Compile and Run Syncany on Ubuntu 11.04

Jun 30, 2011 GMT

Syncany is a relatively young project, but it already garnered the attention of the open source crowd as a potential replacement for Dropbox. Syncany's major attraction is its support for a wide range of storage back-ends: from good old FTP, to Amazon S3, WebDAV, and even Picasa. Better yet, additional back-ends can be easily added via plugins.While Syncany is far from ready for prime time, you can compile the current version of it from the source code to see for yourself what all this buzz is about.First off, install the required packages using the following command (don't forget to enable Canonical Partners' repository in Synaptic first): sudo apt-get install bzr sun-java6-jdk...

Use Klipper Clipboard Actions for Better Productivity

Jun 28, 2011 GMT

The Klipper clipboard manager is one of many great KDE tools. It not only maintains a clipboard history, making it easier to recover previously copied items: the utility also sports a few nifty features like the ability to edit the contents of the clipboard and generate a QR code for the current item in the clipboard. However, Klipper's most useful, yet often overlooked, feature is so-called clipboard actions. It allows you to configure Klipper to run user-defined actions on specific types of clipboard contents. For example, when you copy a URL, you can configure Klipper to automatically open it in the browser of your choice. To create a new action, click on the Klipper icon in the system...

Publish Tomboy Notes on Ubuntu Pastebin

Jun 27, 2011 GMT

Pastebin services like Ubuntu Pastebin are handy for sharing text and code snippets with a minimum of fuss. And if you happen to use Tomboy as your tool of choice for storing and organizing scribbles and code snippets, you'll appreciate the PasteBinIt addin which lets you publish any Tomboy note on Ubuntu Pastebin. To install the addin, grab its latest version from the project's website, and move the downloaded PasteBinIt.dll file to the ~/.config/tomboy/addins/ directory. In the Tomboy, choose Edit | Preferences | Add-ins and enable the PasteBinIt addin under the Tools section. To publish the currently opened note, press the Tools button and choose the Paste Bin it! command.Via OMG!Ubuntu!

Extension Watch: Google Font Previewer

Jun 22, 2011 GMT

The Google Web Fonts repository is a real treasure trove for anyone looking for high-quality open source fonts, but finding the font you like among dozens of available typefaces can be a time-consuming task. Fortunately, there is a nifty tool that can help you to quickly preview the fonts available in the repository -- provided you use Google Chrome or Chromium as your browser of choice. Using he Google Font Previewer extension, you can access all Google web fonts with a single mouse click. What's more, when you select a font, it's automatically applied to the currently viewed web page, so you immediately see what the font looks like in a real-world situation. You can apply the font to...

Getting Started with SparkleShare

Jun 21, 2011 GMT

If you follow Linux-related news, you've probably heard about SparkleShare, a promising open source alternative to the popular Dropbox service. SparkleShare has been under active development for some time, but the latest 0.2.2 release is actually the first version suitable for practical use. Mind you, it's far from ready for production use, so install it only if you want to satisfy your curiosity, or if you enjoy using bleeding edge releases.While you can find .deb SparkShare packages in the wild, your best bet is to compile the software from source. This is a rather straightforward thing to do. First off, you need to install the required dependencies. On Ubuntu, this can be done by...

Save Text Selection as a Tomboy Note with Autokey

Jun 16, 2011 GMT

Since Autokey supports Python, you can automate virtually any task using simple (or complex) scripts. A recent addition to my ever-growing collection of handy Autokey scripts is a relatively simple solution for saving text selections as Tomboy notes: import sys, dbus, gobject, dbus.glib snippet = clipboard.get_selection() retCode, title = dialog.input_dialog("Note Title", "Enter note title:") bus = dbus.SessionBus() obj = bus.get_object("org.gnome.Tomboy", "/org/gnome/Tomboy/RemoteControl") tomboy = dbus.Interface(obj, "org.gnome.Tomboy.RemoteControl") newnote=tomboy.CreateNamedNote(title) tomboy.SetNoteContents(newnote, ...

Generate HTML Photo Gallery in a Pinch with llgal

Jun 09, 2011 GMT

There are plenty of powerful open source web-based applications for sharing photos out there. But if you need to publish a bunch of photos on the web as a simple static HTML gallery without all the bells and whistles, a command-line tool like llgal can come in rather handy. This little tool is available in the software repositories of many popular Linux distributions, so you can install it in a pinch. Using llgal to generate an HTML gallery couldn't be easier: in the terminal, switch to a folder containing photos, and run the llgal command. This creates a gallery using default settings. However, llgal supports a handful of options you can use to tweak its behavior and the resulting...