by ·0 Comments
Amiga 500 and some random floppy disks. Rendered.

For my sins, I have a large folder full of .iff files, which I wanted to convert into a useable format.

GIMP has a plugin which can read .iff files, but you’ll need to build it yourself. Seems like a lot of effort for some pictures.

Thankfully ilbtoppm is available for most Linux distros and can convert to .ppm, which is readable by most image editors.

The command line for ilbtoppm is:

ilbtoppm somefile.iff >outputfilename.ppm

This is a bit clunky and a pain to run a hundred times for different filenames, so I knocked up a quick one-liner to convert all .iff files in a folder to .ppm

for f in *.iff; do ilbmtoppm "$f" >"${f%.*}.ppm"; done

As with most things, I’ve mainly written this for my benefit so I can refer to it in a few months/years when I forget what the hell I did.

by ·0 Comments

I recently got a Raspberry Pi 400. I’ve got Retropie on one microSD card and the official Raspberry Pi OS on another, but I wanted a “full fat” OS. My preferred Linux distro for lower powered systems is Xubuntu, but there is no pre-built image available, so you need to start with Ubuntu server (64bit) which is available in the Raspberry Pi imager.

Continue reading

by ·4 Comments

Updated update Apparently it is still necessary (21.3)

Update: this is no longer necessary in Mint 20.02

I like having my volume control in the bottom right corner of the screen so I can quickly and easily throw the mouse to the corner and scroll for volume control. I also like using multiple screens, each with their own panel. Unfortunately, Cinnamon only allows one instance of the volume control applet.

In the past I’ve used the “Volume control 150%” applet for my second screen, but this runs into a problem with Firefox whereby the volume suddenly jumps to 100%.

To run multiple Cinnamon volume controls:

sudo cp -r /usr/share/cinnamon/applets/sound@cinnamon.org /usr/share/cinnamon/applets/sound2@cinnamon.org

sudo nano /usr/share/cinnamon/applets/sound2@cinnamon.org/metadata.json

Change the UUID from sound@cinnamon.org to sound2.cinnamon.org and change the name to Sound2

You can now add the “Sound2” applet to the your other Cinnamon panel. Or the same one. Add more. Go nuts.