Productivity Sauce

Jan 07, 2013 GMT

The Maniana task manager app is described as "a perfect solution for every procrastinator." In reality, though, it is a perfect tool for anyone looking for a no-frills solution for keeping tabs on your to-dos and tasks. There are, of course, dozens of apps on Google Play Store in this category, but Maniana has two traits that make it stand out from the crowd. Firstly, the app features a somewhat unorthodox approach to scheduling and managing tasks. Maniana does away with the... more »

Dec 17, 2012 GMT

Photo is not the most sophisticated image viewer out there, but it offers a perfect blend of simplicity and flexibility that makes it a handy utility, indeed. This lightweight application has a full-screen keyboard shortcuts-driven interface which doesn't stand in your way. This alone makes Photo an ideal tool for showcasing your snaps. As you would expect, Photo supports a wide range of graphics formats, including JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and PPM.

Practically all common actions in Photo (zoom in out, show next or... more »

Dec 14, 2012 GMT

Since many mainstream Linux distros still lack proper support for the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP), making a Linux machine play nicely with an Android device can be a bit tricky. Unless you happen to use Kubuntu. In this case, you can add MTP support to the Dolphin file manager by installing the MTP KIO slave using the following commands:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:philschmidt/ppa-kio-mtp-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kio-mtp

Once you've done that, connect your Android device, and you should be able to manage it as a regular storage device using... more »

Nov 29, 2012 GMT

DLNA provides a hassle-free solution for sharing digital media between devices, and you can put this technology to good use on your local network. Install DLNA software on a server on your network, and you can easily access photos, videos, and music from any device that has a DLNA client on it. Using the minidlna application, you can turn any Linux machine into a DLNA server in a matter of minutes. Here is how to do this on Debian... more »

Nov 13, 2012 GMT

The latest version of the Raspbian Linux distro for Raspberry Pi contains a graphical tool for configuring and managing wireless connections, but you can easily set up a wireless connection to a WPA-protected Wi-Fi network without booting into a graphical desktop environment. Assuming that you are using a wireless adapter supported by Raspbian, run the iwconfig command to find out the correct wireless interface (in most cases, it's wlan0). Create then a backup copy of the /etc/network/interfaces network configuration file using the... more »

Oct 31, 2012 GMT

While the official Google Reader app does a decent job of managing RSS feeds, it's hardly the best RSS reader for Android. This title should belong to EasyRSS, an open source app which provides a better user experience. EasyRSS relies on Google Reader as its back end, so you need a Google Reader account to be able to use the app.

EasyRSS features a sleek... more »

Oct 29, 2012 GMT

Having your email up in the cloud is very convenient, until your Internet connection is down or email provider is having technical issues. In situations like these, having a searchable backup of all your emails which you can access locally can be a real life-saver. Fortunately, setting up an email archiving solution isn't all that difficult, and you can use a Raspberry Pi (or any spare machine for that matter) for that. If your email service provides IMAP support, then the best tool for the job is OfflineIMAP. This software is... more »