Productivity Sauce

Set up a DLNA Server in a Minute

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 and Ubuntu. Since minidlna is available in the official software repositories of both distros, installing it is a matter of running the apt-get install minidlna command as root. Once the package has been installed, open the minidlna.conf configuration file in a...

How to Quickly Configure Wireless WPA Connection on Raspberry Pi

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 following command: sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.oldOpen the file in the nano editor: sudo nano /etc/network/interfacesLocate the...

Read RSS Feeds with EasyRSS for Android

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 interface, and the app makes extensive use of gestures for navigating and reading RSS articles. The built-in rendering engine does a great job of formatting and displaying RSS articles, while the app's synchronization capabilities keep everything in sync with your Google Reader account. Using EasyRSS's sharing feature, you can push...

Turn Raspberry Pi into an Email Archiver

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 available in the Debian official software repository, so you can install it on RPi (assuming it runs the Raspbian distro) using the sudo apt-get install offlineimap...

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...