Ah, Vim. Love it or hate it, many developers swear by this powerful, console-based text editor, while others used it once and never want to use it again. Vim has been around since 1991 and shows no signs of fading. I’m even writing this article in Vim. If you’ve used Vim before, you know there’s … Read more
If you have any experience at all using the Linux command line, you’ve no doubt used “grep” to search for strings of text, whether they come from files or from commands. There’s a better way to do so, and it’s called Ack. Ack is a program written in Perl that aims to be a replacement … Read more
A broken link is a killer for any website and it should be eliminated at all cost. The bad thing is, it is easily said than done. If you are running a website with more than a thousand articles and every post contains at least 3 links, how are you able to find out which … Read more
The WINE project has helped many users continue to use some of their favorite Windows programs without the hassle of dual-booting, or losing resources to a virtual machine. Setting up and running WINE isn’t the easiest feat, but fortunately the open source community has produced q4wine, a program to help manage WINE and the excellent … Read more
If you are staring at the screen everyday, I am sure you will want to make the screen comfortable for your eyes. Adjusting the correct brightness is not only essential to protecting your eyes, it also helps to conserve battery power and reduce your electricity bill. In Ubuntu, adjusting the screen brightness is easy, but … Read more
Perl is a great language, though some other programming languages like PHP and Ruby might have stolen a bit of its thunder. While Perl has a reputation for being difficult to read, it’s really not that bad. If you’re comfortable writing shell scripts you should pick it up easily. If you’re on a Linux or … Read more
In Ubuntu, there is a “suspend” button where you can click to put your desktop/laptop to sleep and quickly recover from it later. While “suspending”, the computer will save the existing state to the RAM so it can be quickly restored without having to go through the hard disk. However, this also means that you … Read more
Ubuntu’s package management system, which it owes to its big brother Debian, makes it as simple as it gets to keep your system up to date. Whether through GUI programs or using “apt-get“, constantly impresses me. But there are still instances where you can’t get a particular program in DEB format, or maybe you want … Read more
I recently bought a Kindle Fire HD, and it’s a great way to read books, watch movies, surf the Web and play games. As a Linux fan, I’m also pleased that it runs Android, except the Amazon file transfer software does not run in Linux. You can access the Kindle using Amazon’s software on Mac … Read more
Many, many “productivityists” are followers of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology. Commonly called “GTD,” it aims to teach its users a process by which they can trust a set of tools to handle the “remembering” and “organizing” of their everyday work, leaving their brain free to focus on the things that really matter. The … Read more