Since my original post in May of this year and my follow up post in August of this year, a significant number of Linux users have lifted their voices and poured them onto clacking keyboards pushing back against the tide that is the child-like interface of Unity and Gnome 3.x. (For those who may find my [...]

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This is a great utility if you have many jpeg’s or MP3′s that are haphazardly named and want to rename them sequentially, or with a specific pattern. It has a very friendly GUI front end and allows for many types of character substitutions or prefixes and suffixes to be added. It also supports character substitutions for [...]

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A really great post from The Branyard at Informationweek. The comments section are very much worth reading, so click the link above to see them. Some of the comments go further back in time of tech nostalgia. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I vividly remember and identify with a great many of these “If’s…” — You know [...]

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I thoroughly enjoyed this post at FossForce.com. The Top 10 things a Linux distribution might be called, if it were released by Microsoft: 10. Seattle’s Best. 9. Breakable Linux. 8. The best thing Microsoft ever came up with. 7. Open Windows. 6. Something that will never happen. 5. Closed open source. 4. Steve Ballmer’s nightmare. 3. Blue [...]

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Linus with Maddog The Vancouver LinuxCon celebrated 20 years of Linux, with one very special guest, in a tux. Some more pics here, and here, and here, also a short write-up here.

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Thunderbolt is a new over-the-wire technology. Expect to start seeing it more and more in 2012, and I think it may eclipse USB 3.0 before it really gets off the ground. It’s essentially PCIe over a wire, but also incorporates the DisplayPort standard which also allows the wire to handle monitor connections – the connections [...]

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You may remember some months ago I had posted about the state of graphical interfaces for Linux, and my thoughts on Ubuntu 11.x and Gnome 3. I had commented that I did not like the way Ubuntu was going with its Unity interface, nor was I happy at all with Gnome 3′s interface. In that [...]

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The last Friday in July is System Administrator Day …. so happy SysAdmin day ! From the SysAdminDay Website: A sysadmin unpacked the server for this website from its box, installed an operating system, patched it for security, made sure the power and air conditioning was working in the server room, monitored it for stability, set [...]

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If you don’t have expensive PDF editing software, you can convert your PDF to a JPG and then edit/add text/graphics accordingly, then convert the image back to a PDF. To convert a PDF to a Jpeg, you’ll need Imagemagick (sudo apt-get install imagemagick). convert -quality 20 -interlace none -density 300 input.pdf output.jpg The quality setting [...]

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This news is a few days old, but I thought I should post an update about it as I’ve covered Dropbox security issues in a previous blog entry. There is an extensive article in Wired magazine about this Dropbox fiasco. Apparently an FTC complaint has been filed. From the article . . . The FTC complaint [...]

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Ran into a great application called Plop Boot Manager. The software allows you to boot off USB devices for those older computers whose BIOS doesn’t support USB booting. The software is free for personal use, but not free for commerical use. It’s also not open source, but a good tool nonetheless. Click here for the [...]

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I thought this was a very witty creation. It’s certainly not all-inclusive but perhaps a live, interactive Google map of the Great Linux World Map would be a good idea! Where on this map do you live ? Source: dedoimedo.com

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Google Page Speed Online analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster for both desktop and mobile browsers. This site got a 71/100 … not bad. One of the biggest suggestions was to recompress the jpeg’s on the site much more than they are currently for an estimated 50% [...]

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Well, recently we’ve seen some interesting developments. Canonical (makers of Ubuntu Linux) have come out with their latest version of Ubuntu (11.04), featuring their new default desktop interface called Unity. Meanwhile, the folks over at Gnome have also come out with Gnome 3, replacing the amazingly popular Gnome 2.x style interface. Boy, they look pretty [...]

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This year is certainly the year for birthdays. The File Transfer Protocol, otherwise known as FTP is 40 years old today. Originally put forth as the RFC 114 Specification on April 16, 1971, FTP (and the various iterations inspired from it) is as heavily used today as it was back then by people and companies all [...]

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Relative to an earlier post I made about the birth of the Internet, a heritage site is being set up where the very first message was sent over what would become ARPAnet and later, the Internet at UCLA. There’s a couple of great pictures in the article as well. Click here for the full article [...]

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I use Dropbox heavily for storing many files I’d like immediate and synchronous access to across various systems. I enjoy knowing that if I place a file on my Dropbox folder at home, it’ll be available on my laptop later, on my work machine, or on other machines I use remotely. It’s very convenient. Dropbox [...]

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Linux is 20 years old this year … first unveiled in September 1991 as version 0.01. Three years later,  in March of 1994, Linux 1.0.0 was released with 176,250 lines of code. The Linux Kernel soon grew into 14+ million lines of code, and now runs much of the world’s most important servers. Of course, [...]

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The open source alternative to Photoshop, GIMP has some awesome abilities. This site has 30 awesome tutorials with YouTube video links on all topics from photo manipulation to typography.

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…work has been busy … but I am going to try to devote more time to posts … sorry for the hiatus! In the meantime, take this opportunity to check your backups and make sure your treasured data is duplicated, because everything has a failure date. …more posts to come.

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I use many of these commands quite often. They’re immensely helpful when one wants to do a lot of remote work on a computer, or simply access resources on a remote machine (Linux or otherwise). (FYI: OpenSSH may be installed on Windows machines if anyone does not have a home Linux box to receive SSH sessions, and may [...]

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40 years ago today at about 9pm on October 29, 1969 , two programmers sat 400 miles apart and sent information between their two computers. The first word, “LOGIN” was sent at that time. Well, actually only “LO” was sent, before the Stanford Research Institute computer crashed. They worked on the problem and about 90 [...]

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When you want the current weather conditions without having to visit a graphically busy weather website, or without the benefit of a GUI (say working a shell), a great app will give you the weather conditions in no time, just by typing weather at the command prompt. Simply sudo apt-get install weather-util, and set up [...]

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For those that prefer detachable Screen sessions with multiple windows in shell and want to run instant message chat sessions in CLI without the hassle of Xwindows … CenterIM is for you. CenterIM is a pretty robust instant messaging client that runs entirely out of your command prompt. Simply sudo apt-get install centerim and you’re [...]

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With modern filesystems securely deleting files isn’t always easy, but one approach which stands a good chance of working is to write random patterns over all unused areas of a disk – thus erasing the contents of files you’ve previously deleted. We all know that when you simply delete a file, it’s possible to recover [...]

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