Software alternatives for Linux

Blackbox is a new project in development that focuses on giving you a good-looking terminal emulator for your beautiful Linux setup.

I've been using Darktable for years and although it has a steep learning curve, I've found it to be quite a good replacement for Lightroom on Linux.

You can clone a drive from one machine to another using "dd" and netcat (nc)

Caveats:

• The commands should be run a root

• Data on the destination device will be overwritten, so double-check that you get the right one (maybe check with "lsblk" etc)

• The drive on the destination machine must be at least as big as the source

• The data on the source device should not changed while it is being cloned. Make sure it has no mounted partitions (it's a good idea to boot from USB). Ditto the destination drive

• The source machine must be able to reach the destination on the port specific (not blocked by firewall etc)

• Data is sent unencrypted over the network, so make sure you get the right destination and your network is trustworthy/secure (you could so this over the internet - firewall rules permitting - but I wouldn't recommend doing so with a drive containing sensitive data and it is going to eat up bandwidth/data-cap)

The process....

On the machine with the destination drive, run the following (where 11111 is a TCP port the machine will listen on, and /dev/sdd is the device that will be cloned to. Data will be sent in 1M blocks).

nc -l 11111 | dd of=/dev/sdd status=progress

This will begin listening for data on port 11111

On the machine with the source drive, run the following (where 192.168.1.2 is the IP address if the destination machine, /dev/sdb is the drive being cloned from, and 11111 is the port you used above)

dd if=/dev/sda status=progress bs=1M | nc 192.168.1.2 11111

You should see progress on both hosts as the drive from machine to the other

use Pidgin and create a Bonjour account, it will find others on your LAN. If others don't show, go offline then Available to refresh LAN users. Be sure to install all dependencies for Pidgin

simpleScreenRecorder

Linux users can use SimpleScreenRecorder, specify a 1280or1024x720 area of desktop to record, place your webcam output (gucview, vlc) in that frame along with other elements, select output profile YT stream, rtmp is then the output, enter in stream url. pick video (vp8 vp9, h264, h265) & audio (vorbis, mp3, aac) . start preview to check if everything is working, when ready hit RECORD. SSR will all pre encode that area of the screen and send it to the stream URL, there it gets rebroadcast to viewers

you wont find this in VLC manuals or docs

stream very low BW, stable cvlc v4l2:///dev/video0 :sout="#transcode{vcodec=theo,vb=600,fps=6,scale=0.5,acodec=none,scodec=none}:duplicate{dst=http{mux=ogg,dst=:8080/},dst=display}all:keep"

cvlc v4l2:///dev/video0 --sout="#transcode{vcodec=theo,vb=2000,fps=15,acodec=none,scodec=none}:duplicate{dst=http{mux=ogg,dst=:8080/},dst=display}all:keep" 14fps=50KBs, 6fps=23KBs, 4fps does not work must be 6 or above

on receiving end use a browser or vlc or smplayer http://192.168.x.x:8080 find the source's IP# replace x.x above

IrfanView is a great piece of software for Windows. One of those "jack of all trades, master of none". It works as a simple image & video viewer and browser, can do simple and not-so-simple image manipulation, and even batch jobs, like conversion, on selections of images in folders.

For Linux (and other platforms) there's XnView MP that offers extremely similar functionalities.