Showing headlines posted by mcasperson

Ah, the humble task list. For such a simple concept, Google has made it surprisingly difficult to use their task list service. You can pull it up in Gmail, and add it as a widget in iGoogle, but there doesn't seem to be a standard way to use the task list on it's own. Even Android users have been left out in the cold with no kind of official task list widget or app. Thankfully there are at least two ways to get access to more fully featured, stand alone Google Tasks lists.

Hi - my name is Matthew, and I am a copy-and-paste addict. I have no idea how I would use a PC without a clipboard, and when I was on Windows Clipmate was one of my favorite utilities. I have tried over the years to find open source alternatives, but nothing has come close. One script that I did come across recently allows you to copy the contents of files selected in the Nautilus Gnome file browser to the clipboard. This is great for copying things like code snippets and customized email signatures for those applications that don't natively offer that functionality.

HTTPS Everywhere is an initiative by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that boosts the security of Firefox with a clever plugin that will automatically encrypt your communications with a number of web services that support HTTPS. This provides an automated way to move users from the insecure HTTP protocol, which is the default for many web sites (like Google and Facebook), even though they may also support HTTPS. I personally applaud the initiative on a technical level, and if I was a Firefox user, I would install the extension in a heart beat. But, on a fundamental level, the extension will fail to make any real improvement in the security of the web for one simple reason – users are the biggest weakness in any security system, and there is no patch for users.

There are a lot of desktop background switchers available, but Gnome 3 has changed it's interface just enough to stop most of them from working. But a little project from Dhananjay Sathe provides a fairly easy way to setup a Gnome 3 desktop background slideshow.

HTML5 and Flash have been used to great effect in recreating traditional desktop apps that can be run through your web browser. Google is so confident that web apps can replace your desktop apps that it has released the ChromeOS, which is not much more than the Chrome web browser presented as a desktop operating system.

Firefox has long supported running web apps in a kind of desktop mode through projects like Prism, WebRunner and Chromeless. But a lot of these projects are either dead, in their early stages, or require a lot of mucking around to get running.

The good news is that it is quite easy to launch your favourite web apps in a chromeless Firefox 4/5 window with just a few simple steps.

So, given that the vast majority of users don't actually use an OS as anything more than a launchpad for their word processors, IM clients, games and web browsers, why has Linux failed to make any real impression in the desktop OS space? The problem, in a nut shell, is that the word processors, IM clients and games they use in Windows don't run in Linux. Linux has failed on the desktop because it can't be used to launch the applications everyday users are familiar with (and I don't count Wine or its various commercial incarnations as suitable for everyday users). This is where technologies like Flash, HTML5 and ChromeOS and GeckoOS, and to a lesser extent the variety of tablets that are available today, are starting to level the playing field.

So, you want to pimp up your Gnome 3 desktop? The good news is that Gnome 3 is incredibly customizable. The appearance of the icons, mouse pointers, window decorations and the Gnome 3 Shell itself can all be altered to suit your tastes, and web sites like Deviant Art have a huge range of themes to choose from. The bad news is that customizing Gnome 3 is not really a point and click affair. While every element can be customized, generally these are customized separately, and it can be confusing. What I will show you is what tools you need to customize the various aspects of Gnome 3.

Adobe has just released a beta of Flash Player 11, which includes native 64 bit clients. This is big news for Linux users, who are easily some of the most enthuastic adopters of 64 bit operating systems, and who may have been feeling a little left out after Adobe dumped AIR for Linux.

Tribler is one of the more innovative BitTorrent clients available today. Tribler is developed at the Delft University of Technology and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and has introduced a number of impressive features such as truly decentralized BitTorrent downloading, and more recently algorithm changes that improve download speeds.

Tribler provides installation packages for Windows, MacOS and Ubuntu, as well as the source code which can be used on other Linux distributions.

One of the cool features of Screenlets is the ability to display widgets from a wide range of tools, including Google Gadgets. With its simple conversion feature, Screenlets allows you to easily place Google Gadgets on your Gnome 3 desktop. The following instructions show you how this can be done.

Screenlets provides a huge variety of desktop widgets, including support for Superkaramba themes and Google Gedgets (through a converter). The project supplies a convenient package for Ubuntu users, but it appears that there is no RPM for Fedora users. But, with a few simple commands, it is possible to get screenlets up and running in Fedora 15.

Linux Mint represented my return to Linux. It was the first distribution I tried that "just worked", and since that day I have not had Windows installed on any of my personal PCs. I have, however, jumped between a few different Linux distributions, and have recently settled on Fedora 15. I found myself installing Linux Mint once again while resurecting some old Dell laptops. As it turns out, Fedora 15 has issues installing on PCs with 512MB or RAM or less. So I jumped on the Linux Mint website and saw that they had just make a release candidate of their LXDE 11 distribution available.

Chances are, if you are installing Android onto a desktop system, you will want to make use of the higher resolutions that are available, since your desktop probably has a bigger monitor than the average mobile phone or tablet. Android is quite flexible in the resolutions it offers, and most Android apps can take advantage of higher resolutions.

In a previous post I showed you how to install and configure the Android SDK emulator to boot up quickly. What you may have found out by now is that the emulator is incredibly slow. In fact it is only any good if you have the kind of PC that can render the entire Transformers movie in a few minutes.

If you are just interested in running Android applications on your desktop PC, a project called Android x86 provides a copy of the Android operating system compiled for x86 processors. The latest release is Android 2.2, which is a little bit behind Honeycomb (Android 3), but is still capable of running almost all Android applications.

I was interested in using rollApp for two reasons. First, it seems to provide a neat way to access those few Windows only applications that Linux users occasionally need access to. Although the functionality to upload an application and make it available through the rollApp infrastructure is not currently available, it is going to be a large part of the attraction of the service. Second, I wanted to be able to access my cloud based files, such as those stored on Dropbox, without having to sync my files on every device I use.

Almost any IT related job requires interacting with an operating system at some point, and between them Windows and RedHat Linux cover a large portion of the market. Obviously your choice of certification will depend largely on the equipment you are working with, but with that disclaimer aside, which certification is should you be most proud of?

One of the great things about Android is the fact that anyone is free to develop applications for the platform. Google provide Android SDKs for Windows, Linux and MacOS, and part of the SDK is an emulator that lets you run the latest Android operating system from your PC desktop. The aim here is obvisouly to allow developers to test their applications without having to swap to an actual Android device, but it can also be used to run your favourite Android based applications alongside your traditional desktop apps.

Where cloud storage fails is when you just need to get access to one or two files, and your local application does not have any functionality for accessing files stored online. I find myself in this situation all the time with a few OpenOffice documents that are synced with a Dropbox account, but the Dropbox account itself is not synced with all the devices I use. Editing files in this siutation is a case of logging into Dropbox, downloading the file, making some changes, and uploading it again. It's a tedious process. This is where the Ooo2gd (which stands for OpenOffice.org 2 Google Docs) extension comes in handy.

Mozilla recently made headlines by saying (in no uncertain terms) that they would not be providing security fixes for the recently released Firefox version 4. This has caused some concern in the enterprise, who are no doubt aware (thanks to the recent activity of Lulz Security and Anonymous) that security is not something that can be taken lightly. Microsoft also took the opportunity to remind system administrators and CIOs that IE will be supported for many years to come.

"System Tray" icons were a great idea in Windows 95, but over the years the concept has been abused. It's not uncommon to get a new Windows PC with a dozen system tray icons, usually serving no purpose other than to advertise the existance of the application to which the icon belongs. Linux machines are not quite as bad, but this hasn't stopped the designers of Gnome 3 from hiding these icons in a hidden bottom bar that appears only when you move the mouse to the bottom of the screen. If you still prefer to have these icons on the screen (and lets face it, the Gnome 3 top bar is mostly empty space anyway), you can use the icon manager extension to selectively move icons from the bottom bar to the top bar.