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

gpg –output doc.gpg –encrypt –recipient [email protected] 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.

A quick tip to get the dust out of our blog 🙂

If you hear the fan of your computer going way up, most likely that was because some application or process is using too much CPU. Find out which one and terminate it by:

1. Open the terminal

2. Run “top”

3. Press “k” and the number on “pid” column of the process which appears on the top of the list.

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 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.

One of the “I thought it would never come” moments in the open source software industry would be audio and video support in Pidgin. Now it is here! Almost… Windows is not yet supported.

With the release of Pidgin 2.6.1. audio and video is finally supported in the xmpp protocol (used by GTalk). I have to say I haven’t tried it yet since my default IM client is now Empathy (already having audio and video support), which will be the default multi-protocol IM client for the Ubuntu 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:

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.

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.

For quite a while now OpenOffice has been promising the ability to import and edit PDF files. Although not released with the program itself, you can grab the Sun PDF Import extension to do just that.

This extension is in beta and is available multi-platform for Windows, Linux and MacOS X systems.

Tests that I ran were pretty good. The text in the PDF file is imported well and in a way I could edit the text, font settings and images. There was a small problem in that the document that was shown to me had colors inverted (black background with white font). But, don’t ask me why, the imported file actually contained 2 layers. Deleting the one on top will show you the layer with correct colors and fully editable.

The last time there was an Android upgrade, I had to wait over 1 month to get mine. Fortunately this time it appears Europe had Android 1.5 launch date before users in the U.S. This is a much expected release because of the extensive list of new features.

Without further delay, here is the tour of what is new in Android Cupcake.