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 line numbering, undo/redo, auto-save are also present...

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...

Sync Files with bitpocket

Jan 09, 2012 GMT

bitpocket may not rival dedicated file syncing services like Dropbox or Wuala, but this neat tool has a few important advantages. For starters the entire solution consists of a single Bash script which uses the good old rsync tool to perform its syncing magic. Since you can deploy bitpocket on your own server, your storage space is limited only to the size of the server's hard disk. And, of course, there are no monthly fees to pay.Rolling your own file syncing system based on bitpocket is not particularly complicated. First of all, make sure that rsync and openssh are installed on all machines you want to use with bitpocket. Next, use curl to download the latest version of the script on...

Hacker's Keyboard: A Proper Keyboard for Your Android Device

Dec 26, 2011 GMT

Despite its name, the Hacker's Keyboard Android app is not limited to hackers and coders. This keyboard replacement replicates the regular keyboard layout, so it is perfectly suited for users who depend on the arrow, punctuation, Tab, Ctrl, and Esc keys in their daily computing. Moreover, Hacker's Keyboard boasts the Fn key which evokes a separate layout containing a numerical keyboard and a function key pad. Hacker's Keyboard works particularly well with the ConnectBot SSH client app, and the keyboard supports a wide range of layouts, including English, German, French, and Russian. Switching between layouts is done by swiping to the right or left on the Space key, which is a very nice...

Create Web-based Presentations with Slidifier

Dec 22, 2011 GMT

In this day and age, creating presentations with desktop tools like LibreOffice Impression feels somewhat old school. Not only that, but the full-blown applications are overkill in most situations, especially if you prefer to keep your presentation simple and free from all the fluff like fancy transitions and flashy graphics. In this case, Slidifier may be a much better tool for the job. This web-based application allows you to create and run presentations using a browser, which means that you can work on your slides from any machine. More importantly, Slidifer uses a subset of the Markdown markup to create and format slides, which dramatically simplifies the otherwise daunting task of...