Monitoring Notebook Battery with IBAM
Dec 08, 2009 GMT
While KDE, Gnome, and Xfce come with dedicated graphical utilities for monitoring notebook battery, you might still want to use IBAM to keep an eye on the battery parameters directly from the command line. IBAM stands for Intelligent Battery Monitor, and it "uses statistical and adaptive linear methods to provide accurate estimations of minutes of battery left or of the time needed until full recharge." In layman terms, this means that IBAM provides a more accurate estimate of the remaining battery life and charge... more »
Manage Your Schedule with Day Planner
Dec 05, 2009 GMT
If a full-blown calendar application like Evolution of Lightning is overkill for your needs, try Day Planner. This simple yet efficient calendaring utility sports a refreshingly simple interface and it's ridiculously easy to use. To populate Day Planner with events, press the Add a new event button at the bottom of the window. This opens the Add an Event dialog window with the Date field set to the current date. Day Planner supports three types of events: Normal, All day, and Birthday. When you create a... more »
Track Your Missing Notebook with Pombo
Dec 03, 2009 GMT
To recover a lost or stolen notebook, you need all the help you can get -- and this is where Pombo can come in rather handy. The key component of the Pombo solution is a tiny Python script that runs on your notebook. The script runs quietly in the background and collects tracking information such as the IP address and information about all network interfaces as well as information about nearby wireless access points. In addition to that, the script can take a screenshot using the scrot tool and capture a... more »
Disable Touchpad When Typing with syndaemon
Nov 27, 2009 GMT
There is nothing more annoying than accidentally tapping the touchpad on the notebook while typing. This causes the cursor to jump to a random place in the document, and before you know it, you are typing text in the middle of another sentence. Some notebooks allow you to temporary disable the touchpad, but if your mobile companion doesn't have this feature, the syndaemon utility provides a simple yet effective solution to the problem. When activated, the utility disables the touchpad when it detects keyboard activity and enables it as soon as you stop typing. In fact, syndaemon... more »
Three Simple Tweaks for Better SSD Performance
Nov 25, 2009 GMT
As I explained in the previous post, replacing my notebook's hard disk with an SSD significantly improved the overall system performance -- even without any additional tweaking. But there are also a couple of simple tricks that can boost performance even further. The first one is to disable the sreadahead service. The sreadahead tool helps to speed up the boot process with conventional hard disks, but it actually slows... more »
Ubuntu 9.10 on SSD
Nov 24, 2009 GMT
I've been thinking about replacing the hard disk on my production notebook with a solid-state disk (SSD) for quite a while. So when I stumbled upon a good offer on Kingston 64GB SSDNow V series SSD I decided to take the plunge. 64GB is a far cry from the modest by today's standards 160GB hard disk on my notebook. But since I store all my files on a Bubba Two server, I... more »
Better Copy/Paste with Firefox
Nov 23, 2009 GMT
QuoteURLText and Copy Plain Text are not the most advanced Firefox extensions out there, but they sure can save you a lot of time if you do a lot of copying and pasting from Web pages to other documents. As any Firefox user knows, the copy operation grabs not only the selected text fragment but also all the formatting. In most cases, however, all you want is the text itself without all the formatting silliness. Sure, most... more »
