Using ImageMagick to convert a series of images to animated GIF

I use this a lot for research. I have a series of images in a postscript type format (e.g. EPS or PDF) and then I want to turn the time series of data into an animation. For this i use ImageMagick because it is a really nice command line tool for Unix operating systems to do batch type operations. You can even pipe it to C code! (Make sure you have it installed because it is not usually distributed with a bare Linux OS)

To do a simple conversion of images to an animated GIF we invoke the following

>convert -verbose -delay 20 -loop 0 -density 200 *.pdf output.gif

and we get a nice GIF file. This takes the files named *.pdf in the order that they are listed and makes a GIF out of them with a 20 hundreths of a second delay between each frame. The -loop 0 flag makes it loop indefinitely. You can put 3 in there to loop 3 times etc. The -density 200 flag specifies a DPI of 200 for the image. This is only really used when converting postscript images.

Animation of flow over a cylinder (vorticity) made from MATLAB + ImageMagick.

Consolidate your music library (to write up soon)

Before I forget, I really need to consolidate my music library. Right now I have three different music libraries sitting on a desktop, my macbook, and on an external hard drive. Most of this music, I will never hear again in my life. Some of it I want to keep just in case I’m in the mood. The rest I want to listen to it all the time. I don’t want to lose my iTunes ratings and album covers! Hopefully I’ll learn how to do this soon and post it right here.

Using your Xbox 360 to remotely view videos (and listen to music)

Some people have Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate and this allows them to use Media Center to connect to their Xbox 360 by using a the “media extender” option. I tried doing this over the wireless network and it failed miserably (I am not sure what went wrong). Anyway, on my actual “media” desktop, I have a licensed version of Windows Vista Business which does not include Media Center. So does that mean I can’t watch videos remotely on my Xbox? No, just follow these directions.

On your Windows computer go to Windows Media Player 11 and click on Library > Media Sharing. Go ahead and check the boxes that you want to share media to (i.e. Other PC’s, Xbox 360, etc.). You might as well find media that others are sharing as well. Hit the Settings button and add whatever you like.

Now when you go to your Xbox, goto the media tab and go to videos (music, or photos) and change the source to the desktop you just configured. You should see the network name of the computer and set that as the sources (as opposed to the Xbox hard drive). You should be able to browse the folders that you just added in your media libraries now (goto Library > Options > Library > Monitor Folders on your PC to add more monitored folders).

Unlock protected music!

The easiest way to unlock music purchased from places such as iTunes is to burn it to a CD and then re-rip the CD and encoding it back to MP3. This will remove the protection that is put on it so that you can play it on any computer or media player. Note that you will probably have some quality loss in this process…

You can also record the music again using Audacity and then re-encode the music using Audacity’s LAME MP3 encoder plugin. I’m not sure if this loses any quality or not, but is for sure a pain in the ass.