Bring Weather Reports to Your Desktop with Stormcloud

Oct 26, 2012 GMT

In our neck of the woods, we talk a lot about the weather. Why? Because the Danish weather is pretty unstable, and it can be rather depressing at times. That's why many of us, including yours truly, are obsessively checking the current weather conditions and forecasts for the coming days several times a day. So for me a decent weather utility is a necessity. For the longest time, I've being using the Forecastfox Weather extension for Firefox and Weatherbug app for Chromium. But thanks to Stormcloud, I can now check the current weather by quickly glancing over my desktop. This utility is not overloaded with features, but it displays the most essential weather info using a sleek...

Transfer and Organize Photos with fotobasher

Oct 26, 2012 GMT

Some time ago, I shared a simple shell script for downloading and organizing photos. This script served me well, but it did have some limitations. For example, all settings were hard-wired into the script itself, which made it less flexible for processing photos from different cameras. To solve the problem, I've tweaked the script, so it now pulls all the required settings from a separate .cfg file. This way, I can have separate configuration files for different cameras, and all I need to do is to point the script to the right one.The script itself is still relatively simple. It uses the source command to read parameter values from a configuration file. The name of the configuration file...

Raspberry Pi WebIDE

Oct 25, 2012 GMT

If you are serious about using your Raspberry Pi (RPi) as a platform for writing and testing code, you'll appreciate the WebIDE software developed by Adafruit. This server-based solution turns your RPi into a flexible coding environment which you can access and use from any machine with a browser. Although WebIDE is geared towards Python, it can handle other languages, including Ruby, JavaScript, and shell scripts. Better yet, WebIDE seamlessly integrates with the Bitbucket code hosting service.Using the provided installer script, you can deploy WebIDE in an RPi in a matter of minutes. Alternatively, WebIDE can be installed manually, and the project's website provides instructions on how...

phpFileManager: A Single-File Web-based File Manager

Oct 23, 2012 GMT

The phpFileManager (phpfm) file manager can come in rather handy when you need to juggle files on your web server from the comfort of your browser. Since the entire application consists of a single PHP file, phpfm requires no installation: simply drop the script into the root of your server, and you are good to go. However, before you start using the script, you might want to tweak the default settings. To do this, press the Config button which opens the configuration window. At the very least, you should protect phpfm with a password. In addition to that, you can specify the file manager's default directory and enable error reporting. phpfm packs all essential commands for managing...

New Version of Calibre Brings a Slew of Improvements

Oct 18, 2012 GMT

Calibre receives at least a couple of updates every month. Most of them feature minor improvements and bug fixes. But once in a while, Calibre's developers push a major update that brings new features along with some significant enhancements and improvements. Case in point: the latest 0.9 release that packs a raft of new stuff. The new version supports the MTP protocol for USB connected devices. This means that Calibre can now properly handle Android devices. When you connect an Android device to your computer, Calibre automatically detects it and treats it as a regular reading device.A lot of work has been done to improve Calibre's library management capabilities. This includes...

Turn Sublime Text into a Task Manager with the PlainTasks Plugin

Oct 10, 2012 GMT

While Sublime Text is a powerful text editing tool, you can put it to other practical uses through third-party plugins. Take, for example, the PlainTasks plugin. It turns Sublime Text into a simple yet flexible task manager. The plugin uses a plain text file for storing tasks, so you can easily synchronize it across multiple machines and open it in any other text editor. The easiest way to deploy PlainTasks is to use the Sublime Package Control tool (see the Installation page for instructions on how to install Sublime Package Control). In Sublime Text, choose Preferences | Package Control, select then the Install Package command, type PlainTasks to locate and install the package. To...

Turn Google Chrome and Chromium into a Powerful Text Editor with TextDown

Sep 29, 2012 GMT

There are several apps in Chrome Web Store that can turn your favorite browser into a no-frills text editor. But probably none of them offer the power and flexibility of the TextDown app. This editor is designed for working with Markdown files, but it also offers a raft of useful features that make it an excellent general purpose text editing tool. TextDown can be used offline, and you can use the editor to work with local text files. To enable the latter feature, choose Tools | Extensions and tick the Allow access to file URLs check box next to the TextDown entry. TextDown also supports text shortcuts for more efficient writing, and you can specify your own text shortcuts in the Words...