Productivity Sauce

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 is much more convenient in use than a dedicated hardware switch on your notebook, as the utility enables and...

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 the boot with SSDs. To disable the service, open the sreadahead.conf file for editing using your preferred text editor: sudo nano /etc/init/sreadahead.confComment then the following line: exec /sbin/sreadahead -t 0Next trick is to add the elevator=noop kernel boot parameter...

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 rarely use more than 15-20GB anyway. The Kingston 64GB SSDNow V series SSD model is available in several versions, including a so-called notebook kit. It's slightly more expensive than the disk itself, but it's well worth a few extra bucks. The notebook kit includes hard disk cloning software (which is, obviously, of no use...

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 applications let you strip the pasted text of formatting, but this just adds one more unnecessary step. The Copy Paste Text extension remedies the situation. Once installed, the extension adds the Copy as Plain Text command to the right-click context menu. When you...

ConnectBot: SSH Client for Android

Nov 23, 2009 GMT

ConnectBot turns your Android device into a powerful tool for accessing and controlling remote Linux machines. Using this SSH client app, you can reboot your Linux server at home or connect to a desktop machine at your office directly from your Android devices when you are on the move. ConnectBot supports all the essential features you would expect from a decent SSH client: tunneling, public-private key authentication, command history, intelligent keyboard and finger shortcuts. It even allows you to create a shortcut to a host on your desktop. Simply put, this is a must-have application for any Linux geek and system...

Extension Watch: Better Bookmarking in OpenOffice.org with VisibleBookmarks

Nov 20, 2009 GMT

Bookmarks can come in handy when working with long and complex documents, but the way this feature works in OpenOffice.org is not particularly intuitive. The bookmarks you add to the document are not visible, and you have to use the Navigator to view the bookmarks and jump to a bookmarked place in the document. The VisibleBookmarks extension offers a simple solution to the problem. Once installed, the extension adds a dedicated toolbar containing a couple of buttons. Press the Visible Bookmarks button, and the tool inserts a note for every bookmark in the document. The note contains the name and the text of the bookmark, which makes it easier to identify bookmarks in the document. As the...

Roll Out Your Own Dropbox Alternative

Nov 19, 2009 GMT

Dropbox is without doubt an extremely useful service, but it has two major drawbacks: it uses proprietary software and -- as with any cloud-based service -- you leave your data at the mercy of a third party. So why not roll out your own solution that replaces Dropbox and runs on your own server? If you like the idea, then the Fak3r blog provides step-by-step instructions on how to set up your own file synchronization server. The main ingredients in Fak3r's recipe are the OpenSSH server, rsync and lsyncd. If the latter sounds familiar to you, it's because it has been covered on the Productivity Sauce blog before. Rolling out a local synchronization server using Fak3r's instruction is...