Here is a simple and quick way for you to encrypt files in Linux:

gpg –output doc.gpg –encrypt –recipient EmailofRecipient@blah.com original_file.doc

Further explained:

• –output (or -o) is the name of the encrypted file
• –recipient (or -r) is the person who will be decrypting the file. If the file is for yourself only, use the email address of your GPG key.

To decrypt:

gpg --output output_file.doc --decrypt doc.gpg

I recently used this to encrypt a sensitive file before placing it on my Dropbox account. Nice safe way to place a private document in the cloud.

Reference, GnuPG manual.

Gwibber, an open source microblogging app for Gnome has now reached version 2.0!

Although at 2.0, the developers are not considering this a stable release yet and not making it available on the stable distribution channels. What I could notice first from the upgrade was the UI from:

to

Which means:

• it is now easier to jump between different accounts (Gwibber supports Identi.ca, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StatusNet, Flickr and more).
• You can easily post to only one account.
• Easy “re-dent” / “re-tweet”.

I’m sure there are more behind the scenes improvements but so far I haven’t seen any list. For now, the upgrade was worthwhile.

If you’re trying to recover deleted files or files in a corrupted partition, you might want to give Magic Rescue a try. With this command-line tool you will basically be looking for specific file types (searching by their extension). So, for a massive file recovery task, it will not be a good approach.

The program uses what it calls “recipes” as the instruction of which files to look for and how to do so. On a standard installation of Magic Rescue on my Ubuntu 9.04 distro, I got the following recipes (located at /usr/share/magicrescue/recipes) :

• avi
• elf
• gimp-xcf
• gzip
• jpeg-jfif
• mp3-id3v2
• perl
• zip
• canon-cr2
• flac
• gpl
• jpeg-exif
• mp3-id3v1
• msoffice
• png

If you’d like you can write your own recipe, the man page will instruct you how to do so.

To start looking for files, make sure you create an output directory and than execute:

magicrescue -r [name of recipe] -d [output directory] [DEVICE PATH, eg /dev/sda]

*more options and parameters are available, the above are the mandatory ones.

I used it testing .avi extensions and it worked pretty well to recover some files I had deleted even a long time ago.

If you want to run a WebKit web browser with no strings attached (unlike Safari and Google Chrome), Arora is surely worth a try.

First plus is that it runs on Linux, Windows and MacOS X. It is fast, has private browsing and looks like it has some plug-in support. Another good news is the announcement Kubuntu will carry Arora as its default browser in the 9.10 release.

Not long ago I was working with some .po files and needed a nice and simple diff program to merge 2 files. First I tried the multi-purposed text editor vim.

Using vim as a diff and merge tool:

with Andrej’s article I found some nice tips & tricks and the Vim manual for diff tasks. Some useful commands,

• “vim -o one.txt two.txt three.txt” (for horizontal split), “vim -O one.txt two.txt three.txt ” (for vertical split)
• go to the next diff point   ” ]c “; go to previous diff point “ [c “
• merge to original “do“, merge from original “dp“.

The window you’ll be looking at will look something like this:

Where text highlighted red will display text which doesn’t match from the files being compared.

Another tool I found was Meld. This program was incredibly simple to use and visually simple to work with.

Using Meld Diff Viewer:

• open the files (or directories) which you’d like to compare;
• you will visually see where on the original file the text is at on the other file(s) being compared. Specially useful if the text in the files you’re comparing are in completely separate lines;
• clicking on arrows between the files being compared, the text will go to or from the original file.

Conclusion:

if you’re working on the command line, vim will do the job quite nicely but can be troublesome to inform you if text in both files are the same but spaced out in different line numbers. On the other hand, Meld was the tool I used for the task since there was basically no learning curve to get started and it displayed very well differences and matches in the file even if text were separated by dozens of line between both files I was comparing.

Gnash, the freedom alternative to Adobe Flash Player now supports displaying YouTube movies!

The to-do list for Gnash is still pretty large until we’re all freely able to browse the web without the Adobe plug-in. But, at least this is some major good news I found out today.

Now let’s hope html5 gives us more goodies and web developer adopters to make Adboe Flash Player even less needed.

Update: I was hoping I could use Gnash completely now but unfortunately a lot of websites are still not functioning well with it (such as Google Analytics) so I had to remove it.

Although it has been a round for quite some time, I’m not a coder so my experience with text editors and IDEs is very limited. To give you an example, I’ve been using on the command line the good-ol’ simple nano. But, since I’m starting to need a bit more powerful features, my search began for a more powerful program.

Emacs was my first try since it has been highly rated and praised. For me, there was a bit of a learning curve for the simple operations of navigating through a file (keyboard shortcuts are awesome) but nothing overly complicated and there is a nice tour accessible when you open the program.

My usage so far has been to compare and diff a file, but soon I’ll also encounter tasks such as merge and simple code debugging. Again, I’m not a coder so this tool right now might be an overkill but who knows in the future… better get myself familiar from the start with a nice program than having to learn again something new later.

For those who like ebooks, Calibre is a great program that was created to manage pretty much any aspect of your reading files.

The list of features is pretty extensive:

• convert files from and to epub, mobi, LRF and supports input of several other formats including PDF, html, odt, rtf amongst others;
• syncs to mobile reader devices (seems to work well with the iPhone/Stanza and the Kindle);
• convert a news feed to an ebook;
• scans your computer to check for all supported ebook formats so you can keep them organized, download cover art and meta data;
• runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS X.

At the present moment the app is on version 0.5.3 and seems to be under heavy development. For me, file conversion from PDF to epub format went without any hitches and I was finally able to organize my ebook library under one program.

Finally a SIP/VoIP program for the Android OS!

Sipdroid is a great GPL licensed program that allows you to make and receive SIP and make VoIP from your mobile. The app is incredibly simple to use, which just requires you to enter your SIP credentials (server, login and password).

Once it is on, you will see a little green bubble on the status bar indicating that you’re online. After that, just enter the phone number you’d like or use the phone numbers on your contact list, remembering to enter the country code.

The only detriment for now is that it connects only through wifi, so no 3G data connections while you’re out-and-about.

Doing a basic screencast in Linux is pretty easy. The package recordMyDesktop can be found easily on the repository of many Linux distros (including Ubuntu 9.04 that I use).

With this package you’re actually getting the backend recordMyDesktop which is written in C and the frontend developed in Python (gtk-recordMyDesktop or qt-recordMyDesktop).

The feature list is simple but that is all I needed for a quick screencast demo I had to prepare this afternoon:

• record the entire screen or just a specific window;
• record audio (with channel and frequency settings);
• adjust fps;
• include mouse pointer, “follow the mouse” recording, include window decoration (or not), and tooltips.

The closing added bonus, it records directly in theora / vorbis!

Recording is done with a simple click on the “record” button and than on the panel you’ll see an icon where you can quickly pause, resume and stop the recording. Easy and simple.