How to increase volume of audio files

Imagine you are listening to your favorite music or podcast whilst running. From time to time you can not hear the sound/music clearly.  In that case you should raise the volume of your audio files (mp3, wav or whatever).
Her is how you might do it:

One can use Audacity and the 'effect' amplify to raise the volume.
This purely does a mathematical increase. This can make the file sounding "distorted".
 To meet this (unwanted) side-effect, several techniques can be applied.

Peak normalisation inspects the audio as a whole and makes sures that according to the peaks the overall volume is acceptable.

Replay Gain also takes into account how the human ear perceives the sound.
E.g. mp3gain is capable of doing this; it's both GUI and command line interface oriented.

Working with PDF's

Ever wondered how one can easily combine multiple pdf's into one big pdf?
E.g. when you want to print say 5 pdf's, instead of opening them all one by one and then printing them one by one; one can combine them first into one pdf and print the big pdf at once.
The tool you need is pdftk.
This simple command results in the scenario described above:

pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf 4.pdf 5. pdf cat output big.pdf

The inverse (generating single page pdf's from a multipaged pdf) is also possible via following command:

pdftk mydoc.pdf burst

More handy examples of this small but powerfull can be found on the pdftk website.

Firefox Collections: an easy way to combine Firefox add-ons.

Create your own set of preferred Firefox add-ons via Collections.

Advantages:

• Easy to install at once on another computer
• Easy to find back/retrieve which add-ons you prefer working with

How to:

• Go to Firefox Collections
• Register or Login
• Shop for your preferred add-ons

One can also use predefined collections. These are composed by other users and made public to everyone who is interested. This is an easy way to learn about similar add-ons you did not yet know about.

How to work with two monitors

Step 5

Working with multiple screens can be handy. It can avoid you having to 'Alt + Shift' between programs. E.g. when reviewing a report, one could put the report on one screen and making notes on another screen.

Configuration under Windows is easy:

1. Go to your Desktop (you can use key combination: Window button + D).
2. Right click and select Properties
3. Go to the tab Settings
4. The second monitor is in an 'inactive modus' (grayed out)
5. In order to select this monitor, click on it. This will give the screen a blue border (see screenshot)



Step 6

6.  Select the check box ''Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor" (see screenshot)

From now on, you can 'go' to your second monitor by moving the mouse cursor to the right.

One can move one program to the second screen by dragging ( = left click on title bar and move) the program to the right as if you move it out of you first screen.

The set-up of using two screens is often is referred as dual screens.