Linux

Always Use Google.com in Chrome

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I read English, mainly. I also read Hebrew, but not enough to want to do web searches in Hebrew by default. I live in Israel, so every time I use the omni search in Chrome I’m redirected to google.co.il, and of course, most searching results are Hebrew pages. This also applies to my Android tablet which is doubly annoying seeing how the omni search settings in Chrome are the same ones used by Google Now and the default search box across the OS.

Here is an easy trick to not get redirected to your local Google page.

1. Open Chrome and type “google.com/ncr”
2. Search for something in the Google page (not the omni search)
3. Close Chrome completely (different in each OS)
4. Open Chrome again, but this time search for something in the omni box
5. You should be greeted by a yellow bar asking if you want to switch to your local Google or keep using Google.com

Enjoy being able to always use Google.com in Chrome :)

Compress and Rotate Videos

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For easier and faster viewing of videos online, I compress them before uploading to my server. My goto application for this is HandBrake. It’s cross-platform, has lots of options as well as easy presets, does a really good job of compressing, and is open source.

The two options HandBrake is seemingly missing that I’ve been wanting.. batch and rotate. It does have a queue that can be processed, but all things added to the queue are done so manually. And no rotate. However.. HandBrakeCLI DOES have these options. Because of course its CLI you can script to to do batch, and they’ve added a rotate feature.

The rotate is a little funky and not documented so well though. From various forums it seems that the options are:

  • 1 = flip X axis
  • 2 = flip Y axis
  • 3 = flip on X & Y axes (180 degree rotate)
  • 4 = flip? (anyway this does a 90 degree rotate)

So the command I used was:

HandBrakeCLI -i vid_file.mov -o vid_file.mp4 –preset=”Android”, –rotate=4

Then I scripted the process for the entire directory.

for FILE in `ls`; do HandBrakeCLI -i $FILE -o ../export/`echo $FILE | cut -d”.” -f1`.mp4 –preset=”Android”, –rotate=4; done

Cool. I’ll be bypassing the GUI and using the CLI from now on.