Linux – Video Tag Editing

Posted on by rcragun

Not everyone may be as particular as I am about having my files organized, but I like to make sure everything is where it’s supposed to be. I make sure my music is tagged accurately. I also like to have my video files tagged correctly. What does that mean? Just like with audio files, video container formats include as part of the file some tags that provide information about the file. Those tags can include the name of the video, the year, and other information (e.g., genre, performers, etc.). If you rip files or have digital copies, it’s not really necessary to update the information in the tags. However, depending on the software you use to play your video files, having that information included in the tags substantially increases the odds that your video player will be able to figure out what the video is and will then be able to retrieve any other relevant data. Thus, having accurate metadata in your video files is nice. It’s not necessary, but nice.

I was cleaning up some video files the other data and realized that I didn’t have accurate tags in some of them. I opened the video in VLC and then clicked on “Tools” -> “Media Information”:

I wanted to see the tags in the video file.

Here’s what VLC saw:

Yep, I’m working with Frozen!

As you can see, it didn’t have any tags filled except “Encoded by.” It actually filled the title by pulling the name of the video file itself. The minimum tags that should be included in a video file are: title and year, but including genre and some of the performers is always nice.

While there are a number of music file tag editors that work very well on Linux (e.g., Picard), I have struggled to find a good video metatag editor for Linux. I had one that was working for a while, Puddletag, which actually worked quite well even though it only billed itself as a tag editor for music files. However, Puddletag does not appear to be maintained anymore and, as of Kubuntu 20.04, it is no longer in Ubuntu’s repositories and the PPA does not contain the correct release file. I could try building it from source, but I wanted to see if there was a good alternative.

After googling around, I found one that seems to work quite well – Tag Editor. (You have to love the Linux community: call the software exactly what it does!) Here’s the GitHub site. And here’s where you can download an AppImage (I went with “tageditor-latest-x86_64.AppImage”), which worked great on Kubuntu 20.04.

Once you’ve downloaded the AppImage, you can set it to be executable (right-click and select “properties” then, on the “permissions” tab, select “executable”) or just double-click it and allow it to be executed. It should load.

In the left pane, navigate to your video file:

Once you find the file, you can see all of the tags that can be edited. Fill in the information:

Once you’ve filled in the tags you want to add or modify, click on “Save” at the bottom of the screen:

I particularly like this next feature. Once you click save, it shows the progress and actually tells you what stage it is at in saving the tags in the file:

Progress is in the circle with robust information on what it is doing next to it.

Tag Editor also does something that I actually questioned at first until it saved my bacon – it makes a backup of the file before it writes the new file. The backup file is named the same as the original file but with a new file extension: “.bak”.

You can see the backup copy of Frozen (“Frozen.m4v.bak”) just below the updated copy.

I initially thought this was just going to be annoying as I’d have to go through and delete all the backup copies once I was done. However, I did run into a couple of files that, for whatever reason, could not be modified. Partway through the tag saving process, I got an error message. Sure enough, Tag Editor, in writing the file, had stopped midway through. If a backup file wasn’t made, I would have lost the video. I don’t know exactly what caused the errors, but I quickly learned to appreciate this feature.

Just to illustrate that the tags were updated, I opened the new file in VLC and went back to the media information:

As you can see, the Title, Date, and Genre fields are now filled with accurate information.

Unlike, say, mp3 audio files, video files can take quite some time to update because the file has to be re-written. With a very fast computer, this won’t take an exorbitant amount of time. But it is a much lengthier process than updating tags in mp3 audio files.

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LibreOffice 6.4.3.2 – Not Showing Greek Letters/Symbols

Posted on by rcragun

I ran into an issue the other day that ended up taking me hours to solve, in part because I couldn’t find any other solutions online, which is pretty unusual these days.

Here was the issue: I was evaluating a paper (I’m an academic and read lots of papers) that had a bunch of Greek letters/symbols in it as part of a regression formula. On my computer running Kubuntu 19.10 with LibreOffice 6.3, the Greek letters showed up perfectly fine. On my laptop, which I had just reformatted and on which was a fresh install of Kubuntu 20.04 with Libreoffice 6.4.3.2, the Greek letters were all showing up as something other than Greek letters – odd symbols or dingbats or something. Here’s the version number from a fresh install of Kubuntu 20.04:

And here’s what was being displayed in LibreOffice with the document:

Those familiar with the Greek alphabet will clearly see that these odd dingbats or symbols are definitely not from the Greek alphabet.

I spent about three hours googling for a solution and trying various suggestions. Google is usually a Linux user’s best friend and it’s common that someone else has had the same issue or something similar. Alas, no luck this time. No one, as far as I could tell, had run into this exact issue before. The closest problems seemed to suggest that the problem wasn’t with LibreOffice but with my Linux installation and that I was missing some language packs. Specifically, these semi-related issues suggested I needed to install a language pack with Cyrillic characters. This suggestion seemed reasonable as this version of LibreOffice didn’t seem to ship with support for Cyrillic characters:

Screenshot from LibreOffice for inserting special characters; Greek is not included by default.

I installed a Cyrillic language package from the repositories and restarted my computer. Nothing. I was still getting dingbats instead of Greek letters. I tried about 10 more Cyrillic language packages thinking that maybe I hadn’t found just the right one, searching through the repositories for anything that mentioned Greek or Cyrillic. Haphazardly adding language packages doesn’t seem like a good approach, but I was getting desperate. Even so, it didn’t help. I still couldn’t display the Greek letters in the document.

Next, I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the same version of LibreOffice – 6.4.3.2, which is the version shipping with Kubuntu 20.04. That didn’t work.

After a couple of hours and no solution, I decided that I’d try a different version of LibreOffice. On their website, LibreOffice makes two additional release candidates or development versions available. I could have gone straight to 7.0.0, which was in Alpha, but I opted instead for version 6.4.4.2. To uninstall LibreOffice, I used the following commands (see here):

sudo apt-get remove --purge libreoffice*
sudo apt-get clean
sudo apt-get autoremove

To install the new version, you have to untar the files you downloaded then navigate to the DEBS folder you just unpacked, then run the following:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

After installing LibreOffice 6.4.4.2, I opened the file that was having issues and, lo and behold, it worked just fine:

There are my lovely alphas, betas, sigmas, epsilons, and omegas!

I’m assuming this is a bug in LibreOffice 6.4.3.2 or, at a minimum, the folks who packaged that version left something out of it. Either way, I was frustrated enough at the end that I realized I needed to post a solution for others who may run into this. Since Ubuntu/Kubuntu 20.04 is an LTS (long-term support) release, having a serious bug shipping in the included version of LibreOffice is, no doubt, going to frustrate many users.

I spent a solid three hours on something that was working perfectly fine in LibreOffice 6.3 but broken in 6.4.3.2. That’s annoying. I’m a huge fan of LibreOffice and prefer it far and above MS Office. It’s mature enough software now that little regressions like this really shouldn’t happen.

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Plex on Linux – Video Files Not Detected

Posted on by rcragun

I added a number of video files to my Plex server the other day and, when I checked Plex, some of them had not shown up in the corresponding library. I tried the obvious solutions. First, I selected the options for the library and then chose “Scan Library Files”:

That will often solve the problem, but it didn’t. Then I went for the bigger ask for my Plex server and selected “Manage Library -> Refresh all Metadata”:

That didn’t solve the problem either. Since my Plex server is on Linux, it took me a minute to think it through, but I wondered if the files I had put into the library had the appropriate permissions for Plex.

(Quick aside for those not used to Linux permissions. All files and folders on Linux have permissions assigned to them that dictate what can and cannot be done with them. Basically, it’s a 3×3 set of permissions. There are three options for what can be done with a file: Read, Write, Execute. Then there are three categories of those who can interface with the file: Owner, Group, Others. Thus, you can set the Owner to be able to Read, Write, and Execute a file while not allowing the Group or Others to do the same. Any combination of these permissions is theoretically possible.)

A quick check of the files on my Plex server showed that, indeed, some of the files had permissions settings that were likely interfering with Plex’s ability to index the files:

In the image above, you can see that the permissions for the two lower files (the first and second half of the Sevilla vs CFR Cluj game) are 600 with me as the owner and not “plex.”

My immediate response was to change the permissions to make them fully accessible to make sure that Plex could read them. To do that, I used the following command:

sudo chmod 777 -R /plexserver/videos/newfiles

Security gurus will freak out about this as I basically made those files accessible with no restrictions whatsoever. But, it did solve the problem with Plex. As soon as I changed the permissions, Plex was able to detect and index the files. However, that’s not best Linux security practice.

The general rule of thumb for Linux permissions is that you should grant sufficient permissions to do what you need but should never grant more lenient permissions than you need to. It turns out, Plex has a very nice article on Linux permissions. Based on that article, the command I should have used for those files was:

sudo chmod 644 -R /plexserver/videos/newfiles

Once I changed the permissions, my Plex server was able to find and index the file.

Technically, what I should probably do is make the user “plex” an owner of the files, which would then allow me to keep the permissions as restrictive as possible. That is done with the “chown” command. If I did that, I could simply give the plex user ownership and then leave the permissions such that the owner can read and write to the file (so, 600). Both of these options actually work, with the first being more permissive than the second. But, you can see with my files that I set one to 644 with me as the owner and another at 600 with plex as the owner:

And, in this screenshot, you can see that Plex was able to recognize them both and index them since it now has “read” permissions for the file:

So, what is the best approach here? If you’re lazy, you could set all the permissions to 777. That gives Plex (and everyone else) complete access to all your media files. If you want to be somewhat restrictive, you could set the permissions for media files in Plex to 644, which gives the owner read/write access and the plex user, if it is not an owner of the file, read access. If you want to be more secure, you could set the permissions to 600 and set the plex user as an owner of the file, which would restrict the permissions for the file to read/write for the owners and no access for everyone else.

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Plex – Sports Videos Library

Posted on by rcragun

I use Plex to manage my music and video libraries. I actually don’t watch sports very often. The one exception is when I’m grading papers (I’m a college professor). I’ve found that watching soccer/futbol matches in the background while I grade papers breaks up the monotony of grading. With finals coming up, I thought it would be a good idea to record a few games so I had about 10 hours of soccer matches to watch while I grade papers. But I also realized that I wouldn’t remember which matches I had watched, how far into them I was, and I might want to watch some on my TV and others on my computer. Thus, why not put the matches on Plex?

That’s when I realized that Plex doesn’t really have a way to organize sports events. Plex is remarkably good at pulling the relevant information for movies and TV shows (I actually use tinyMediaManager to do the renaming and organizing for movies and TV shows, then put them into the respective Plex folders, which works extremely well). But Plex doesn’t have built-in functionality for recognizing sports events. That, in itself, isn’t a problem. I just need it to recognize the files in a library and keep track of what I’ve watched and what I haven’t. So, here’s how I organized the files.

I created a new top-level folder next to the same folder where I store my movies and TV shows that I called “sports”:

Inside, I created a separate folder for the league I wanted to watch – English Premier League, UEFA Europa League, etc. If I was planning on keeping the games after I watched them, I would have added a folder below that for the year, but I delete the recorded games after I watch them. So, the folder structure looks like this:

I then named the files as follows: [DATE]-[TEAM1 VS TEAM2]. This structure is visible in the above image.

In Plex, click on settings:

Scroll down to “MANAGE” Libraries and click on it:

Click on ADD LIBRARY

In the window that pops up, select “Other Videos.” That lets Plex know that it doesn’t need to try to retrieve metadata for the videos (this is also the option I choose for my home movies):

Name the folder. I called mine “sports”:

Click “Next” then find the top-level folder you created earlier:

Once you’ve found the folder, you’re ready to click ADD LIBRARY.

This tutorial was done using Plex 4.32.1. With that version, you have the option of pinning libraries to your home screen. I went ahead and pinned sports to my home screen so I can see it quickly:

Click on the library and you should see a list of all the sports videos you have in the library:

As you can see in the image above, I had started watching one of the games when I made this tutorial. This is why using Plex to watch the games is so nice – it keeps track of where I was and I can switch between devices.

NOTE: Tutorial created using Plex version 4.32.1.

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LibreOffice Calc: Graphs with Two y-axes with Different Scales

Posted on by rcragun

While a bit technical, it’s occasionally useful to plot multiple data series that have very different scales in the same chart. Let me give an example to illustrate. Let’s say I want to see whether the number of Mormon temples being built aligns with the number of Mormon stakes (akin to a Catholic diocese) that are organized over time. (I’m a sociologist who studies religion; you’ll just have to go with my examples.)

However, the number of Mormon temples is in the hundreds while the number of Mormon stakes is in the thousands. If I plot them both on the same chart with the same y-axis (that’s the vertical axis), the number of Mormon temples is going to look really small and I won’t be able to see the variation over time in the number of temples, like this:

The chart shows that stakes have increased, but it looks like the number of temples has barely moved. LibreOffice Calc automatically creates the scale used for the y-axis based on the scale of the larger of the two data series, in this case, the number of stakes. Thus, the maximum value is 4,000 and the minimum is 0. What I want to do in this tutorial is to illustrate how to add a second y-axis on the right side of the chart that uses a different scale that is more appropriate for the number of temples.

To begin with, go ahead and create your chart with at least two data series, as I have shown in other tutorials, like this one. Once you have your chart with two data series complete, now it’s time to add a second y-axis with a different scale.

First, click on your chart then double-click it to open chart editing. Then, select the chart area by clicking on one of the axes (left or right doesn’t matter) and then right-click it. You’ll get a context menu with the option “Insert/Delete axes…” Select that:

In the window that pops up, you’ll see a second column labeled “Secondary Axes.” You want to select “Y axis.”

Click “OK” and you’ll see that a second y-axis has been added to your chart on the right side using the same metric as the left side:

The next steps are pretty straightforward, but before you do them, you should pause and think for a second so you don’t have to go back and undo what you’re about to do. You’re going to change the scale of one of the two y-axes, but which axis do you want to change? There isn’t a right or wrong answer here. Generally speaking, I typically see charts like this with the smaller of the two ranges assigned to the left axis and the larger assigned to the right axis, but, again, it is entirely up to you which way you choose to go. At this point, though, you need to make a decision. Then you can move to the next step.

I’m going to follow my suggestion above and change the y-axis on the left to a scale that fits with the number of temples (so, a smaller range of values) and keep the y-axis on the right with the larger range for the number of stakes. But before I change the scales of the axes, I need to tell LibreOffice which data series is going to align with which axis. Here’s how. Click on one of your data series lines, then right-click it and select “Format Data Series.”

In the window that pops up, you’ll see on the “Options” tab right at the top an option that says, “Align Data Series to” and then “Primary Y axis” (this is the one on the left of the chart) or “Secondary Y axis” (this is the one on the right of the chart). Since I selected the number of temples first, I’m going to leave that one aligned to the Primary Y axis:

Hit OK. Then select the other line (in my case, the number of stakes), right-click it, and select “Format Data Series.” On the “Options” tab, I’m going to select to align this line with the “Secondary Y axis”:

Once you do that, you’ll see that LibreOffice automatically adjusts the scale of the other axis. Here’s how my chart now looks:

You can see that it changed the scale of the Primary Y-axis (the one on the left) to a maximum of 250 to reflect the smaller range of that data series. If you want to customize the scale used, you can always click on the axis you want to modify and then right-click it and select “Format Axis”:

In the window that pops up, you can modify the scale of the axis by clicking on the “Scale” tab. If you want to change the values, click on the box next to “Automatic” to unselect it so you can put in your own values, then customize the value you add, like this:

When you have modified the scale to your satisfaction, select “OK” and your graph will be updated with the scale you want, like this:

The resulting chart now has two axes with different scales. It would be a good idea at this point to label the axes to reflect the differences. Simply right-click on the chart and select “Insert Titles.” In that window, add appropriate titles. The left y-axis is simply the Axes while the right y-axis is considered the “Secondary Axes”:

And your final graph will look something like this:

That’s how you can create a chart with two axes in LibreOffice Calc.

NOTE: This example was done in LibreOffice Calc version: 6.4.2.2 on a Linux-based operating system (Kubuntu 19.10).

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LibreOffice Calc: Interpolating Missing Values in Graphs

Posted on by rcragun

Here’s my situation. I have some data over time but I’m missing values in specific years. I want to graph that data but would rather not have to estimate all of the missing values. It turns out, LibreOffice Calc can do that for you in your chart. Here’s how…

Imagine I’m plotting the number of congregations in the LDS Church over time (weird example, I’m sure you’re thinking, but I’m a sociologist who studies religion, so, yeah, that’s what I do). I have the number of congregations in 1841, 1849, 1901, etc. Basically, I have the number in certain years, but I’m missing the number of congregations in lots of other years. I could interpolate the missing values (Excel has this function built in; LibreOffice Calc does not, but you can do it following the approach I have detailed here). But, I don’t really need to do that for my project. I just need a chart that shows the growth of congregations over time.

My data are organized into two columns. Column A is years and ranges from 1841 through 2019. Column B is the number of congregations with the values I have and lots of blank cells:

Select the cells you want to plot (A1:B176 in my case) then click on “Insert Chart”:

You’ll get this window:

Since I want a Line chart, I’m going to select “Line” and because I want “points and lines,” I’m going to select that option as well. I also want “Smooth” lines rather than “Straight” lines, so I select that option, too:

Click “Next >” at the bottom. Since you already selected your Data range, you shouldn’t have to change that. However, we do want the “First column as label” for the x-axis of the chart. So, select that option:

Then select “Next >”. You shouldn’t have to change anything on the Data Series tab, so you can hit “Next >” again. On the Chart Elements tab, you’ll want to describe your chart elements. Add a Title and label your x-axis and y-axis. I also didn’t need a legend since I’m only plotting one data series, so I turned that off:

Then click “Finish.” You’ll have a chart, but it only has the points for the years when you have data, like this:

To add a line connecting the points and interpolating the missing data, click on the chart, then double-click it to modify the chart. Once you’re inside the chart, click on one of the points to select the data series, then right-click and select “Format data series”:

On the “Options” tab you’ll see “Plot Options” and just below that, “Plot missing values.” The default is “Leave gap.” Select “Continue line” and it will interpolate the missing values for you:

Select “Ok” and your line chart will now actually have a line, like this:

There you have it. A line chart with interpolated missing values in LibreOffice Calc without you having to calculate all of the missing values.

NOTE: This example was done in LibreOffice Calc version: 6.4.2.2 on a Linux-based operating system (Kubuntu 19.10).

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Setting Up a New Windows Computer for Your Kids

Posted on by rcragun

I recently had a colleague contact me for some computer advice. He knows I’m a computer geek and was looking for some help setting up a new Windows laptop for his kids. He was wondering which antivirus software to buy.

If you’re at all familiar with my blog, you’ll know that I’m not a fan of Windows and run Linux almost exclusively in my house (I keep a Windows laptop around to use a book scanner). So, it may seem strange turning to a Linux user for advice for a Windows computer. But, it’s actually not that strange. Linux does so much right that it has taught me what you should do when setting up a computer, regardless of your operating system. So, here’s the advice I gave my colleague that I think would be good advice for anyone setting up a new computer for kids.

Antivirus Software

If what you want is just antivirus software, Microsoft Windows ships with antivirus protection now (Microsoft Security Essentials). If you don’t install any other software, you can make sure that you install that software. Plus, the price is hard to beat. It’s free. Also, from my perspective, it’s best for not slowing down your computer dramatically. Norton, Kaspersky, etc. all slow down your computer, which sucks. If all you want is virus/spyware protection, Microsoft Security Essentials is sufficient.

Additional Software

If you want additional software on the laptop to accomplish something else, that’s a different question. Since it’s for your kids, there are two types of software you could consider.

Home Internet Security

First, do you want to restrict where your kids can go online? I’m actually a proponent of simply teaching your kids good habits and not policing where they can go. That may not be your perspective. If you want to restrict where they can go, I’d suggest OpenDNS’s Family Shield (or Home). It restricts adult content and is free.

Ransomware

Second, there is also the concern of ransomware, which is basically if someone were to get a piece of software on your computer that then locks you out of your files. The easiest solution to this is just to install backup software like Dropbox and make sure your kids store any important files in the Dropbox folder. There is a free option that gives you 2 gigabytes. It’s generally good practice to back up all of your important files anyway (e.g., essays, homework, photos, etc.). So long as you have a backup, ransomware is basically not a problem. (See this guide for dealing with ransomware by Dropbox.)

Multiple Accounts and Administrator Accounts

You should also probably set up multiple accounts on the laptop, though, again, this is up to you and how much control you want to give your kids. Setting up a local account for your kids means they won’t be able to install software without your administrative password. If they don’t know what they are doing, this is generally a good idea.

Reinstall Windows

Finally, I’m not sure how good you are with computers, but I’d also suggest making sure you have a way to revert to a completely fresh install in case your kids manage to get past the software and screw things up. Since I build my own computers and run Linux, reinstalling my operating system is something I do regularly. But for most users, the very thought of doing that is terrifying. Microsoft has made that much easier.

Conclusion

Do all of the above and your laptop should work fine for years. Plus, all of the above will cost you exactly $0, just some time.

 2,478 total views,  1 views today

Plex/tinyMediaManager and Doctor Who Specials

Posted on by rcragun

I’m a science fiction fan. And I want my science fiction at my fingertips. To that end, I have slowly been digitizing my favorite series (e.g., Star Trek, Stargate, and now Doctor Who) and putting them on my fileserver that uses Plex to serve the episodes to whatever device I want. I recently ran into an issue with how to organize Doctor Who episodes on my fileserver and, once I figured it out, I thought I’d share it here in case others run into the same situation.

First, props to Doctor Who for occasionally having specials. They are always well done and lots of fun. So, I’m certainly not complaining. BUT, the problem is that the specials are not technically part of a season. That causes some challenges when it comes to how to organize the files.

I use tinyMediaManager for organizing my movies and TV shows on my file server. Not only does tinyMediaManager pull down all the information for my movies and TV shows but it also has the ability to rename the files and organize them. I like how it does all of this and it plays nice with Plex as well, which is important.

Now enter the problem with Doctor Who. Like most TV shows, Doctor Who has seasons. The standard ways to indicate the season and episode of a show are to include something like the following in the name of the digital file: “S03E14.” This indicates the show is from Season (“S”) 03 and is the 14th Episode (“E”) from that season. This works great for most of Doctor Who since most of the content is episodes.

But, what about the specials? The creators of Doctor Who regularly release off-season or out-of-season specials. These don’t get a season episode number. When I tried to get tinyMediaManager to scrape the specials, it didn’t know what to do with them. Basically, it ignored them because it didn’t know what they were since I didn’t know what to name them.

After a little googling, I found out that “Specials” have a special Season designation: “00.” So, for the first Doctor Who (2005) special called “The Christmas Invasion,” that aired on December 25, 2005, how you can name that file is:

Doctor Who – S00E167 – The Christmas Invasion

The naming convention breaks down like this. “S00” tells both Plex and tinyMediaManager that it is a “special.” tinyMediaManager then moves it into a folder called “Specials.” The “E167” is the episode number for the entire series (from Wikipedia). Once I figured this out, tinyMediaManager knew where to put the special:

And Plex began to recognize what the episode was:

Success! Now I can include Specials with my favorite science fiction series. There is order again in the science fiction universe.

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Change Doorbell Sound on Ring App and Amazon Echo

Posted on by rcragun

I’ve had a Ring doorbell (and security system) for quite a while. I never bought the chime that goes with the doorbell because it has always worked through my Amazon Echo devices. However, I only recently learned that you can change the notification sounds you get when someone rings your doorbell. However, how you do this requires clicking through almost a dozen screens in the Ring app and I can never remember it. So, here’s how to do it.

Change Doorbell Sound on Ring App

I’ll start with the notification sound you get on your phone through the Ring app when someone pushes the doorbell. First, open the Ring app and you’ll be on the Dashboard or Home screen:

The dashboard or home screen.

Click the three lines in the upper left corner to open that menu:

Menu options.

Select “Devices”:

The list of devices.

Now select your Video Doorbell (mine is called “Front Door”):

Options for your Video Doorbell.

You’ll have to scroll down (at least, I did), to see the settings icon (the gear). Click on that:

These are the settings for your video doorbell.

The settings you want are the Alert Settings. So, click on that:

The alert settings for your video doorbell.

The second option down in the screenshot above is for the chimes that you can use if you have a separate chime for your device. I don’t. So, what I want to change are the “App Alert Tones.” Click on that option and you’ll get this screen:

App Alert Tones screen

We’re almost there (I know, right!?!). Now click on “Ring Alerts” and you’ll get this screen:

Here’s where you can adjust all of the alerts for your phone (through the Ring app) when someone pushes your doorbell. You can silence it. You can turn on or off the notifications. You can set it to Pop on screen. What we want is at the very bottom in the “Advanced” section. Click on that and you’ll get more options:

This is the same screen, just after I scrolled down to the see the advanced options.

Now, finally, we can change the sound. Click on “Sound” (it will indicate which sound you are currently using below “Sound”) and you’ll get this screen:

These are your options for doorbell notifications on your phone through the Ring App.

You can pick any of the sounds or music available there. If you want to set it to a song or something like that, you can put that into a folder on your phone called “Ringtones” and they will show up there.

Change Doorbell Sound on Amazone Echo Devices for Ring

In addition to changing the sound on your phone, you can also change the sound on your Amazon Echo if you have it connected to the Ring app. I’m not going to go through how to connect it to the Ring app as that is pretty straightforward (download the Ring skill for your Echo), but here is how to change your doorbell sound on your Amazon Echo.

First, open the Amazon Echo app:

Amazon Echo home screen.

In the bottom right, click on “Devices”:

A list of my devices.

I have a lot of devices set up with my Amazon Echo, so I actually have to scroll over to see all the devices (just swipe the list at the top to the left – Tinder style!) to see the option for All Devices:

I swiped left!

Click on “All Devices” and you’ll get a list of all the devices you have set up on Amazon’s Echo/Alexa app. You need to find the app that has a camera icon and is whatever you named your Ring video doorbell. Mine is called “Front Door”:

You’re looking for your Ring video doorbell in the list of devices.

Click on that and you’ll see the settings screen for your video doorbell:

The selected sound is under “Doorbell Sound.”

As you can see in the screenshot above, I had set up a “Howl” for Halloween. I want to switch it to something different. Click on the Doorbell Sound option and you’ll see a list of additional sounds:

The list of doorbell sounds.

The list includes seasonal options. I went with Xmas Elves. Select it and click back and that will be the new sound that is played through your Amazon Echo devices when the Ring video doorbell is pressed:

It worked!

Now, the next time I want to change this option, I won’t have to click on 50 different options in the various apps. Hooray for me (and you)!

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Linux/Kubuntu – Disable Network Printer Auto Discovery

Posted on by rcragun

I don’t know when Kubuntu started automatically discovering printers on networks and then adding them to my list of printers, but it is a problematic feature in certain environments – like universities (where I work).

I set up my home printer on my laptop easy enough. But, whenever I open my laptop and connect to my work network, this feature searches for printers on the network and then adds them to my list of printers. I now have hundreds of printers that show up in my printers dialogue:

I didn’t manually add any of those printers. They were added automatically and are causing problems. First, it’s a pain in the ass to find the printer I want. Second, when I shutdown my computer, the OS has to run through all of those printers and make sure they are disconnected, which makes the OS hang for a couple of minutes every time I want to close down.

This is obviously a great idea in principle, but problematic in this environment.

So, how to turn this off. I found a solution. In a terminal, edit the following file:

sudo nano /etc/cups/cups-browsed.conf

In that file, you should just have to uncomment the following line (remove the hashtag ‘#’):

BrowseProtocols none

So, from this:

To this:

Afterward, try running the commands:

service cups-browsed restart
service cups restart

After making this change, my computer no longer automatically adds shared printers on my network. Hooray!

Unfortunately, making this edit did not remove all the shared printers it had already installed. I still had to remove them all manually, which was annoying. But at least they won’t be reinstalled automatically.

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