Mirror Android Notifications on Linux Desktop with LinConnect

Jan 22, 2014 GMT

Want to receive notifications from an Android device directly on your Linux desktop? LinConnect lets you easily add this functionality to any machine, as long as it's on the same wireless network as the Android device. LinConnect consists of two parts: the service that runs on the Linux desktop and the Android client app. The server component is written in Python, and it has only a few dependencies. If you happen to use Ubuntu, you can deploy and run the LinConnect server using the following command: wget --quiet https://raw.github.com/hauckwill/linconnect-server/master/LinConnectServer/install.sh; \ chmod +x install.sh; \ ./install.shOn other Linux distributions, you can deploy the...

Generate EPUB Ebooks with ePub-Boilerplate

Jan 21, 2014 GMT

If you plan to publish your next opus magnum as an EPUB ebook, you don't have to start from scratch. Instead, you can use ePub-Boilerplate. This bundle comes with a ready-made ebook template and a script that generates an EPUB file and validates it. Using ePub-Boilerplate is easy. Grab its latest version from the project's repository using the git clone git@github.com:javierarce/epub-boilerplate.git command. You'll find the ebook template in the book directory, and you can edit template files to your heart's content. Once you're done editing, use the ./publish book command to generate an ebook in the EPUB format. It's that simple.While using ePub-Boilerplate requires some manual work,...

More Fun with KDE Service Menus

Jan 17, 2014 GMT

Using the service menus feature in KDE, you can add all kinds of useful commands to the Actions entry of the context menu. The previous post demonstrated how you can add Déjà Dup-related commands to restore missing files and revert a file to a previous version. Of course, you can put the service menus feature to other clever uses, too. For example, I usually resize photos before publishing them on the web using the convert tool in ImageMagick. But instead of switching to terminal and running the convert foo.jpg -resize 1600x1600> foo.jpg command manually every time I need to shrink a photo, I created a service menu that allows me to quickly resize images from the convenience of the...

Integrate Déjà Dup with Dolphin

Jan 14, 2014 GMT

If you happen to use the excellent Déjà Dup backup tool on KDE, you'll appreciate a simple hack by Pascal d'Hermilly that integrates the utility into the Dolphin file manager. Using a simple technique, you can add two commands to the Actions context menu which can be used to revert a specific file to an earlier version and restore missing files in a directory. To add the latter command, create the dejadup_restore_missing.desktop file in the ~/.kde4/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus directory (if the ServiceMenus folder doesn't exist, add it manually). Open the file in a text editor and add the following service menu definition to it: [Desktop...

Mobiwiki: Simple Mobile-Friendly Wiki

Dec 30, 2013 GMT

As the name suggests, Mobiwiki is a mobile-friendly wiki engine that works equally well on large and small screens. But this is not the only thing that makes this little wiki stand out from the crowd. Mobiwiki strikes a perfect balance between functionality and ease of use. Installing Mobiwiki is a matter of copying a handful of files to your server, so you can have a wiki up and running literally in a matter of minutes. Mobiwiki uses its own simple markup dialect for formatting text. In addition to that, the wiki supports hashtags. When you prepend a hashtag to a word on a wiki page, Mobiwiki turns this word into a hyperlink which returns a list of all wiki pages containing the hashtag....

GNURoot: Linux on Android, No Root Required

Dec 27, 2013 GMT

Installing Linux on Android usually requires rooting your device first. If that's not an option for you, then the GNURoot app is right up your alley. Despite its name, GNURoot doesn't require root access in order to run. Better still, the app greatly simplifies the entire process of getting Linux up and running on an Android device. To deploy Linux using GNURoot, you need to grab a helper app for a specific Linux distribution. For example, if you want to deploy Debian, you need to download the GNURoot Wheezy app. There are also helper apps for the Aboriginal, Gentoo, and Fedora Linux distributions. Next, install and run GNURoot, then press...

Spigot: The Simplest RSS Reader

Dec 25, 2013 GMT

To call Spigot simple would be an understatement. Indeed, this tiny web app is stripped of all creature comforts we take for granted in most web-based RSS aggregators. There are no tools for organizing and managing RSS feeds, the app lacks sharing capabilities, and the main interface is just a single page with a list of RSS snippets. In short, Spigot is as minimal as it gets. But that doesn't mean it's useless. It can come in handy when you want to keep track of a few RSS feeds without loading a full-blown RSS aggregator. Deploying Spigot on a server is so easy that you can probably do this with your eyes closed. Grab the latest release of...