Productivity Sauce

Mustard: Nifty Identi.ca Client for Android

Dec 16, 2009 GMT

While Identi.ca is not nearly as popular as Twitter, this open source microblogging service is home to many open source advocates, developers, users, and just interesting people. Thanks to a Twitter-compatible API, many closed source Twitter clients for the Android platform will happily work with Identi.ca. But why settle for a closed source app if you can install the excellent open source Mustard client? Mustard is not the most advanced microblogging app out there, but it offers all the essential features and a few clever tricks to boot. It supports multiple accounts and sports the geolocation feature which attaches current geographical coordinates to your posts (you can, of course,...

Five Productivity Extensions for Google Chrome

Dec 14, 2009 GMT

Good news for Google Chrome users: the latest version of the browser supports extensions, so you can extend its default functionality by installing extensions from the official extension repository. While the repository offers only a few hundred extensions (compared to several thousand add-ons available on Firefox), it does feature a few neat modules that can make your browsing more productive.Things To Do is a pretty nifty extension that turns every new tab into a to-do list. Install the extension, and next time you open a new tab, you'll see a simple to-do list. To add a new task, start typing in the empty field. Using the buttons you can then move tasks up and down as well as delete...

Gift Ideas for Linux Geeks

Dec 09, 2009 GMT

The holiday season is approaching fast, but there is still time to buy a nice gift for the Linux geek in your life. Not sure what to give? Here are a couple of gift ideas.Nothing makes a geek happier than hardware which is designed to run Linux. This year, you might consider TonidoPlug -- a tiny and inexpensive Linux server that runs a slimmed-down version of Ubuntu and the Tonido application suite. The Tonido apps are top-notch, and the fact that you can access and tweak TonidoPlug via SSH is guaranteed to make your Linux partner ecstatic. Kingston V series solid-state disks are not designed specifically for Linux, but they make a great gift anyway. One of the most affordable SSDs on the...

Monitoring Notebook Battery with IBAM

Dec 08, 2009 GMT

While KDE, Gnome, and Xfce come with dedicated graphical utilities for monitoring notebook battery, you might still want to use IBAM to keep an eye on the battery parameters directly from the command line. IBAM stands for Intelligent Battery Monitor, and it "uses statistical and adaptive linear methods to provide accurate estimations of minutes of battery left or of the time needed until full recharge." In layman terms, this means that IBAM provides a more accurate estimate of the remaining battery life and charge time. IBAM does this by creating a battery and charge profile from which it can compute the actual times. To find out the remaining battery life (or charging time, if...

Manage Your Schedule with Day Planner

Dec 05, 2009 GMT

If a full-blown calendar application like Evolution of Lightning is overkill for your needs, try Day Planner. This simple yet efficient calendaring utility sports a refreshingly simple interface and it's ridiculously easy to use. To populate Day Planner with events, press the Add a new event button at the bottom of the window. This opens the Add an Event dialog window with the Date field set to the current date. Day Planner supports three types of events: Normal, All day, and Birthday. When you create a normal event, you can specify the start time and make the event recurring by specifying the appropriate settings in the advanced settings section. In this section, you can also add notes...

Track Your Missing Notebook with Pombo

Dec 03, 2009 GMT

To recover a lost or stolen notebook, you need all the help you can get -- and this is where Pombo can come in rather handy. The key component of the Pombo solution is a tiny Python script that runs on your notebook. The script runs quietly in the background and collects tracking information such as the IP address and information about all network interfaces as well as information about nearby wireless access points. In addition to that, the script can take a screenshot using the scrot tool and capture a snapshot with the notebook's webcam using the streamer utility. The script then packs, encrypts, and uploads the tracking information to a destination server.To get Pombo running on your...

Disable Touchpad When Typing with syndaemon

Nov 27, 2009 GMT

There is nothing more annoying than accidentally tapping the touchpad on the notebook while typing. This causes the cursor to jump to a random place in the document, and before you know it, you are typing text in the middle of another sentence. Some notebooks allow you to temporary disable the touchpad, but if your mobile companion doesn't have this feature, the syndaemon utility provides a simple yet effective solution to the problem. When activated, the utility disables the touchpad when it detects keyboard activity and enables it as soon as you stop typing. In fact, syndaemon is much more convenient in use than a dedicated hardware switch on your notebook, as the utility enables and...