KWave 0.92

Audacity is a brilliant audio editor, and it's now used by professionals on all kinds of operating systems for everything from cutting silence to preparing mastered audio files for compact disc. It's what open source software should be about. Before Audacity came along, the same functionality cost serious money and was inaccessible to Linux users. But Audacity is often too complex for simple jobs, such as adding a fade-in or fade-out or examining the contents of an audio file, which has left me often wanting a simpler, quicker alternative. Considering audio often goes hand-in-hand with images, there are very few alternatives. One of the exceptions is KWave, a sound editor that started life almost 18 years ago but, sadly, hadn't been updated for a while … until now.

After a string of updates, KWave is back. It's been ported to KDE Frameworks 5 and has had its 'K' position ratified by becoming a member of the official KDE Applications 16.12 bundle. This is great news for KDE users or almost anyone wanting a simple audio editor without needing to dive into Audacity, and KWave definitely doesn't compete with in terms of features. There's only a limited set of effects; for example, recording is very limited when compared with Audacity's multitrack capabilities, and there's no plugin support. But it does allow you to export an audio file with a simple click of Save, and cutting and pasting the audio itself is the same process. You can even zoom into a waveform to examine the specific bits within a wave, which is useful if you're editing out glitches. There's also some good options for saving a raw data file you know is audio, because KWave can change the sample format without forcing a conversion on the current data.

Project Website

http://kwave.sourceforge.net/

Finally, you have an alternative to Audacity if all you need is a quick and dirty tool for editing audio.

Smart kettle

iBrew

It may seem crazy, but you can buy a kettle that boils water when you press a large button on your phone. It's called the iKettle 2.0. What's even crazier is that the mobile app requires a remote user account, and more importantly, the connection to your kettle barely works. You may press the button, but when you walk all the way to the kettle, your water may be cold. Welcome to the Internet of Things (IoT).

Fortunately, like Linux itself, nothing exists for long without being deconstructed and rebuilt, and a brilliant little tool called iBrew rebuilds the iKettle into something much more functional. It's both a command-line utility and a web interface for all your iKettles and Smarter Coffee machines, and it does a far better job than the official tools. To start, you don't need an account. Just type ibrew boil and heat will be applied until your water is hot. It's as simple as that, and apart from needing the app to connect your device to WiFi initially, you no longer need accounts or proprietary software. Nor is this a simple tool. More than 50 other commands can be used to hack and better integrate these devices into whatever home automation system you're using. To keep the water hot, for example, you specify a specific target temperature (brilliant for green tea) and measure the water in the device. The kettle is protected from boiling empty, so these commands should be safe.

Another command will even launch a web interface that is much clearer and quicker to use than the app, and this can be used as both a conduit for the app itself, side-stepping multiple user issues with the original app, and as a RESTful API for easy integration with your other services.

Project Website

https://github.com/Tristan79/iBrew

The future is now – turn on your kettle from the command line and heat water to that perfect green tea temperature.