Hound Lets You Search for Music with Your Voice -A Competitor for Shazam

 

iOS/Android: From the same team that brought you SoundHound, Hound is a music search app that lets you speak the name of a song or artist aloud to search for it in the SoundHound database. Once it’s found, you can read more about it, listen to a preview, or watch the video.

Unlike the previously mentioned SoundHound, which uses a song’s audio pattern to identify the track playing, Hound allows you to just speak the title or the artist to see songs that match your search. When the app finds the song you’re looking for, you can listen to an audio preview of the track, read more about the song or the artist, or hop over to YouTube to watch the music video.

If your voice search doesn’t work, you can always use the keyword search. Hound is meant to be a song search tool, not so much a music-on-demand app. It does, however, give you an easy way to learn more about any artist you hear about, and preview their music. Hound is free, and available in the iTunes App Store and the Android App Market.

SoundHound

Ref: Alan Henry

TorChat Is an Easy to Use Anonymous and Encrypted Chat Client

 

Windows/Mac: TorChat is an instant messenger client that makes encrypted, anonymous chat and file sharing with your friends incredibly easy. Built on Tor’slocation hiding services nobody will be able to see what you’re doing or who you’re contacting.

While most of us won’t need TorChat too often, it’s bound to come in handy at some point when you need to transmit data or if you’d like to have a conversation with a friend without worrying about anyone sniffing your internet connection. When you sign into TorChat you’ll get an random .onion address that serves as your ID. Exchange this with your friends and you’ll be chatting privately right away. On top of the Windows version linked below you can get an OS X client, Pidgin plugin, and a Portable Java version.

• TorChat | via One Thing Well

Compare SkyDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox

Get A Free Google Website For Your Business & Get Your Business Online

You have your files, photos and documents on your home computer that you would like to access from other locations on different devices. Dropbox has been the de-facto choice for long but that could potentially change as Microsoft and Google have just entered the arena with the launch of Windows Live SkyDrive and Google Drive respectively.

The three services are very similar – you get online storage (you can access your files anywhere) and file synchronization – edit a document on one computer and the changes are propagated to all your other computers almost instantly.

Let’s see how these online drives stack up against each other:

SkyDrive vs Google Drive vs Dropbox

Supported Platforms

Dropbox is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, BlackBerry and Android devices. Windows Live SkyDrive is available for Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Windows Phone devices while Google Drive is currently available for PC, Mac and Android phones /tablets. All services do offer a web mobile version that can help you access your files from the web browser of any mobile phone.

The other important difference is that Dropbox is also available for Windows XP and Linux while SkyDrive is not.

Storage Limits

Dropbox offers 2-3 GB of free online storage storage, Google Drive offers 5 GB while SkyDrive, if you are new, offers 7 GB of storage space.

You can upload files of any size to Dropbox through the desktop client while that limit is 2 GB in the case of SkyDrive. Both SkyDrive and Dropbox let you upload files up to 300 MB from the web browser while that limit is 10 GB in the case of Google Drive.

Storage Plans

If you are running out of storage space on SkyDrive, you can buy an additional 20 GB for about $10 per year or 50 GB for $25 per year. Dropbox Pro offers 50 GB of storage space for $99 per year while Google Drive offers an extra 20 GB for $2.49 per month.

See detailed comparison of pricing plans.

Built-in File Viewers

Both SkyDrive and Dropbox web apps have built-in file viewers for most common file formats including Office documents, PDFs, videos and images. Google Docs supports even more formats – including Photoshop mockups and AutoCAD drawings – and no wonder that you can also view these files in Google Drive without additional software.

Unfortunately, maybe because of licensing issues, none of these drives will stream MP3 songs in the browser – you will to have download the MP3 file locally to play the audio.

File History

Your free Dropbox account will save any file’s history for 30 days meaning if you accidentally delete or change a file, you can easily restore the previous working version for the next 30 days. SkyDrive and Google Drive also store the previous versions of all files though they have not exactly specified how many reversions are preserved.

If you delete a file or folder inside SkyDrive web app, it’s gone forever whereas in the case of Dropbox and Google Drive, the files are moved to the Trash from where they can be easily restored.

Account Security

Since your Google Drive is connected to your Google Account, you can apply 2-step protection and non-authorized user won’t be able to access your online file even if they are aware of your Google username and password. This extra layer of protection is not available to Dropbox and SkyDrive users.

Google Drive and Dropbox also maintain a detailed log of every single change that was made to your files (or account) but this seems to be missing in SkyDrive.

File Search

This is one area where Google Drive has a definite upper hand.

When you search for a file on Dropbox.com, it returns results where the file names matche your search keywords. SkyDrive lets you search the content of documents that are in common Microsoft Office formats. Google Drive goes a step further as it can even read the text content of scanned documents and photographs using OCR. That is, if you have saved a photograph of the whiteboard to your Google Drive account, you should be able find that image by text without having to remember the filename.

Offline Access

The mobile apps of Dropbox and Google Drive let you save any document or file on your mobile for offline use.  Such a facility is not available in the iOS apps of Windows SkyDrive though you can always export the document to another app (like iBooks or Good Reader) from SkyDrive and access it offline.

Selective Sync

If you have multiple computers, all these “online drives” will copy your files across all your machines. Sometimes, you don’t want this to happen and both Dropbox and Google Drive offer you an option to selectively synchronize folders per computer. For instance, you can tell Dropbox not to download your family photographs folder on the work computer.  This saves bandwidth and your hard disk stays light too.

Selective Sync is however missing in SkyDrive.

What I like about Windows SkyDrive

SkyDrive offers plenty of storage space but the best part is that the SkyDrive web app lets you access files and folders of all your other computer right from within your browser. You just need to have SkyDrive on these machines and you can then easily access any of their files from any other computer, anywhere simply using your Windows Live ID.

SkyDrive is an absolute must-have service for Microsoft Office users because it gives you the ability to edit documents in the web browser while preserving all the formatting.

What I like about Google Drive

Google Drive offers the most pleasing interface, the search feature is brilliant and the new grid view lets you quickly browse your stored files visually. You can email any file from your Google Drive account to another user as an email attachment, a useful feature that’s missing in all the other online drives.

If you live in the Google ecosystem and do not have Microsoft Office on your computer, skip SkyDrive and go with Google Drive.

What I like about Dropbox

The basic Dropbox account offers a mere 2 GB of storage space but you can easily increase your account space to 16 GB by referring a couple of friends to Dropbox. Also, you can find tons of apps that make the Dropbox service even more powerful and useful.

Google Drive and Windows Live SkyDrive are extremely promising services but none of them support as many platforms as Dropbox does. The best part about Dropbox is that it just works and it won’t be easy even for Google and Microsoft to build the kind of developer ecosystem that currently exists around Dropbox.

Ref:Digital Inspiration.

Middleman Syncs Virtually Any Device with iTunes on a Mac

Mac only: iPods are great, but if you want to sync your music with another device—like a Sansa Clip or an Android phone—iTunes doesn’t exactly have your back. Middleman is a free service for iTunes that syncs a playlist of your choice with any USB mass storage device.

Android now have apps like previously mentioned iSyncr to sync their devices with iTunes, but those of us using plain ol’ USB drives or other USB-based MP3 players are still left out in the cold. We just want something simple and free to copy our music. Middleman hopes to fill this void. It isn’t the prettiest or the most feature-filled, but it’ll sync your music to nearly any device with little hassle.

Middleman: Sync Any USB Mass-Storage Device with iTunes

Version: 0.2
Released: March 31, 2010
Updated: May 9, 2012
Creator: Whitson Gordon, Updated for Lion by Max Czarnecki
You can still download the old, Snow Leopard-compatible version here.

License: GNU Public License

What it does: Lets you select any playlist from iTunes and sync the tracks contained within to any desired folder on your USB mass-storage device.

Installation: Middleman is a Service that can be launched straight from iTunes. To install it, just mount the DMG, drag the Middleman_temp file to the Library folder in “Macintosh HD”, and double-click on the “Sync selected playlist” file.

As always, we recommend you make sure all your data is backed up before using a new program that moves your files around. We’ve tested this pretty thoroughly, but you never know what could go wrong.

Usage: Middleman requires a bit of initial setup. Due to the nature of iTunes and Middleman, you can only sync one playlist to your device. If you try to sync a second playlist, it’ll delete tracks from the first playlist. So, if you aren’t syncing your entire library, create one master “Sync” playlist with all the tracks you want on your device. My preferred way of creating the master playlist is to create a smart playlist that includes all the playlists I want to sync, but you can do this any way you want.

To sync, mount your device and select your master playlist in iTunes (or, if you’re syncing your whole library, just select “Music”). In the menu bar, go to iTunes -> Services -> Sync Selected Playlist with Middleman. Middleman will prompt you for the folder on your device in which you want to sync your music. You can select any folder you want, including the root folder of your device—it will not delete the contents of the folder you choose; it will put the music in another folder named “Middleman” inside of it. It will use your existing directory structure for artists and albums, so I highly recommend you have the “Keep iTunes Media Folder Organized” box checked under Preferences > Advanced in iTunes.

Middleman will show a dialog that says it is gathering information, which may take a few minutes depending on the size of the playlist you’re syncing (the spinning gear in the menu bar shows that it’s working). When it’s done, your device will begin syncing (you’ll see it all happening in a Terminal window), showing you the progress track-by-track. As always, the first sync takes a while, but subsequent syncs will only transfer new or changed songs (and will remove from the device songs no longer on the master playlist). When it finishes syncing, you may close or quit Terminal and unmount your device.

Note that Middleman doesn’t sync any playlists, just the tracks listed on the playlist you sync. I couldn’t find an easy way, with my knowledge and skill set, to sync the playlists themselves too. For now, you’re best off using something like iTunes Export, which will convert any number of playlists from iTunes to .M3U format and put them on your device if you so choose. Keep in mind you’ll need the tracks on those playlists synced to your device for them to work.

Middleman is a free download for Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard and 10.7 Lion only. Middleman was made in Automator, using a number of Applescripts, and relies heavily on rsync, which is built into OS X. If you would like to view or edit the workflow in Automator, just navigate to ~/Library/Services and double click on the Sync Selected Playlist with Middleman workflow.

Bug reports and feature requests: I’ve thoroughly tested Middleman on my machine and a few others, but it’s had little exercise outside of that. If you find a bug, have a good idea for a new feature, or know a little about Applescript and Automator and have a suggestion/improvement to offer, leave a comment below.

Download Middleman for Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard

Download Middleman for Mac OS 10.7 Lion

 

Ref:LifeHacker

Jailbreaking Your iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad [iOS 5.0.1]

Jailbreaking is a process that changes little by little with each iOS upgrade. Rather than always publishing new guides, we’re simply going to keep this one up to date. If you want to jailbreak your iOS device, you’ve come to the right page.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Although you can jailbreak both A5-based and non-A5-based devices running iOS 5.0.1, the method differs. Be sure to follow the instructions for your device.

Current Untethered Version: iOS 5.0.1
For additional jailbreak options for older versions of iOS, please see the list at the bottom of this page. As this guide is updated, previous versions of the guide will be archived there as well.

Current Tethered Version: iOS 5.0.1
We do not recommend tethered jailbreaking, as it requires you to connect your iDevice to your computer to boot it every time. This is especially bad with new operating system releases, as they tend to freeze up a bit more. You probably don’t want your device freezing up and becoming unusable while you’re out and about, so you really should wait until an untethered jailbreak is available for iOS 5. That said, if you’re jailbreaking for development purposes or carry a laptop with you everywhere, this post will show you can do it.

Not sure if you should jailbreak?
We love jailbreaking our iDevices, but it’s not for everybody. If you’re not sure, you should read both our reasons not to jailbreak and why jailbreaking is awesome.

How to Jailbreak Older (Non-A5-Based) Devices: The Step by Step Process

The video above will show you how the whole process works, both on your computer and your iOS device, but read on for the steps for non-A5-based devices.

1

Before getting started, make sure you are running iOS 5.0.1, as this jailbreak will only work on iOS 5.0.1 and not 5.0.0. If you’re still running 5.0.0, update to 5.0.1. Also, be sure your iDevice does not run on an A5 chip. (This means iPad 2s and iPhone 4S’.) Any earlier device that can run iOS 5.0.1 should work just fine. (This means the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 GSM, iPhone 4 CDMA, iPad 1, iPod touch 3G, and iPod touch 4G.)

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2

Download redsn03 0.9.10b3 for Mac OS X or Windows.

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3

Connect your iDevice to your computer, open up the redsn0w application, and turn off your iDevice.

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4

On the redsn0w application window you’ll see a Jailbreak button. Click it. You’ll be told you’ll need to put your iDevice into DFU mode and to click the Next button when ready. When you are ready, go ahead and click it.

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5

Hold down the power button at the top of your iDevice for three (3) seconds. Next, continue holding down the power button but also hold down the home button for a total of 10 seconds. Finally, let go of the power button but continue holding down the home button for another 15 seconds, or until redsn0w changes screens and tells you it’s exploiting your device for the jailbreak.

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6

Once redsn0w has finished doing its business, it’ll ask you what you want to do for this jailbreak. By default, only Cydia will be checked. Most of the other options are irrelevant, but you might want to check Enable multitouch gestures if you want additional multitouch gestures on your iPhone or iPod touch.

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7

Wait a few minutes for the jailbreak to finish and for your iDevice to reboot. Once it has booted, you’ll see the Cydia icon on your home screen (although it may not be on the first page, so look around). Open it up and you’ll have access to a bunch of jailbreak hacks.

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And you’re done! Launch it and you’re ready to go. Not sure what to do next? Check out our jailbreaking tag page for some ideas.

How to Jailbreak Newer (A5-Based) Devices: The Step by Step Process

The video above will show you how the whole process works, both on your computer and your iOS device, but read on for the steps for A5-based devices.

1

The greenpois0n absinthe method is pretty simple. You just plug in your iPhone or iPad (there’s no need to enter DFU mode or even turn it off), open the absinthe jailbreak app on your Mac or Windows PC, and click the jailbreak button.

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2

Wait for a while. Your device will go into a fake restore session and reboot. When it reboots, DO NOT TOUCH IT. The jailbreak process isn’t over yet. You will be notified on-screen when absinthe has finished its work. It will tell you to find the quote-unquote jailbreak app on one of your home screen pages. The app is not labeled jailbreak, but rather absinthe. Tap that app and it should cause your device to reboot with the jailbreak complete.

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3

If that doesn’t happen, however, just open up the Settings app on your device and flip the VPN toggle switch to on (it’ll be towards the top of your main settings options). You’ll receive an error, which you need to dismiss, and then after a few seconds your device will reboot.

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Once you’re done jailbreaking, you’ll now find Cydia on one of your home screen pages. Open it up and start installing whatever you want. Not sure what to install first? Check out our jailbreaking tag page for some ideas.

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Jailbreaking Options for Older iOS Devices

• Jailbreak for iOS 4.3.3 (the faster, easier, JailbreakMe Method)
• Jailbreak for iOS 4.3.3 (the old-fashioned, redsn0w method)
• Jailbreak for iOS 4.3.2
• Jailbreak for iOS 4.3.1
• Jailbreak for iOS 4.2.1
• Jailbreak for Apple TV 2G
• Jailbreak for iOS 4.1
• Jailbreak for iOS 4.0 and 4.0.1
• Jailbreak for iOS 3.1.3 and 3.1.5
• Jailbreak for iOS 3.1.2
• Jailbreak for iOS 2.2.1
• Jailbreak for iOS 1.1.4

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Turnkey: Build LAMP Server in Under 10 Minutes

Many of us have wanted to work on our own homemade Linux Web server, but struggled due to the lack of appropriate versions, and the knowledge to set up PHP support or even  dynamic DNS. Well, fear no more; it is no longer rocket science to set up a LAMP stack at your home or office, thanks to virtual appliances from Turnkey Linux. In this article, I walk you through a simple, effective way to set up your own LAMP virtual server, using a preconfigured ISO.

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Turnkey Linux is a virtual appliance library that integrates and polishes the very best open source software into ready-to-use solutions. Each virtual appliance is optimised for ease of use, and can be deployed in just a few minutes on bare metal, in a virtual machine, or on the cloud.

Before we get into setting up our own LAMP Virtual Server using a preconfigured ISO, let us evaluate our options.

Prerequisites

• Virtual Machine software: VMWare Player or Oracle VirtualBox? For the purposes of this article, we will use the free VMWare Player 3, which you can download from here.
• Download the LAMP server ISO image from Turnkey’s website.
• Once the above ISO has been downloaded, place it on your desktop or home directory.
• A host operating system — Linux, Windows, BSDs or whatever. Unfortunately, I’m using a Windows host as I write this article, since I don’t currently have any Linux host at my disposal.

Installing into a VM

1. Launch VMWare Player.
2. Click the Create a New Virtual Machine option.
3. You will now be presented with the New Virtual Machine Wizard, as shown in Figure 1, asking for the install source (your optical drive, or an ISO image), or whether you would like to install the OS later. Choose the last option, and click Next.Figure 1: New Virtual Machine Wizard
4. In the Guest Operating System screen (see Figure 2), choose Linux, and Ubuntu, and click Next.Figure 2: Choosing a Guest Operating System
5. Give the VM a name, and click Next.
6. Now, you need to allocate disk space. As you can see in Figure 3, I have chosen 8 GB; feel free to choose whatever is appropriate for your environment, and click Next.Figure 3: Disk Configuration
7. In the final screen of the wizard (Figure 4), click Customize Hardware.Figure 4: Final screen
8. We need to set up our Turnkey LAMP ISO as the media to boot from (see Figure 5). Click New CD/DVD, and in the Connection section, choose Use ISO image file; click Browse and navigate to the location of the Turnkey Linux LAMP ISO, and choose it.Figure 5: Set up an ISO image location
9. Now, click OK twice, and click Play Virtual Machine.
10. At the Turnkey Linux bootloader screen (see Figure 6), choose Install to Hard disk and hit Enter.Figure 6: Install to hard disk –- LAMP Stack Boot splash
11. Follow the on-screen instructions, and choose to install with auto-partitioning. Choose the second option that shows up, Guided Partitioning — Use Entire Disk.
12. When it comes to choosing the GRUB installer, choose Yes.
13. When the installation is done, click Yes to reboot.
14. Enter the passwords for the root and mysql users, when prompted.
15. The Backup and Migration utility (TKLBAM) doesn’t require setting up an Amazon EC2 instance. It works with local installations just as well. However, if you wish to store your backup data on Amazon, you need to subscribe to Amazon’s cloud storage service. Click Skip for the time being…
16. You will now be prompted to install security updates; please choose Install, as it is a one-time operation. Once the updates have been applied, you should see a screen like the one shown in Figure 7.Figure 7: TKL LAMP Appliance Services Console

Checking it out

Do a test connection to the appliance by visiting the IP address mentioned in the console, which may differ for your installation. Figures 8 and 9 show the server home page and Apache service status.

Figure 8: Turnkey Linux LAMP home page

Figure 9: Apache Web server status

To make things even more user-friendly, Turnkey Linux has included the famous Webmin (Web-based server administration for managing Linux servers) as part of this appliance. To access the Web Console, from the home page click the Webmin icon. You will be asked to accept the security settings; do so and you will be taken to the Webmin login page.Log in as root, with the password you set during the first boot. The Webmin home page is shown in Figure 10.

Figure 10: Webmin home page

Now wasn’t that a breeze? You now have your personal LAMP stack up and running, ready to serve your websites…
I hope you found this tutorial informative and feel free to share your feedback.

 

ref: Anil Mahadev

Backups and More with rsync

Learn how to use this powerful utility that almost all experts use in their day-to-day work, to perform tasks like back-ups, and much more.

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The rsync utility can be used cross-platform—Linux, Mac OS X and Windows (with Cygwin, of course) — and, in combination with cron and SSH, it can easily be scripted. This makes it one of the essential utilities in one’s toolkit, even if not planning to use it for backups. Another advantage is that it is bundled with almost all major Linux distributions today.

The killer feature, really, is differential backups — rsync, with its unique algorithm, allows you to transfer only the changes made in a file/directory tree, instead of re-transferring all data. This is very beneficial when synchronising large files or directory trees with gigabytes of data. rsync only transfers changed portions, and applies the changes to the file/directory tree copy on the other system, somewhat like the patch utility. It can even be used to synchronise files locally (on the same system), if you want to make backups on the local machine itself (say, to a different drive, like a USB drive). Overall, it is a simple, easy and efficient solution, where we don’t even need to install any complicated backup software.

Setting up and configuring

Normally, rsync can directly be used by specifying source and destination directories, but we usually set it up in daemon mode (an “rsync server”) at one end, so that it can receive requests for synchronisation. It can be set up in one-way or two-way synchronisation methods, as a standalone daemon configuration or as inetd configuration. The type of configuration used depends on the amount of traffic that our daemon is going to receive.

For significant traffic throughout the day, it is better to have a standalone daemon, otherwise the inetd configuration will do. Also, it is obvious that for two-way synchronisation, we have to run rsync in daemon mode at both ends. To configure rsync in daemon mode, modify the /etc/rsyncd.conf file as follows:

motd file = /etc/rsyncd.motd log file = /var/log/rsyncd.log pid file = /var/run/rsyncd.pid lock file = /var/run/rsync.lock     [path_1]     path = /directories/here     comment = something to comment     uid = nobody     gid = nobody     auth users = username     secrets file = /etc/rsyncd.scrt

As you can see, this file has two sections — global parameters and path-specific settings. All file specifications like motd (message of the day) file, log file, pid file, lock file, etc., come under global specifications, while parameters that follow the [path_1] tag are path-specific settings
([path_1] is the name of that particular path). More than one such path can be set up in a configuration file. Though I have only specified relevant and important settings here, you can take a look at the man page if you want a complete list of path-specific and global configuration parameters.

However, here is a brief explanation of some of them:

Parameter	Explanation
path	The physical directory in the filesystem to be made available
uid	The user that should execute the actual transfer process
gid	The group name or ID that accompanies the uid parameter
auth users	The names of users, as specified in the secrets file, that are allowed to connect to this path. These do not refer to the actual users of the system.
secrets file	The name of the secrets file, specifying the user names and passwords that are asked on connection to the client

Now that rsync has been configured on the server, you can start the stand-alone daemon with the command: rsync --daemon.

rsync client

The rsync server can now be used from the client with the following command:

rsync -avz host::path_1 /directory/at/destination

This command will copy all files from the remote module named path_1 to the local destination folder on the client. This type of command is known as a “pull” command, while one with the remote path as destination is known as a “push” command. This will make it prompt for the password configured for the respective module, which can be bypassed by using the --password-file option (for use in scripts).

Now, let’s look at another example, of a local copy of files, with some of the optional switches:

rsync --verbose --progress --stats --compress --recursive --times --perms \ --links --delete --exclude *.pdf /home/user/Folder1/ /home/user/Folder2

Some of the options like --verbose, --progress and stats are self-explanatory. Compression (--compress) is one of the features rsync provides to speed up data transfers, which is actually useful when synchronising with remote hosts. The next few options specify the following:

• --recursive — to recursively copy all sub-folders;
• --times — to maintain previous timestamps
• --perms — to keep the permissions intact
• --links — to copy symbolic links as links (not to de-reference)

There are a number of other choices that you can use, like --copy-links and --safe-links — the first copies the linked directories/files instead of the links themselves, while the second altogether avoids links pointing outside the tree.

The --delete option specifies that one wants to delete (earlier copied) files in the destination folder, if they have been deleted in the source directory since the previous synchronisation. Finally, --exclude *.pdf prevents all PDF files from being copied.

Note: The presence or absence of the trailing slash in the source/destination path is very important; it makes quite a difference to how files are copied. In the above command, the trailing slash in the source, /home/user/Folder1/ means that the contents (files and sub-folders) inside Folder1 are to be copied to the destination folder. Without the trailing slash, rsync first creates the Folder1 folder at the destination, and then copies Folder1‘s contents into that new folder. Always keep this in mind, else you can end up with quite a mess to sort out if you’re backing up two or three project folders, like (in /home/ankit/Projects) projA, projB, projC. Or if, for example, your rsync commands are as follows:

rsync --recursive --delete /home/ankit/Projects/projA/ /media/BACKUP/currentprojects rsync --recursive --delete /home/ankit/Projects/projB/ /media/BACKUP/currentprojects rsync --recursive --delete /home/ankit/Projects/projC /media/BACKUP/currentprojects

Now, in the currentprojects folder on the backup drive, you will have a folder projC, containing that project’s files — but the files and sub-folders from the projA and projB folders will be mixed together in the currentprojects folder, not inside individual projA and projB folders… and this will be because you wrongly used the trailing slash for those folders. If you
have to recover files from this backup, imagine the mess and confusion, and the effort required to sort things out!

GUI tools

There are a number of GUI tools available for rsync, most of which obviously cannot match the flexibility provided by the command-line itself. Still, some of the tools, like Grsync and Gadmin-Rsync, do a good job of implementing the basic functionality. Another really good application based on the rsync, cron and diff commands is Back in Time, which resembles the Time Machine feature of Apple’s Mac OS. It provides more sophisticated features, and an interface understandable even by non-geeks.

The Interface for Grsync

The GNOME view for Back In Time Application

In conclusion, we can say that rsync is a simple, yet really powerful application, which when used with tools like cron can provide flexibility and performance comparable with complex and even enterprise back-up tools.

Mobile Phones To Get Cheaper.

Saturday, March 17, 2012: Telecom users have some goods news coming from the Budget.

Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, while presenting Union Budget in Lok Sabha on Friday, announced relaxation in custom duty on mobile phone parts.

With this, mobile phones will get cheaper in India. Mukherjee also proposed to exempt memory cards parts from basic excise duty.

The move is likely to provide boost for manufacturing of mobile phones in the country. Mobile Phones Telecom Industry Reacts To Budget “Exemption of mobile phone parts from basic custom duties will bring down the manufacturing cost of mobile phones.

It will also aid in deeper penetration of mobile phone manufacturers into the untapped portions of the Indian market,” Pradeep Jain, managing director, Karbonn Mobiles said. Sunil Dutt, managing director, Research In Motion (RIM) India, told Business Line, “The proposed full exemption on mobile phone parts may further make the smartphone affordable to larger section of the masses.

The increase in disposal income as a result of relaxed IT slabs will further enhance the penetration of smartphones.” The Government has also announced deduction of 200 per cent tax liability on expenditure made in research and development (R&D).

Welcoming the announcement, SN Rai, co-founder and director of Lava Mobile, said, “For telecom industry it is a good budget. The Government has provided benefits for companies like us to invest on a core of R&D because for manufacturing and R&D services there is an increase in deduction of income tax from 150 per cent to 200 per cent.”

Reference: Monika Bhati, EFYTIMES News Network

Ease Your Ubuntu Experience

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So you have made the leap, and are flying away from Windows… welcome to Ubuntu! You must have performed a few common activities like using the Ubuntu Software Centre, installing media codecs and drivers for your graphics card, etc. So what’s next? This article offers tips on how to make your work on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat faster, and more convenient.

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In this article, I have seven tips for you, which I have found very helpful in my daily usage of Ubuntu. Without much ado, let’s get right into them.

Install Synapse, a fast, light application launcher

Forgot, or don’t want to remember, what sub-menu your favourite application is in? Use an application launcher instead! A little window that appears on pressing a key combination, it lets you search for an “activity” and press Enter to launch it. If you’ve forgotten the name of the application, you can even enter a semantically-related term: for example, Web, Internet, or browser, for the Firefox browser; word or word processor for OpenOffice.org Writer; spreadsheet for… you get it!

Figure 1: The Synapse application launcher window

App launchers abound, but I’ll suggest Synapse (see Figure 1). It’s light, fast, and easy to use, as well as a small download (less than 1 MB!). You’ll need to tell Ubuntu where to find Synapse, since it’s not available by default. In Ubuntu Software Centre, click Edit –> Software Sources. Enter your password when prompted, click Add and enter the following line: ppa:synapse-core/ppa.

Click Add Source. Back in Software Centre, click the Reload button. After reloading, search for, and install the synapse package. I recommend you also install zeitgeist, which gives Synapse the smarts to list commonly/recently used applications, thus tailoring the list to suit your daily usage.

Once both are installed, add Synapse to your GNOME Startup Applications, so it will start automatically when you log in. Go to the System menu –> Preferences –> Startup Applications. Click Add. In the Name entry, type Synapse app launcher or any short name you choose; in the Command entry, enter synapse. Click the Add button and you’re done.

From your next login onwards, you just hit Ctrl+Spacebar to activate Synapse.

Speed up OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org could be faster (couldn’t everything?). To reduce the time it takes to open, add the OpenOffice.org Quickstarter to Startup Applications, using the procedure explained above, but change the Name to OOo Quickstarter and the Command to ooffice -quickstart. From your next login onwards, when you launch an OpenOffice.org component, you’ll see that it opens faster than before — because it is preloaded when you’re logging in. This does consume some memory, and slows down your login a little, so depending on the amount of RAM on your system, and how fast a processor you have, you might want to undo this later — if so, just return to Startup Applications, select the entry you’d created, and click Remove.

Note: The OpenOffice.org Quickstarter leaves an icon in your panel. You can close the Quickstarter at any time by clicking the icon and choosing the Exit option. You especially need to do this if you’ve just installed a new plugin, and must restart OOo; exit both OOo and Quickstarter, then restart them, so your new plugin will work.

Figure 2: OpenOffice.org Quickstarter in your panel

Additionally, if you have a lot of RAM on your system (modern computers come with 2 to 4 GB of RAM) then you can increase the memory reserved for OpenOffice.org, to a maximum of 256 MB. Visit Tools –> Options in any OOo component; select the Memory option on the left. Type in 128 or 256 in the Use for Openoffice.org entry. Click OK and see the difference in OOo’s performance.

Control your CPU speed with the scaling applet

To use a car analogy, your processor operates in various “gears”, depending on the workload of your system. You can manually put your processor into top gear, and your computer performs heavy tasks faster. To do this, right-click the top panel, and select Add to Panel. From the list of applets, select and add the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor applet.

Right-click the applet and choose Preferences. Choose which processor or core (listed as CPU0 and CPU1 on a dual-core system, for example) you wish the applet to monitor. For multi-core/multi-processor systems, you should add one applet per core to the panel, and choose the relevant CPU in each applet’s Preferences.

Figure 3: Click to change your CPU frequency

You can change the processor/core speed by clicking the applet. You can choose Performance when doing “heavy” tasks like watching videos or copying big files. Geeky fun! However, this could consume more power, and heat up the processor (reducing battery life, and the overall life of your system). A good choice is Ondemand, which lets Linux auto-boost your CPU speed when it needs more processing power, and drop back to minimum speed afterwards — a good balance between performance and power-saving, extending the battery life and cool running.

Label your partitions

The Nautilus file manager labels partitions as “10 GB filesystem”, “150 GB filesystem” and so on, which can be perplexing. Give them sensible labels like “Backups”, “Movies”, whatever. From the main menu, head to System –> Administration –> Disk Utility. Select Hard Disk. Select the partition you’d like to label; check that the partition is unmounted first, then click Edit Filesystem Label (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: The Disk Utility window

Enable useful Compiz effects

Ah, Compiz! Who doesn’t love Compiz for eye-candy? Now you’ll love it for its usefulness. First, install the Simple CompizConfig Settings Manager by searching for “simple ccsm” in the Software Centre. Launch Simple CCSM, and click the Effects tab. Enable the Expo and Scale effects. Now click the Desktop tab. If you don’t need the Ubuntu-default four desktops, reduce Desktop Columns to two; this will save memory. Now click the Edges tab. You’ll see the image of a computer screen. Click one of its red-coloured edges. A large pop-up menu will appear; select Scale: initiate window picker for all windows.

Now, when you move the mouse pointer to the chosen edge, your windows conveniently arrange themselves (see Figure 5). I use this as an alternative to Alt+Tab for switching between applications. Assign actions to other edges if you like! Your left edge could be the window picker and the right could be Expo, for instance. And oh — at any time, press Esc to return to the desktop!

Figure 5: Move pointer to left edge to arrange windows

Move window buttons from left to right

Why do Americans drive on the right? Why does Ubuntu put the close, minimise and maximise buttons on the left? Shift the buttons to the right if you like them the old way. Press Alt+F2 for the Run Application window, or better, use Synapse! Type gconf-editor as the command to run, and press Enter. Navigate to apps –> metacity –> general. Change the button_layout option to menu:minimize,maximize,close (no spaces between commas!) as seen in Figure 6. Hit Enter.

Figure 6: Use the configuration editor to relocate window buttons

Enhance Nautilus with Nautilus scripts

You can install third-party scripts that add functionality to Nautilus’ right-click menu. First, head to gnome-look.org and navigate to the Nautilus scripts page. There, you have hundreds of scripts. I recommend that you at least get “Send to”, “Send link to Desktop”, “Backup” and any of the “Rename multiple files” scripts. There are also scripts that can convert multimedia files, download pictures from a camera, upload to Facebook, GMail or Flickr, burn a disc… and remember, each functionality is available by just right-clicking one or more files or folders. Beat that, Windows!

Extract the downloaded scripts, and copy them to your .gnome2/nautilus-scripts folder. Note that this is a hidden folder. Navigate to your home folder, and press Ctrl+H to make hidden folders visible (and the same key combination to hide them again when done). Navigate into .gnome2/nautilus-scripts and paste the copied scripts.

Figure 7: Home folder with hidden folders un-hidden

There are hundreds of possible tips and tweaks for your Ubuntu desktop. I have covered a few that will speed up your workflow. There are many websites that deal with customising your GNU/Linux desktop, both for utility and cosmetics. You’ll realise that your desktop is truly yours — an expression of individuality. That freedom is only available in the free-software world.

Ref: Suhit Kelkar.

FreeBSD 9.0 — Fast, Safe and Completely Geeky

Most of the development that took place in this cycle had to do with bringing ZFS in FreeBSD in sync with the latest available open version (which is ZFS v28), improving the efficiency of FreeBSD Jails, adding support for USB 3.0 and making it all a lot faster.

Here’s what they did to the internal end of things:

UFS has gained journalling support for soft-updates.

UFS introduced soft-updates as a method for updating file system metadata (stuff like last accessed time, and permissions) out of band. This basically means that the data and the metadata don’t get committed to disk at the same time. While it’s a boon for performance, it’s nightmare for data integrity. With FreeBSD 9, they’ve added in an intent-log to the soft-updates mechanism, so soft-updates is now fully journalled. So on the outside, what you’ll see is that after a power failure, FreeBSD 9 now does not need to run fsck on the disks at all – it just comes back up online like nothing ever happened!

FreeBSD 9 has TRIM support for SSDs.

SSD users need to minimise writes to them. The ATA specification specifies a command called TRIM, which is used by operating systems to tell SSDs that a certain sector isn’t being used anymore by the file system. This alleviates the need to overwrite the sector to delete data. Linux users with SSDs will be familiar with the “discard” flag that they put in the /etc/fstab files that enables TRIM support. Well, FreeBSD 9 now supports TRIM.

ZFS has been updated to version 28.

ZFS v28 now supports block-level deduplication, so if you’ve got many files which have only some common segments, those segments can be stored only once by ZFS at the file-system level. Admittedly, deduplication requires a lot of RAM — the ARC cache itself takes over 20GB of RAM (yes, 20!) — so you’ll want a box with 48 or so gigs of memory to really take advantage of this. Triple-parity RAIDZ support is in. Also, ZFS v28 supports changing the log device (if you’re using a separate log device, that is,) so if your log device dies, your entire file system won’t. Like UFS, ZFS is also TRIM aware. And finally, ZFS now supports diffing between two files systems.

There have been improvements to low-level disk management.

Apart from improvements to RAID, HAST (Highly Available Storage) is now available as part of the system. HAST is just like Linux’s DRBD (which basically lets you transparently mirror a block device across a network), and supports only two nodes in an active-passive configuration.

Networking has been overhauled.

A bunch of network card drivers have been completely rewritten or majorly overhauled. In addition, TCP/IP now supports pluggable congestion-control algorithms, and FreeBSD comes with five of them in the box to choose from. So, for example, you can use one type of algorithm if you expect a moderate number of high bandwidth connections, and another if you expect a high number of low bandwidth connections. Of course, the default algorithm is balanced for regular use.

There’s a new storage subsystem.

FreeBSD now has a storage subsystem which implements the entire SCSI command set. So you get to take advantage of things like NCQ and all (stuff like sending a bunch of commands to the disk at once and letting the disk decide the order in which to execute them for best performance) because the disks are now used in their native mode and not ATA emulation mode. GEOM can now use multiple IO schedulers simultaneously, which is a really neat feature because it allows you to optimize disk IO even if your disk activity is erratic at times and sustained at other times. Of course, only one scheduler can be used on one drive. Also, Advanced Format (AF) drives with 4K sectors are now natively supported, and finally, you can now enable or disable the write cache either globally or per drive. This is neat because you might want to enable it on ZFS because ZFS ensures data is consistent so you can use the extra performance caching offers, but if you’re using a conventional file system, you’ll want to keep the write cache disabled for critical data.

There’s a new Resource Usage Monitoring And Limiting API

FreeBSD can now monitor resource usage per user, per jail, or per monitoring class. Also, the groundwork for controlling resources have been laid out, so in the future versions, something called rcontrol will be able to limit usage of resources per user, per jail and per monitoring class too. This makes for an interesting capability — you can limit jails to CPU sets right now, and in the future you will be able to limit available RAM to jails too, so in essence you’re getting everything that VMs can do on jails but there’s no performance penalty.

FreeBSD doesn’t crash anymore if you remove a USB drive.

Eh? Well, with previous versions of FreeBSD, there was a bug where if you just yanked a USB drive out without unmounting it, there was a 50 per cent chance that the system would kernel panic. The bug stayed on until they rewrote the entire USB subsystem. The new USB subsystem now fully supports USB 3.0 XHCI, and fixes the kernel panic issue for good.

There are upgrades to SSH and resov.conf handling.

The latest OpenSSH has been imported from OpenBSD, and in addition to that, the OpenSSH-HPN patches (HPN is High Performance Networking) have been imported too, and makes OpenSSH a lot faster in some scenarios. Also, FreeBSD 9 now uses OpenResolv, which means that resolv.conf files can be configured per application, per networking device or per connection (using a different one for Wi-Fi and VPN). Multiple resolv.conf files can be active at the same time, and OpenResolv hooks in at the library level, so the system /etc/resolv.conf can stay unaffected.

Security has been improved.

Password hashing now supports SHA256 and SHA512 in addition to MD5 and Blowfish. Also, there’s a new framework called Capsicum, developed at the University of Cambridge, that allows you to sandbox individual applications. Capsicum is still in-the-works stuff, so you can’t use all of it just yet.

They’re moving away from GPL

Because of GPLv3 and its implications, FreeBSD is now moving away from dependencies on all GPL tools. The system still compiles with GCC, but that’s GCC 4.2 because that was the last version that was GPLv2 based. They’ve already imported in Apple and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s LLVM framework and Clang, and that should be the system compiler from FreeBSD 10 onwards. Apart from the fact that they are licensed much more liberally, LLVM and Clang have technical advantages too — they generate code that are orders of magnitude faster, and somewhat smaller.

Well, that’s for all the internal changes that have gone in this cycle. The shell has also been updated, and they’ve updated handling for arithmetic expressions and environment variables for builtin commands, and imports code from Debian’s Dash shell, which in turn imports code from NetBSD’s Ash shell, which is why the code was BSD licensed in the first place.

One of the biggest changes that the user will see (or not — I always install my BSD systems by manually extracting the tarballs and creating config files by hand) is that FreeBSD has a new installer program called BSDinstall. Sysinstall was cool — and it’s still available for configuring the system — but all ISOs from FreeBSD now ship with BSDinstall as the default installer.

Over at the PC-BSD stable, they’ve done a few major changes too. If you’ve used PC-BSD, you’ll know that they use a package manager somewhat like Mac OS X, where they install PBI packages which are self-contained — they include all their dependencies in them. Well, PC-BSD packages can now share libraries too! And most importantly, PC-BSD packages gained support for package signing, so now the integrity of a package can finally be verified.

Also, PC-BSD is no more KDE-exclusive. You can now use GNOME, XFCE and even LXDE with PC-BSD. Which makes me wonder — the GhostBSD project was started to provide GNOME to FreeBSD. Do they have a niche anymore, now that PC-BSD makes GNOME a first class citizen?

What’s not so rosy at Free/PC-BSD is the state of graphics. Mesa has really abandoned development for almost all non-Linux platforms because all their drivers are now based on Gallium3D — which is neat and Gallium3D drivers give some really snazzy performance, but Gallium3D depends on the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) which is as of now Linux only.

Mesa has removed all of their classic DRI based drivers, so you can either use an old version of Mesa, use the new LLVMpipe-based software renderer (which can do Gnome-shell or Compiz pretty well), or buy a nVidia GPU and use their proprietary driver (which, according to Phoronix, is the only way you’re going to enjoy FreeBSD 9 with an acceptable level of graphics performance). But for typical server workloads (which is what FreeBSD is for, hey), this isn’t much of an issue as no one’s likely to use OpenGL on a server.

That’s pretty much all, folks. Oh, yeah, FreeBSD can now do binary updates using binary diffs, so you don’t need to fetch source from CVS and do a make world just to keep your system up to date.

I’ve talked enough. Now go play with this.