Productivity Sauce

Dmitri Popov
Simple URL Shortening Solution Using Redirect Pages

Sep 21, 2012 GMT

Using an application like YOURLS, you can host a link shortening solution on your own server. But if you need to maintain only a handful of shortened URLs, installing a full-blown URL shortening application is overkill. Instead, you can use a dead-simple solution based on HTML pages containing the REFRESH metatag. For example, to set up a shorter link to my Wikimedia Commons gallery, I created the following HTML file and saved it as a gallery page on my server: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <title>Redirect</title> <meta http-equiv="refresh"...
Mosh: Shell for Users on the Move

Sep 14, 2012 GMT

The ability to connect and control remote machines via SSH is a boon for users on the move, but an unreliable and slow Internet connection can turn an SSH session into an exercise in frustration. Enter Mosh, a mobile shell that works wonders even on a shaky and anemic Internet connection. This tool offers several features designed to deal with challenges posed by unreliable Internet connections. For starters, Mosh provides a mechanism for handling dropped connections. This means, among other things, that when you put your machine to sleep and wake it up later, Mosh resumes the connection. In addition to that, the tool supports connection roaming, which can come in handy when you hop from...
Transfer Ebooks Wirelessly to an Android Device with FBReader

Aug 31, 2012 GMT

FBReader is undeniably one of the best ebook reader apps available on the Android platform. Besides a comprehensive feature set, the app also lets you obtain ebooks from different sources, including the Calibre library stored on your machine. This is, indeed, a nifty feature which can be used to effortlessly transfer ebooks from an existing Calibre library to your Android device. To make use of this functionality, you need to enable Calibre's built-in content server first. To do this, launch Calibre on your machine, press the Connect/share button on the main toolbar, choose the Start Content Server command, and note the IP address of the content server. Launch FBReader on your...
Turn Raspberry Pi into an Ebook Server with Calibre

Aug 16, 2012 GMT

There is probably no better tool for managing, converting, and sharing ebooks than Calibre. You can use it as a regular desktop application for reading and organizing ebooks, but Calibre also features a built-in server for sharing ebooks on the web. In practical terms, this means that you can publish your ebook library on the web and access all your ebooks from any machine using a browser. To publish your ebook library, you can turn Raspberry Pi into a little headless Calibre server. And since a fairly recent version of Calibre is available in the Raspbian software repository, this project can be done in a few simple steps. Because Calibre doesn't allow you to create libraries and...
Highlight and Share Web Snippets with MASHA

Jul 31, 2012 GMT

Bookmark sharing services are a dime a dozen nowadays, but what if you want to give your visitors the ability to share specific text snippets from a web page without relying on third-party services? Then MASHA (which stands for MArk and SHAre) is just the ticket. This nifty little tool provides a simple and elegant solution for highlighting text fragments on a web page and sharing them with other users.Deploying is not particularly complicated, even if your web coding skills are not up to scratch. Grab the latest release of the software from the project's GitHub repository. If you have Git installed on your system, you can do that by executing the following command: git clone...
QuickDic: Offline Multi-Lingual Dictionary for Android

Jul 27, 2012 GMT

Whether you learn a foreign language or travel to another country, a good dictionary is a must-have. And if you already have an Android device in your pocket, you can replace a thick paper dictionary with a more practical solution like the QuickDic app. What makes QuickDic particularly suitable for travel and study is the fact that it works offline. When you launch the app for the first time, you need to grab dictionary files for a specific language pair. Once you've done that, you can use QuickDic without an Internet connection. The app can handle multiple dictionaries, which can be useful when you are working with several foreign languages. QuickDic features a simple and functional...
Improve Photos Automagically with aaphoto

Jul 23, 2012 GMT

For many photographers and shutterbugs, post-processing photos is an important part of the creative process. But there are situations when you want to improve your shots without going through the photo editing rigmaroles. And this is when aaphoto can come in rather handy. This simple utility lets you improve photos using a single command. aaphoto is available in the software repositories of many popular Linux distributions, so you can install it using your distro's package manager. On Debian and Ubuntu, you can do this by running the apt-get install aaphoto command as root. Alternatively, you can grab a compiled binary from the project's website, or compile aaphoto from the source.aaphoto...
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