Productivity Sauce

Digitize Notes with CamiApp for Android

Feb 13, 2012 GMT

Among solutions that bridge the digital and analog worlds, CamiApp is by far my favorite one. I stumbled upon CamiApp notebooks in the Tokyu Hands store in Tokyo. These notebooks are designed for use with the accompanying CamiApp for Android (which, according to the app's licensing info, is based on several open source components). The app lets you easily digitize notes using the Android built-in camera, and it does a good job of straightening and cleaning up the snapped images. You can then neatly organize the processed snaps using tags and descriptions. What's more, each sheet in the CamiApp notebook contains a so-called...

SSH Tunneling on Android for Secure Web Browsing

Feb 08, 2012 GMT

When you are on the move, you can easily secure your Internet connection by setting up an SSH tunnel, provided you have a remote SSH server to connect to. Creating an SSH tunnel on Linux is a matter of executing the ssh -ND 9999 user@remotehost command in the terminal. But what if you are using an Android device when you are out and about? ConnectBot has got you covered. This SSH client app can be used to set up an SSH tunnel by configuring a so-called port forward. To do this, launch ConnectBot and establish a connection to an SSH server. Press then the Menu button and tap on Port Forwards. Press again Menu and tap on Add port...

Instant Remote Desktop Access with DeskView

Jan 30, 2012 GMT

VNC is a popular choice when it comes to remote desktop access and control, but it's not the only fish in the sea. In fact, if you want to establish a connection to a remote machine instantly and with a minimum of fuss, DeskView is the perfect tool for the job. The only requirement is that a Java Runtime Environment (e.g., OpenJDK) is installed on both the server and client machines. DeskView works through HTTP proxies, and the connection between the client and server is encrypted using the DES encryption. More importantly, the software requires no installation and it can run practically on any platform, so you can control your Linux machine at home from a Windows box.To run DeskView on...

Jota: A Perfect Text Editor for Android

Jan 27, 2012 GMT

Jota is probably the most feature-packed text editor for the Android platform, which makes it a perfect app for anyone writing for a living or just doing a lot of writing while on the move. For starters, Jota can handle large texts (up to one million characters according to its developer) and a wide range of encodings. As a writer, you'll most certainly appreciate the word count feature, although you have to dig through Menu | File | Property to access it. Jota also sports an indispensable find and replace function which supports regular expressions for advanced search and replace operations. Other text editor essentials such as...

Publish Photos with PhotoShow

Jan 23, 2012 GMT

Hosting your own photo sharing solution makes a lot of sense, but setting up and maintaining a full-blown application like Gallery or Piwigo requires some technical chops and can be a time-consuming affair. Enter PhotoShow, an open-source photo sharing software that can be deployed in a matter of minutes and requires practically no maintenance.Unlike many other photo sharing applications, PhotoShow doesn't use a database back end, which dramatically simplifies the installation procedure. In fact, there is no installation procedure to speak of. Grab the latest release of PhotoShow from the project's website GitHub repository, unpack the downloaded archive, and rename the resulting...

Manage Tasks with nag

Jan 20, 2012 GMT

nag is probably the simplest command-line task manager out there. But while this tiny Python script won't replace a full-blown task manager, nag can come in handy for maintaining a short list of tasks with a minimum of fuss. To install nag on your machine, grab the latest version of the script from the project's website GitHub repository and unpack the downloaded archive. Rename the nag.py file in the resulting directory to nag and move it to the /usr/bin directory. Make then the file executable by running the chmod a+x /usr/bin/nag command as root.nag features just four simple commands (five if you count the -h command that displays a brief description of all commands). The -a (--add)...

Extension Watch: SimplyRead for Chromium and Firefox

Jan 12, 2012 GMT

After going through several browser extensions that make reading long articles on the web more tolerable, I've finally settled for SimplyRead. Why? For several reasons. The extension is released under an open source license and it's available for both Google Chrome (and Chromium) as well as Firefox. SimplyRead does a commendable job of pulling out and formatting relevant text from most web pages. According to the extension's developer, SimplyRead is inspired by the Readability project, but it "aims to be much simpler, faster, and more usable." The extension doesn't offer any embellishments like the ability to share the sscurrently viewed web page via Twitter or Facebook, and you...