Cross platform
CloudCompare – a powerful cross-platform open source 3D point cloud and mesh program
CloudCompare is a powerful, open source 3D point cloud and mesh processing software available on all major platforms (Windows, MacOS, Linux). It is my current favorite tool for visualizing 3D point clouds.
Compressing PNG images with pngout, optipng, and advpng
Screenshot tools for Linux and macOS generally produce image files in the .png
file format. PNG is a lossless compression format, meaning that it can be compressed without losing quality, which is unlike another commonly used image format, JPG. There are 3 command-line tools which can be used to compress PNG files, pngout, optipng, and advpng.
➜ pngout terminator-terminal-window.png In: 11405 bytes terminator-terminal-window.png /c6 /f5 Out: 8790 bytes terminator-terminal-window.png /c2 /f5 Chg: -2615 bytes ( 77% of original) ➜ optipng -o7 terminator-terminal-window.png ** Processing: terminator-terminal-window.png 800x266 pixels, 3x8 bits/pixel, RGB+transparency Input IDAT size = 8715 bytes Input file size = 8790 bytes Trying: zc = 9 zm = 9 zs = 0 f = 0 IDAT size = 8140 zc = 9 zm = 8 zs = 0 f = 0 IDAT size = 8140 Selecting parameters: zc = 9 zm = 8 zs = 0 f = 0 IDAT size = 8140 Output IDAT size = 8140 bytes (575 bytes decrease) Output file size = 8215 bytes (575 bytes = 6.54% decrease) ➜ advpng -z4 terminator-terminal-window.png 8215 7232 88% terminator-terminal-window.png 8215 7232 88%
TeamViewer: Remote Desktop to Android Tablet
In the past, I’ve written about different remote desktop products/solutions, including NoMachine for remoting into traditional desktop machines, but also a few alternatives for accessing and controlling Android devices from a computer. Today I’d like to mention TeamViewer, a product free for non-commercial use that supports computer to computer, Android to computer, and computer to Android connections.
The following screenshots were taken on a macOS Sierra machine remotely logged onto a rooted Samsung Galaxy S4 Android tablet.
Stylish/userstyle for Telegram Web Full-Width
Just some minor tweaks to increase the width of containers for Telegram Web to look better on full-screen desktops.
Of course, you’ll need the Stylish extension installed for your browser (see Chrome Web Store, Firefox Extension).
Install URL: https://www.nickmcummins.com/stylish/stylish-telegram-full-screen.css
Firefox ‘Task Manager’ similar to Chrome’s
A useful feature native feature of Chrome is its ‘Task Manager’, which allows one to monitor all Chrome processes and their resource consumption:
Firefox has been slow to adopt parallel functionality, though this is mostly that multi-process mode in Firefox hadn’t become available until recently (at least in non-Nightly releases). One still needs to install this Task Manager Firefox add-on — though I would not be surprised to see if this became built-in to Firefox sometime in the near future.
NoMachine – Improving Video Quality By Using the H264 Display Encoding
This basically involves two steps:
- Client-side support, aka adding the required decoding libraries on the local computer. See official documentation: Enabling the H.264 codec on the NoMachine client host. Here is an example of following the steps on my Macbook Air:
brew update brew install ffmpeg && brew upgrade ffmpeg cd /usr/local/Cellar/ffmpeg/3.0.2/lib sudo cp libavcodec.dylib /Applications/NoMachine/Contents/Frameworks/lib sudo cp libavutil.dylib /Applications/NoMachine/Contents/Frameworks/lib
Setting a custom resolution to that of the guest monitor
Say you have two monitors physically connected to the server, supporting by default maximum resolutions of 1440x900
and 1600x900
. If you are logging in to the remote server from a machine that has a larger display, it may be difficult to add the new resolution. I have attempted to follow dozens of similar instructions I found online, with little luck. The only thing that worked for me seems like a hack, but it works.
➜ xrandr | grep -i primary DVI-D-0 connected primary 1440x900+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 410mm x 257mm
We’ll be using the scale option of randr to change our resolution in this case, i.e. (x resolution)(x scale factor) = (desired x resolution); (y resolution)(y scale factor) = (desired y resolution). You’ll want to use at least a few decimal places for non-truncating decimal numbers unless your scaling factor is a rational number:
xrandr --output DVI-D-0 --scale 1.3333333x1.33333333
Afterwards, you should see this represented if you run the initial xrandr
command above.
➜ xrandr | grep -i primary DVI-D-0 connected primary 1920x1200+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 410mm x 257mm
digiKam: A powerful, open-source digital photo management application
digiKam is my current application of choice for managing my digital photos taken with my Nikon D3300. It runs on all major operating systems – Linux/Mac OS X/Windows – see official downloads.
All-in-One Messenger: WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and more
There are a few multi-protocol chat clients — some common ones include Apple’s official Messages app and Adium for OS X, as well as the popular cross-platform Pidgin. I have opted out of using these multi-protocol chat clients for the most part: chat protocols often become outdated and re-implemented, and usually official dedicated clients that are far superior. Furthermore, many chat services have migrated to having a web-based interface, such as Skype (amidst many others). Many users now just open their chat clients as a separate tab in their web browser.
All-in-One Messenger is a Chrome app that essentially does the tabbed browser approach — it a tabbified, multi-protocol chat client, that behind the scenes more or less interfaces with the web clients available for the number chat services. However, it provides an intuitive interface that is streamlined for switching between chat protocol tabs in a way that is not provided by the tabbed browser view nor through having each of the individual apps running separately.
Marble: A cross-platform, multi-purpose Virtual Globe
Marble is a Virtual Globe app that started as part of the KDE desktop environment that is now currently available for Linux (all flavors), Mac OS X, Windows, and Android. It has tons of features and definitely worth checking out for map and geography lovers out there!
Below we view the globe using a historical map from 1689 centered around North America. Interestly, California is depicted as an island, and the Pacific Northwest region of the United States and Canada, as well as Alaska and eastern Russia, is a big void in the map (not depicted).