Plantagenet Penguinista

Why do this? Because you have a heap of CD audio tracks ripped to Raw format by k3b, however the software intended to use those depends on some kind of file structure. So... place this in ~/bin/raw2wav.sh & mark it executable ( chmod a+x ): #!/bin/sh if [ -f "$1" ]; then echo WAVifying [$1] sox -V -r 44100 -b 16 -c 2 -s "$1" "$(dirname "$1")/$(basename "$1" .raw).wav" fi Apply this using a command like: find . -type f -name '*.raw' -exec raw2wav.sh {} \;

Users who wish to run wvdial productively need to add themselves to the group dialout (to see the /dev/ttyUSB# device nodes) & the group dip to run (authenticate, as it were) the ppp dæmon. Getting WiFi (or many other network things) to work may (after installing wicd ) requiring adding an entry to /etc/apparmor.d/sbin.dhclient3 to permit dhclient to access /var/lib/wicd/* in lrw mode.

Now I have a good handle on how the previous programmer typically mucked things up, it’s becoming much simpler to predict what they omitted or their weird ways of implementing otherwise ordinary procedures in a semi-sane fashion. The time to convert a report from a format intended to be rendered on a specific brand of dot-matrix impact printer to a generic prints-everywhere email-able PDF file (via an HTML-ish file) has decreased from several hours per report to maybe half an hour... & shrinking... Call it “meta-study,” in that instead of attempting to divine how something was done each time, one figures out roughly why certain things were done in certain ways, then the discrepancies often make a bizarre kind of sense, & can be rapidly, systematically replaced with much more concretely sane ways of doing things.