Today's computer brain explosion

[rebeccmeister]

At the moment I still only have a murky sense of the various different ways to install software on this machine, but at least my internet searches also tell me this can be kind of a murky thing anyway. I'm generally going with the Ubuntu Software GUI and the synaptic GUI, as this murky understanding indicates that's least likely to cause horrible package conflicts.

Video recording: I had a weird hack going for recording lecture videos with some Movavi tools, but eventually found something called vokoscreen that looks like it basically does what I want, in combination with cheese. Essentially, I like being able to show slides as a pdf, while having a thumbnail video of myself showing, with a second webcam pointed at a table with a piece of paper on it so I can write and draw next to the slides. It sounds cumbersome but tends to work as well as lecture videos can possibly work, given the limitations of the medium. Messing around with the iPad has really reconfirmed how much I hate tapping on glass screens. I'm reminded of how a lot of people think an electronic keyboard is a perfectly acceptable replacement for a real piano.

A quick look around seems to indicate that OpenShot will be reasonably straightforward for me to get up and running with, as a replacement for Movavi for video editing.

Master PDF Editor also looks fine as an Acrobat replacement. I'll probably pony up for a license to get rid of the watermark pretty quick here. I think I said this before, but I have no problem whatsoever with paying for software, just so long as I'm not paying for a subscription service.

And I might try and learn how Scribus works. In the short term I may just keep my lectures in Keynote. I generally export my lectures as PDFs because the classroom lecture computers are all Windows machines, but my initial clicking around in Scribus suggests there's going to be a learning curve for editing existing slides.

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Now I should probably just shift over to the work computer to work on syllabi and schedules, because classes start next week. I don't think I'm going to reach a stage anytime soon where I have this laptop set up to a point where it will become the main home for my teaching files. Instead it's more likely I'll switch back over to the work computer for that, just using this laptop as a supplementary resource for work. I'll also bring the backup hard drive home again, and spend some time deciding how I want to load and organize personal and research files from it onto the laptop.

Comments

It's all murk, all the way down

[twoeleven]

synaptic is probably the least harmful of the available software mismanagers, but every time my linux virtual machine needs a major update, I'm reminded of why I fork over so much cash to Orange. It no longer "just works" -- "just sucks less" is closer to the truth -- but I can patch my machine without worrying that a misunderstanding of some arcana will brick it.

[graydon]

I have been using the various RedHat package manager systems from the command line -- currently something called dnf -- for oh-dear-bright-gods 25 years, and they have all worked and these days they Just Work.

GUIs are extremely useful for complex visual relationships between stuff; they're not useful for "do exactly this".

On Ubuntu, the command line utility for package management is called apt; it's been around for yonks and is part of Ubuntu's common history with Debian so it's decently documented as well as stable.

[graydon]

Scribus is a true desktop publishing document layout program; the usual comparison is to inDesign or Quark.

Keynote is presentation software, at least as I understand it; the list of alternatives includes Libre Office Impress and LaTeX Beamer.

[rebeccmeister]

Heh, I encountered one thing written by someone commenting they were...not so Impress-ed with Impress, including a much longer response by someone else who clearly had experience with somewhere around 8 different presentation creation options and who settled on Scribus. But I should probably also look at both Impress and Beamer at some point. I've gotten just far enough into trying to work with LaTeX to still be a little bit confused about how to best set things up for myself in a workable fashion.

[graydon]

Despite its very high google score, that not-so-impressed review is more than ten years old. LibreOffice in particular has a much better Impress these days.

Scribus will do it, no question, but Scribus also comes with three distinct learning curves; I thought that it was easier to write my own ePub creator than to learn Scribus back in the day, so this might be me being somewhat overcautious.

[rebeccmeister]

Hahahaha, okay, okay, I'll give Impress a try. :^)

And, yes, my very brief futzing around with Scribus did suggest at least one steep learning curve, I'd definitely agree there!

[scrottie]

synaptic is a good choice. That's a layer over apt. apt is a layer over dpkg. But any package manager you find is going to be a layer over apt and pull from the same library of packages. synaptic does do a lot to keep you out of trouble and deal with stuff.

Some times things like Zoom will have you download and unzip or tar -xzvf something and run an installer. Master PDF Editor if I recall is similar. Commercial software tends to fit that pattern. Sometimes you have to add a repository source to apt in its config and then use whatever packager to installer it.

Starting to think LaTeX or at least LyX might be a low fuss way to do slides if I ever really had to do that a lot, especially if I was just spitting out pdf.

[scrottie]

But you installed Master PDF Editor so you've been through that. I'm just repeating stuff. Derp.

[rebeccmeister]

One of the things I'm struggling with overall is learning how to do this stuff by googling it and then reading through forum posts. People are very helpful about providing a series of steps, but not always with an overall sense of how each approach works, or best practices for where to download and unzip this stuff - methods for keeping things organized. I left the RStudio .deb in Downloads, and left the Master PDF Editor stuff in home; do I need to save these once I've installed them? Feels very untidy.

[scrottie]

I suspect people avoid discussion of best ways because anything subject to opinion becomes a tar pit.

I have a directory of installers that I save stuff in but sometimes delete some old stuff from. It's the same directory of things I compile and install from source. Saving installers is just saving old versions packratting for me.

Installers typically install to /usr/local/bin / usr/bin / usr/local/lib / /usr/lib /usr/local/share / etc but it's possible that some might not. But those tend not to have installers. If you have to cd in to the directory you decompressed and run ./some_program , then it runs out of the directory you decompressed instead of installing. You probably won't run in to any of those.

[rebeccmeister]

Best ways: Hahaha, as observed even here, in my blog comments section! Although this is a very friendly tar pit, thankfully. :^)

Y'know, I think I'll make that directory. But then I'll keep it in mind as something to clear out periodically. I'm trying to keep reasonably good notes about stuff I've done and set up in a text file, because I'm likely to forget everything I've installed.

I just couldn't quite remember how that all worked, after years of Fruit Company "installation" via drag'n'drop.

[scrottie]

Stuff I write first thing in the morning and late at night tends to miss the mark. Meant that people will often go out of their way to avoid commenting on which approach, program, etc is best to avoid Q&A turning in to a flame war when they wind up untintentionally dissing on other ways of doing things or other project's apps. So there isn't much discussion about what's "best" in any kind of discussion forum, but bloggers will sometimes try to tackle that, as you've seen. Since Linux is all community made and there are competing factions each trying to replace each piece with a different version of that piece they made, things get political. So, that kind of a tar pit. Not just the complexity of it or current info.

Some of the worst pieces of things that got in to Linux (systemd comes to mind) got in there because the people responsible for it screamed over any perceived slight, no matter how valid it is.

screen recording composition

[(Anonymous)]

It might not come up because it is oft used for video game streaming, but "osb" is excellent for composing video, screen capture, audio sources, etc. It can record locally without streaming. Like all these things there is a learning curve.

I used this for this video as a sample. It arranges screen capture, two webcams, and audio. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FPE5DOlScIY

--Brock

Re: screen recording composition

[rebeccmeister]

Thank you - I'll look into it.