Posted on

Keeping track of podcast times with a simple bash script on Linux

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam's Blog

I was recording some podcast audio tonight and wanted to be able to press a single key when I reached a significant moment, so I could add the times to the show notes.

I couldn’t find anything that already did this, so I wrote a tiny bash script. I ran this script pressed Enter whenever I wanted a time recorded:

T=0
echo
while sleep 1; do
    echo -n -e "\e[1A"
    echo $(($T / 60))m $(($T % 60))s
    T=$(($T + 1))
done
Posted on

Converting HTML slides to a PDF with Firefox

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam's Blog

I have not found an automated way to generate a nice PDF from some slides written in HTML – if you know of one please add a comment!

In the meantime, if you create slides using my HTML Slides template, then you can make a decent-ish-looking PDF like this:

  1. View your slides in Firefox and open the Print dialog (press Ctrl-p).
  2. Select Print to File and choose a filename to save to.
  3. Under Options deselect “Ignore Scaling…” and select “–blank–” for all the headers and footers. Ensure “Print Background Colours” and “Print Background Images” are selected.
  4. Under Page Setup set Scale to 70.0 and Orientation to Landscape.
  5. Select the dropdown next to Paper size and choose Manage Custom Sizes…
  6. Create a new custom size called “Screen 16:9” with Width 157.5 mm and Height 280.0 mm. Set all the Paper Margins to 5.0 mm. You can modify the name of the custom size by clicking on it in the list on the left.
    Click Close.
  7. Back in Page Setup, make sure your new custom size is selected next to Paper Size.
  8. Click Print.

If that does not work well for you, try experimenting with different Scale settings.