Posts Tagged ‘program’

GUI wep/wpa cracking through Gerix Wifi Cracker NG (GUI for cracking wireless networks)

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

gerix-wifi-cracker-hack-into-wireless

I found a neat program that facilitates work on cracking
a wep or wpa secured wireless network. The program is called
Gerix Wifi Cracker NG and is a part of the
backtrack penetration testinglinux distro
Gerix Wifi Cracker itself is located here , it's cool cause the author even has prepared a deb
package with the nifty GUI wireless cracker
. The slogan of the soft is also a killer,it reads:
"The software that even your grandmother knows how to use!",
a bunch of nice granda's pictures are included as well 🙂

Howto create Linux Music Audio CD from MP3 files / Create playable WAV format Audio CD Albums from MP3s

Tuesday, July 16th, 2019

cdburning-audio-music-cd-from-mp3-on-linuxcomapct-disc-tux-linux-logo

Recently my Mother asked me to prepare a Music Audio CD for her from a popular musician accordionist Stefan Georgiev from Dobrudja who has a unique folklore Bulgarian music.

As some of older people who still remember the age of the CD and who had most likely been into the CD burning Copy / Piracy business so popular in the countries of the ex-USSR so popular in the years 1995-2000 audio ,  Old CD Player Devices were not able to play the MP3 file format due to missing codecs (as MP3 was a proprietary compression that can't be installed on every device without paying the patent to the MP3 compression rights holder.

The revolutionary MP3 compression used to be booming standard for transferring Music data due to its high compression which made an ordinary MP3 of 5 minutes of 5MB (10+ times more compression than an ordinary classic WAV Audio the CPU intensiveness of MP3 files that puts on the reading device, requiring the CD Player to have a more powerful CPU.

Hence  due to high licensing cost and requirement for more powerful CPU enabled Audio Player many procuders of Audio Players never introduced MP3 to their devices and MP3 Neve become a standard for the Audio CD that was the standard for music listening inside almost every car out there.

Nowdays it is very rare need to create a Audio CD as audio CDs seems to be almost dead (As I heard from a Richard Stallman lecture In USA nowadays there is only 1 shop in the country where you can still buy CD or DVD drives) and only in third world as Africa Audio CDs perhaps are still in circulation.

Nomatter that as we have an old Stereo CD player on my village and perhaps many others, still have some old retired CD reading devices being able to burn out a CD is a useful thing.

Thus to make mother happy and as a learning excercise, I decided to prepare the CD for her on my Linux notebook.
Here I'll shortly describe the takes I took to make it happen which hopefully will be useful for other people that need to Convert and burn Audio CD from MP3 Album.

 

1. First I downloaded the Album in Mp3 format from Torrent tracker

My homeland Bulgaria and specific birth place place the city of Dobrich has been famous its folklore:  Galina Durmushlijska and Stefan Georgiev are just 2 of the many names along with Оркестър Кристал (Orchestra Crystal) and the multitude of gifted singers. My mother has a santiment for Stefan Georgiev, as she listened to this gifted accordinist on her Uncle's marriage.

Thus In my case this was (Стефан Георгиев Хора и ръченици от Добруджа) the album full song list here If you're interested to listen the Album and Enjoy unique Folklore from Dobrudja (Dobrich) my home city, Stefan Georgiev's album Hora and Rachenica Dances is available here

 


Stefan_Georgiev-old-audio-Music-CD-Hora-i-Rychenici-ot-Dobrudja-Horos-and-Ruchenitsas-from-Dobrudja-CD_Cover
I've downloaded them from Bulgarian famous torrent tracker zamunda.net in MP3 format.
Of course you need to have a CD / DVD readed and write device on the PC which nowdays is not present on most modern notebooks and PCs but as a last resort you can buy some cheap External Optical CD / DVD drive for 25 to 30$ from Amazon / Ebay etc.

 

2. You will need to install a couple of programs on Linux host (if you don't have it already)


To be able to convert from command line from MP3 to WAV you will need as minimum ffmpeg and normalize-audio packages as well as some kind of command line burning tool like cdrskin  wodim which is
the fork of old good known cdrecord, so in case if you you're wondering what happened with it just
use instead wodim.

Below is a good list of tools (assuming you have enough HDD space) to install:

 

root@jeremiah:/ # apt-get install –yes dvd+rw-tools cdw cdrdao audiotools growisofs cdlabelgen dvd+rw-tools k3b brasero wodim ffmpeg lame normalize-audio libavcodec58

 

Note that some of above packages I've installed just for other Write / Read operations for DVD drives and you might not need that but it is good to have it as some day in future you will perhaps need to write out a DVD or something.
Also the k3b here is specific to KDE and if you're a GNOME user you could use Native GNOME Desktop app such brasero or if you're in a more minimalistic Linux desktop due to hardware contrains use XFCE's native xfburn program.

If you're a console / terminal geek like me you will definitely enjoy to use cdw
 

root@jeremiah:/ # apt-cache show cdw|grep -i description -A 1
Description-en: Tool for burning CD's – console version
 Ncurses-based frontend for wodim and genisoimage. It can handle audio and

Description-md5: 77dacb1e6c00dada63762b78b9a605d5
Homepage: http://cdw.sourceforge.net/

 

3. Selecting preferred CD / DVD / BD program to use to write out the CD from Linux console


cdw uses wodim (which is a successor of good old known console cdrecord command most of use used on Linux in the past to burn out new Redhat / Debian / different Linux OS distro versions for upgrade purposes on Desktop and Server machines.

To check whether your CD / DVD drive is detected and ready to burn on your old PC issue:

 

root@jeremiah:/# wodim -checkdrive
Device was not specified. Trying to find an appropriate drive…
Detected CD-R drive: /dev/cdrw
Using /dev/cdrom of unknown capabilities
Device type    : Removable CD-ROM
Version        : 5
Response Format: 2
Capabilities   :
Vendor_info    : 'HL-DT-ST'
Identification : 'DVDRAM GT50N    '
Revision       : 'LT20'
Device seems to be: Generic mmc2 DVD-R/DVD-RW.
Using generic SCSI-3/mmc   CD-R/CD-RW driver (mmc_cdr).
Driver flags   : MMC-3 SWABAUDIO BURNFREE
Supported modes: TAO PACKET SAO SAO/R96P SAO/R96R RAW/R16 RAW/R96P RAW/R96R

You can also use xorriso (whose added value compared to other console burn cd tools is is not using external program for ISO9660 formatting neither it use an external or an external burn program for CD, DVD or BD (Blue Ray) drive but it has its own libraries incorporated from libburnia-project.org libs.

Below output is from my Thinkpad T420 notebook. If the old computer CD drive is there and still functional in most cases you should not get issues to detect it.

cdw ncurses text based CD burner tool's interface is super intuitive as you can see from below screenshot:

cdw-burn-cds-from-console-terminal-on-GNU-Linux-and-FreeBSD-old-PC-computer

CDW has many advanced abilities such as “blanking” a disk or ripping an audio CD on a selected folder. To overcome the possible problem of CDW not automatically detecting the disk you have inserted you can go to the “Configuration” menu, press F5 to enter the Hardware options and then on the first entry press enter and choose your device (by pressing enter again). Save the setting with F9.
 

4. Convert MP3 / MP4 Files or whatever format to .WAV to be ready to burn to CD


Collect all the files you want to have collected from the CD album in .MP3 a certain directory and use a small one liner loop to convert files to WAV with ffmpeg:
 

cd /disk/Music/Mp3s/Singer-Album-directory-with-MP3/

for i in $( ls *.mp3); do ffmpeg -i $i $i.wav; done


If you don't have ffmpeg installed and have mpg123 you can also do the Mp3 to WAV conversion with mpg123 cmd like so:

 

for i in $( ls ); do mpg123 -w $i.wav $i.mp3; done


Another alternative for conversion is to use good old lame (used to create Mp3 audio files but abling to also) decode
mp3 to wav.

 

lame –decode somefile.mp3 somefile.wav


In the past there was a burn command tool that was able to easily convert MP3s to WAV but in up2date Linux modern releases it is no longer available most likely due to licensing issues, for those on older Debian Linux 7 / 8 / 9 / Ubuntu 8 to 12.XX / old Fedoras etc. if you have the command you can install burn and use it (and not bother with shell loops):

apt-get install burn

or

yum install burn


Once you have it to convert

 

$ burn -A -a *.mp3
 

 

5. Fix file naming to remove empty spaces such as " " and substitute to underscores as some Old CD Players are
unable to understand spaces in file naming with another short loop.

 

for f in *; do mv "$f" `echo $f | tr ' ' '_'`; done

 

6. Normalize audio produced .WAV files (set the music volume to a certain level)


In case if wondering why normalize audio is needed here is short extract from normalize-audio man page command description to shed some light.

"normalize-audio  is  used  to  adjust  the volume of WAV or MP3 audio files to a standard volume level.  This is useful for things like creating mp3 mixes, where different recording levels on different albums can cause the volume to  vary  greatly from song to song."
 

cd /disk/Music/Mp3s/Singer-Album-directory-with-MP3/

normalize-audio -m *.wav

 

7. Burn the produced normalized Audio WAV files to the the CD

 

wodim -v -fix -eject dev='/dev/sr0' -audio -pad *.wav


Alternatively you can conver all your MP3 files to .WAV with anything be it audacity
or another program or even use 
GNOME's CDBurn tool brasero (if gnome user) or KDE's CDBurn which in my opinion is
the best CD / DVD burning application for Linux K3B.

Burning Audio CD with K3b is up to few clicks and super easy and even k3b is going to handle the MP3 to WAV file Conversion itself. To burn audio with K3B just run it and click over 'New Audio CD Project'.

k3b-on-debian-gnu-linux-burn-audio-cd-screenshot

For those who want to learn a bit more on CD / DVD / Blue-Ray burning on GNU / Linux good readings are:
Linux CD Burning Mini Howto, is Linux's CD Writing Howto on ibiblio (though a bit obsolete) or Debian's official documentation on BurnCD.
 

8. What we learned here


Though the accent of this tutorial was how to Create Audio Music CD from MP3 on GNU / Linux, the same commands are available in most FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD ports tree so you can use the same method to build prepare Audio Music CD on *BSDs.

In this article, we went through few basic ways on how to prepare WAV files from MP3 normalize the new created WAV files on Linux, to prepare files for creation of Audio Music CD for the old mom or grandma's player or even just for fun to rewind some memories. For GUI users this is easily done with  k3b,  brasero or xfburn.

I've pointed you to cdw a super useful text ncurses tool that makes CD Burninng from plain text console (on servers) without a Xorg / WayLand  GUI installed super easy. It was shortly reviewed what has changed over the last few years and why and why cdrecord was substituted for wodim. A few examples were given on how to handle conversion through bash shell loops and you were pointed to some extra reading resources to learn a bit more on the topic.
There are plenty of custom scripts around for doing the same CD Burn / Covnersion tasks, so pointing me to any external / Shell / Perl scripts is mostly welcome.

Hope this learned you something new, Enjoy ! 🙂

Windows unable to delete file, file locked unlocking with Unlocker tiny tool

Wednesday, April 13th, 2016

Windows-Unlocker-program-show-what-program-or-software-is-locking-your-file-why-file-cant-be-deleted-file-locked

If you want to delete some file on a Windows server or Desktop but you get the a dialog with an error saying:

"This action can't be completed because the folder or a file in it is open in another program"

windows-unable-to-delete-file-file-locked-get-what-is-locking-it-and-unlock-the-file-with-Unlocker-tiny-desktop-graphic-tool-0

Then you need to find out which Program is preventing the file from deletion / locking the file, I've earlier blogged on how to check which process locks file with tasklist or wmic Windows commands

However some users might prefer to not bother with command line check what is locking a file and then killing the Process manually with taskmanager (taskmgr.exe) but do both file unlocking from one single gui interface, that's especially for lazy novice users, gamers and most of Desktop Windows users.

If you're one of those lazy users you will appriace

Unlocker – a useful utility for unlocking files, it will help you figure out which file is using a file what program is using the file you're prevented to delete.
Unlocker is the tool for you if you get any of below error messages, when you try to delete a file:

 

  • Cannot delete folder: It is being used by another person or program
  • Cannot delete file: Access is denied
  • There has been a sharing violation.
  • The source or destination file may be in use.
  • The file is in use by another program or user.
  • Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.
     

windows-unable-to-delete-file-file-locked-get-what-is-locking-it-and-unlock-the-file-with-Unlocker-tiny-desktop-graphic-tool-1

If you stumble unto an locked file once you download and install Unlocker tool and launch the tool ( in case it disappers in future a mirror of Unlocker tool here ).
Once installed if you click properties over the file which is refused to be deleted you will get a new menu such as in below screenshot:

NB! Beware while installing Unlocker you might be offered to install a bunch of malware (make sure you deselect it). Also Unlocker's site is made in a way so the Download button could easily be confused with some Google Adsense

unlocker-windows-menu-added-to-properties-options-screenshot

Click on the file that is being locked and choose the Unlocker button, for example if you have a bunch of Videos installed and the video is being locked by VLC clicking on the file you will be shown VLC like in below screenshot

 

Unlocker-screenshot-locked-file-because-movie-opened-in-VLC

As you see you're shown the Process PID that is being used by the file the full path to the locking program and you have the option to quickly kill the process or unlock the file. Note that at some cases unlocking a file used by some critical program lets say Microsoft Word / Excel or OneNote could cause you a data loss, so before unlocking a file make sure you know what you're doing.

For more advanced users that still prefer GUI to find out what is Locking a file you can also check out Microsoft Process Explorer (advabced task manager) like tool.
If you haven't tried Process Explorer be sure to take a look at it as its a great tool for Win SysAdmins:

Process Explorer is very handy if you want to explore which .DLL (Windows Libraries) are used by a Process / Program

Windows-process-explorer-an-advanced-task-manager-for-windows-and-handy-tool-to-see-what-external-libraries-and-files-a-program-is-using.png

Windows-process-explorer-an-advanced-task-manager-for-windows-and-handy-tool-to-see-what-external-libraries-and-files-a-program-is-using-1

 

Use mac PC built-in camera to make / take pictures on Mac OS X macbookair notebook with Photo Booth

Friday, February 26th, 2016

take-picture-or-video-with-built-in-camera-on-MacOSX-PhotoboothLOGO

It seems we lost our Good high quality Digital Camera somewhere and I was in need urgently to make a good quality photo (my ZTE Phone) has a very bad camera, so I got the idea to use Macbookair's camera as it has better
resolution to picture my present a  Tank Tort 🙂 hand made by my wife as a present for the Day of the Defender of the Fatherland which is a major feast in Russia, Belarus and many of the ex-Soviet Union members communist countries.

Actually using build in camare in MacBookAir is a handy thing for people mising at the moment a good high quality digital camera as it is thin and light and build in MacBook cam can be used to make Videos and Pictures exactly the same way
as an ordinary Tablet Computer is used so commonly nowadays by many:

In other words I needed for the Mac OS X equivalent to Cheese's (Photo and Video) capturer program for Linux.

Luckily for people interested in using their Mac OS notebook as a amateur camera this is easy by using default shipped Mac Application called:

Photo Booth app

To Launch Photo Booth app it just look it up in Finder and double click it:

PhotoBooth-how-to-take-photos-on-macosx

Clicking the large red button underneath the preview area will take a picture after an optional countdown.

Tort Tank of Svetka

Besides being able to capture Video and Pictures from Mac's camera it could add also some nice effects to taken pictures and videos (supports a basic video editing) features and effects.

The effects you can choose are are: Sepia, Black and White, Glow, Comic Book, Normal, Colored Pencil, Thermal Camera, X-Ray, and Pop Art. There are also effects that change the person in the picture using these effects: Bulge, Dent, Twirl, Squeeze, Mirror, Light Tunnel, Fish Eye, and Stretch. Actually  photographic filters of Photo Booth are very similar to Adobe Photoshop.

make-picture-on-mac-photobooth-effects-screenshot
By default Photo Booth will create picture, howver

Photo Booth saves your photos as JPEG files in a folder named Photo Booth, located in your home folder.

Choose File > Reveal in Finder

to see your picture files.

A much better way to be able to easily see and access all taken Pictures and Videos with Photo Booth is to

 

open Terminal

 

and type:

——-
 

 

$ cd Pictures
$ ln -s Photo\ Booth\ Library/Pictures/ PhotoBoothPics


This will make Link to pictures be easily accessible from your Finder -> Pictures folder
 
Applying custom photo backgrounds

A very useful feature of Photo Booth is that the user can apply backdrops to provide an effect similar to a green screen. When a backdrop is selected, a message appears telling the user to step away from the camera. Once the background is analyzed, the user steps back in front of the camera and is shown in front of the chosen backdrop.

For people who prefer to take photos using a console program on Mac OS I guess you should take a look at ffpeg
Here is one more snapshot of the Tort Tank snapshot made with the Macbookair of Svetlana 🙂

Tort Tank


P.S. If you like the Tort Tank and you happen to live in Sofia Bulgaria, you can order it  by dropping me a comment with request 🙂

Enjoy ! 🙂

Configuring server running both OpenSSHD and Apache to be accessed via HTTPS

Friday, December 18th, 2009

I wanted to make this machine accessible for both me and others also with a simple browser,
I was thinking about configuring this on pc-freak since some time now.
It took me a while until I found a program that does this for me, anyhow luckily I found it.
It’s called webshell and is working pretty well. Check out the home page of WebShell for download and more info on it. I’ve succesfully installed it on FreeBSD 7.2.
All that is needed for the program to operate is python 2.3 or higher and python openssl (this is optional),
however most people would desire to have the service running over SSL thus this is mandatory.
On my FreeBSD box I had to install:
the port/package py26-openssl and subversion (this is a prerequirement in order to download the source via svn)
It also necessery to modify the webshell.py and change the shebang's location pointing to python
in freebsd that is:

#!/usr/local/bin/python and not #!/usr/bin/python

as in linux.
Then I copied the downloaded source to /usr/local/web-shell/webshell as well as add recordto rc.local

# echo "/usr/local/web-shell/webshell.py -d" >> /etc/rc.local The last thing I did was manually start the daemon with:
# /usr/local/web-shell/webshell.py -d

Tadam, it's up and running accessing it is as simple as pointing the browser
to a domain name or ip on which the python service is running
Currently the running webshell for pc-freak can be accessed via

How to install Winrar on Mac OS X on Console and Graphical Interface – IZIP and Keka Free archivers short review

Friday, February 19th, 2016

howto-install-winrar-free-gui-program-for-mac-osx-notebook-pc

If you're looking for just Mac OS X, console version of rar and unrar then standard WinRar website binaries for Mac should be perfect for you.
If you're an advanced Mac OS X user with UNIX background and you've already installed Mac Ports or Brew – The Missing package manager for Mac OS X
To install WinRar on Mac (with brew) with:
 

macosx# brew install unrar


If you're using MacPorts instead:
 

macosx:/home$ sudo port install unrar


However console version isn't the best choice for my wife which is not a console ninja, so I had to look and install some oher Graphic Interface program 🙂
As I don't like using AppleStore (I can't even properly register for an Apple Store ID,as I'm required to fill in my credit card … )
Hence I looked online on some WinRar dearchiver GUIs and  found IZip which is natively a ZIP archiver but also supports .RAR Archives.
Though IZIp website give the impression IZip is a great tiny prog, once installing the .DMG downloaded from the website and installing into Applications it turned out IZip is currently crashing on the Mac Book Air with Mac OS X 10.8.5Mountain Lion

If you want a simplistic interface program you would probably want to check out UnrarX though I personally didin't liked that one because it is not properly handing UTF-8 and CP-1251 filenames written in Russian, Bulgarian Cyrillic and probably also Chineese, Viatnamese and other exotic language encodings.
After few more minutes of searching I finally got KEKA – The Free  Mac OSX file archiver.

keka_winrar-archive-unarchive-free-program-for-macosx-icon

Though the program Logo is a little scary, Keka turned to be very nice tiny, easy  to install WinRAR GUI interfaced program for Mac OS X and the installation comes to standard download and run of .DMG file and moving it to the Finder Applications.

Once installed, if you turn to have a .rar file association issues (by default in my case) files were opened with VLC. To change the file type association of a certain file on the Mac I've had to press Command (button) + I over the .rar extensioned file, e.g:

  • Command + I
  • Click to expand the “Open with” section within that files info screen
  • From the pull down menu, select the application you want to open this specific file with
  • Close the Get Info window
     

change-mac-file-association-to-rar-kaka-free-winrar-winzip-archive-dearchive-macosx

Putty Connection Manager A Handy tip to make your PuTTY multi tab enabled

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Some time ago, I asked myself if there is a SSH/Telnet supporting Terminal program
for Windows which enables you to have a tabs with the opened connections to a number
of servers. Well after some time spent looking, I’ve came across the solution
which concludes to a nice PuTTy wrapper program called Putty Connection Manager .
Putty Connection Manager requires you to have PuTTY installed all it does it runs a multiple putty instances
each one opening in a nice multi tab windows, like the good old linux gnome-terminal.
Cheers!END—–

Howto add Bulgarian Phonetic keyboard set to Windows XP

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

There is a nice site in Bulgarian explaining quite extensively how to add Bulgarian phonetic key set on Injinera’s Website. Another way to solve the problem is to use bgphon_xp program.

how to archive with Windows default zip (compress) algorithm

Tuesday, April 1st, 2014

windows-sent-to-compressed-file
I'm working on a decomissioning project (for those who hear decomissioning for a first time – in corporate world this means removal of service/s or assigned resources of a server or a physical server hardware that is not to be used in future or is obsolete). The decomissioning includes removal of Apache Tomcat (Software Configuration Item CI – in HP terms) from Microsoft Windows 2007 – Service Pack 2.
Part of decomissioning is of course to create backup of Tomcat Application server and for that I needed to create compressed archive of Tomcat instances. Usually I do archives on Windows using Winrar or Winzip but this time as the server productive server has the minimum installed there was no any external vendor produced archiving software available.

My memories from past were that there is a native compressing program embedded into Windows as I've unzipped compressed archives on Win hosts with no need for external WinZip. However until so far I never did .ZIP archive with no available external uncompress software.

Using Winzip or Winrar so far to make archive from a number of files I used to select files to enter Archive press right mouse button and select Create Archive (Add To Archive) so I expected this will work whenever no Winrar, however there was no obvious button like this, so I googled a bit to find out how is that possible ending up on Article from Microsoft titled "Compress and uncompress files (zip files)", there is a dumb proof video teaching Compressing files with Microsoft default ZIP program is done by the the weird "Send To" menu 🙂 

Selecting files to enter Archive;
> (Click Right Mouse Button) -> (Send To Compressed Zipped Folder)

compress_zipped_folder_with_windows_default_archive_algorithm how to archive with windows default compress archive

Honestly If I didn't checked the net probably I will never think of looking it there.