Its been a long time since i blogged, recently i logged in and found that this site was still using Drupal 6 fortunate enough that it was the Final Version of D6, which has already reached End of Life on On February 24th 2016, so as a first step thought of upgrading this site to the latest version fortunately was not using many modules so was able to upgrade the site to Drupal 8.5.3 in less than 10 mins using the guide available on Drupal Docs, Upgrade was smooth as Drupal Migrate & UI Module were used was able to migrate entire site barring the Theme as D8 version of Kanji Theme which was used in D6 was not available will work a bit on some theme to give site a new look till then using the Default Theme :).

Will try to restart blogging this Year atleast.

No one likes a silence when tuning to a radio station, and for a radio manager its tough to have 24*7 programmes, in case you are running an Internet Radio Station using Airtime you probably would be programming your shows and in Offtime your radio is always silent i would suggest you to play some random tracks in this Offtime and also include a track which tells when your station plays live so here is how to achieve this

1. Put some MP3 files in a folder of your server, please also record a message with the showtimings etc or what ever you want this folder may contain any number of files which you want to play in off time (Folder used in the below script /store00/rand)
2. Edit /usr/lib/airtime/pypo/bin/liquidsoap_scripts/ls_script.liq (below is the patch) the modified lines are in bold

@@ -150,14 +150,14 @@
 #                "read_stop_all",
 #                fun (s) -> begin log("dynamic_source.read_stop") destroy_dynamic_source_all() end)

-default = amplify(id="silence_src", 0.00001, noise())
+#default = amplify(id="silence_src", 0.00001, noise())
 ref_off_air_meta = ref off_air_meta
 if !ref_off_air_meta == "" then
     ref_off_air_meta := "Airtime - offline"
 end
-default = rewrite_metadata([("title", !ref_off_air_meta)], default)
-ignore(output.dummy(default, fallible=true))
-
+#default = rewrite_metadata([("title", !ref_off_air_meta)], default)
+#ignore(output.dummy(default, fallible=true))
+default = playlist(mode='random', "/store00/rand/")
 master_dj_enabled = ref false
 live_dj_enabled = ref false
 scheduled_play_enabled = ref false

Once you have modifed you are good to go restart the services, upon restarting you will listem random tracks in offtime from the folder you have set in the script.

Tested on Airtime 2.5.1, do listem to VMOU's stream @ http://vmou.ac.in/stream

I am sure you would have come to a situation when you would have to resize multiple images say you copied 200 images from your Digital Camera and now need to upload them and need to resize them all, now doing this using GIMP would take ages here is a easy way.

Step 1) Install ImageMagick

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Step 2) Change to the Directory where all Images are Present

Step 3)

a) If you need to reduce images to a specific Percentage

mogrify -resize 20% -format jpg *

b) If you need to reduce to Specific Width & Height

mogrify -resize 800x600 -format jpg *

c) If you need to reduce to Specific Width

mogrify -resize 1024x -format jpg *

Further Reading Click Here !!!

Managing users & groups since long but have you ever looked/reviewed the list of users present in a Specific Group after adding them, so here is a single line command for my lazy sysadmins :)

$ getent group | awk -F: '{print $4}'

you may use this when doing a security audit.