Tech Tips

Switching Monitor Profiles

It's funny, when your home office is your couch, you tend to forget how nice it can be when you dock a laptop and have all the extra screen real estate a monitor brings. For many years, I left my work laptop docked at work, and when I worked from home, I just VPNed in with a personal laptop.

Non-Linux FOSS: Launchy!

With Unity's method for launching and finding programs and applications, and OS X's spotlight tool becoming the new way to launch programs, the entire way we think about launching programs is changing. Although I still like to have a few icon shortcuts on my task bar, many folks prefer a quick keystroke to bring up Gnome-Do, or Unity's launcher, or even OS X's spotlight.

Dude, Where's My Car?

When my family moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, last year, one of the biggest adjustments was dealing with city parking. While we usually remember what side of the mall we parked on, there was a time downtown that I couldn't remember what parking garage we used, much less what level or spot.

Own Your Data with OwnCloud

I love Dropbox. I really do. With a Google AdWords campaign, and $50 or so, I was able to max out my free storage. That means I have around 24GB of free Dropbox storage to fiddle with. Granted, that's a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, 24GB isn't very much space.

Surf Safely with sshuttle

In past articles, I've explained how to set up a SOCKS proxy with SSH. I've demonstrated how to tunnel traffic with SSH. I've even shown how to circumvent a company firewall with SSH. I've never been able to use SSH completely as a VPN, however, and that's always bummed me out—until I discovered sshuttle.

Pitch Perfect Penguins

My daughters love the movie Pitch Perfect. I suspect our XBMC has played it more than 100 times, and I'm not exaggerating. Whether or not you enjoy young-adult movies about singing competitions and cartoon-like projectile vomiting, I'll admit it's a pretty fun movie.

Non-Linux FOSS: Notepad++ Is Better Better

If anyone understands the importance of a good text editor, it's a Linux user stuck on Windows. Sure, Microsoft supplies Notepad and Wordpad, but neither really feels like the powerful sort of text editor a Linux user expects. Enter Notepad++.

The Google Giveth

And the Google taketh away. So it is with Google Reader. A while back, Google discontinued its Google Wave product, because it never gained traction as a social-media platform. This surprised approximately zero people. More recently, Google announced it would be closing Google Reader on July 1, 2013. Far more people were surprised, myself included.

Non-Linux FOSS: Classic Shell

Even those of us on the Linux side of the fence have been watching Microsoft's Windows 8 roll-out—albeit for us, it has been with morbid fascination. Granted, we're not without our drastic changes (ahem, Unity), but the new interface Microsoft has chosen for version 8 is seemingly unusable for most people. The iconic Start menu has been taken away without a clear replacement.

Android Candy: MightyText, Mighty Awesome

I'll admit, I've always been impressed with Apple's iMessage program. With its integration into texting, it seamlessly combines instant messaging and SMS into a single communication stream. Whether on an iPhone, iPod, iPad or Macintosh, the messages can be seen and sent to other Apple devices.

Sleep as Android

I sleep poorly. In fact, insomnia has plagued me for years. As it turns out, even when I think I'm sleeping well, I'm usually not. There's nothing worse than a shoddy night's sleep followed by an abrupt alarm going off when you've finally settled into a deep slumber. Enter: Sleep as Android.

Non-Linux FOSS: libnotify, OS X Style

One of the things I dislike about using Irssi in a terminal window on OS X is that I often miss the screen flash when someone mentions my name in IRC. With some fancy SSH tunneling (maybe more on that some other issue) and a really cool pop-up notification tool, if someone mentions my name, I can't miss it.

Weechat, Irssi's Little Brother

It may not be fair to call Weechat the little brother of Irssi, but in my short introduction to it, that's what it felt like. If Weechat didn't seem quite as powerful as Irssi to me, I definitely can say that it is better-looking out of the box. So, little brother has one thing going for him!

One Tail Just Isn't Enough

Although it's difficult for me to look at this piece's title and not think of mutant felines, it doesn't make the statement any less true. If you've ever used the tail command on log files, you'll instantly appreciate multitail. My friend (and LJ reader) Nick Danger introduced me to multitail, and I can't believe how useful it is.

Add More Fruit to Your Raspberry Pi!

Since this month was our Raspberry Pi issue, I did some research on "what folks do with their Raspberry Pi". I sent queries out via Twitter, Facebook, the Linux Journal Web site and even the #linuxjournal IRC room. When it comes to doing extra-geeky projects with the RPi, every person I spoke with mentioned buying parts from Adafruit.

Non-Linux FOSS: Seashore

As Linux users, we tend to take programs like GIMP for granted. Thankfully, as of version 2.8.2, GIMP is available as a native application for OS X! Because everyone reading this most likely is familiar with how awesome GIMP is for photo editing, it's worth mentioning there is another open-source photo-editing application for OS X named Seashore.

When a Shell Isn't Enough

Not long ago, I wrote about how awesome it is to have shell access on a remote server. I still hold to that notion, but I received a lot of feedback on the issue.

Shell Game

Many of the cool things in Linux Journal require the use of the command line. For us Linux users, that's generally not a big deal, because we have a terminal window readily available. Some of the time, however, it's helpful to have a shell account on an Internet host somewhere.

Crashplan, the Only Reason I Install Java

I'm the sort of person who doesn't like to install Java. I actually don't like to install Flash either, but it's still tough to survive browsing the Internet without Flash installed. There is one program that makes me break my own rules, however, and that's Crashplan.

Non-Linux FOSS: Dive Deep with Wireshark

Before you say anything, yes, I know Wireshark is available for Linux. This time, however, Windows and OS X users get to play too. Wireshark is an open-source network analyzation tool that is really an amazing tool for troubleshooting a network.