Microsoft’s Translation service is without doubt not as popular as Google’s service. The service is available over at Microsoft Translator. It works pretty much as Google Translate works. The translation service auto-detects the original content language and offers to translate it into one of the supported languages.

Users can enter text or website addresses at the translator site to get the textual contents translated.

Microsoft has released a bookmarklet for their translation service recently that everyone can use to translate web contents on the fly. The bookmarklet is available on this page.

You first need to select the language that you want the original text to be translated to. The pulldown menu lists many languages, from English and German to Spanish, Portuguese or Japanese.

You then need to drag and drop the bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark’s bar or bookmarks. You can alternatively right-click the link on the Translator Bookmarklet page to bookmark it this way. Depending on the frequency of use, you may want to place it prominently in the browser.

A click on the bookmarklet on a foreign language page invokes the translation. The bookmarklet adds a small toolbar to the top of the page that is visualizing the translation process and the original and destination language.

A click on a language displays a selection menu where it can be switched to another language. That’s handy if the automatic language detection did not detect the correct language used on the page, or where you may want the text to be translated into a different language.

The original text on the page is displayed whenever you move the mouse over a translated sentence.

Microsoft’s Translator bookmarklet is a handy tool for users who need to translate web contents regularly. Google is also offering translate bookmarklets for their Google Translate translation service. (via)

Installation of the Microsoft Outlook add-on should not pose a problem. Users need to make sure that Outlook is closed during installation. The wizard that is displayed after installation can be skipped by clicking next all the time, no personal data needs to be entered.

A new Text Lightning entry is added to Outlook’s toolbar which offers access to the add-in’s features. The add-in furthermore adds a sidebar to the right of the new email message window for quick access to pre-configured texts, images and files.

The main feature of Text Lightning is the ability to create and use text modules. The available text modules can then be added to email messages with a double-click, via individual keyboard shortcuts or drag and drop.

New text modules are added with the shortcut Ctrl-N or a right-click on the sidebar and the selection of Add Quick Text from the context menu. Text can be imported as well either from a file or a folder with multiple files. Supported file formats for single file import are Microsoft Excel xls and Comma-Separated text csv files, for folder import HTML, text and TextLightning files.

The add-in supports both plain text and rich text. One interesting option is the ability to add files to text modules which are then automatically added as attachments.

Another interesting option is product guessing. This basically can be used to configure products that Text Lightning tries to identify in email messages to only display relevant text modules.

Text Lightning can be downloaded from the developer website over at Xequte. The developers are unfortunately not listing compatibility information on the website. The add-in worked flawlessly under Outlook 2010. (via)

Chart Chooser is a free service by Juice Analytics that offers 17 new Powerpoint and Excel charts that are provided as data templates. Templates are listed with their name and a thumbnail of how they look like. A filter on the left side can be used to hide unneeded templates, but since there are only 17 it is not really necessary, as all are easily accessible on the frontpage.

The filter may however help in finding the correct template for the data that needs to be put into chart form.

A click on any thumbnail opens a larger preview image and download options of the Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint templates.

The template comes in the native format of the application, either xls for Microsoft Excel or ppt for Microsoft PowerPoint. They need to be loaded just like any other document and become fully editable after they have been loaded into the Office program they have been designed for. It is possible to change the title and values to create a custom chart based on the information entered.

Protected View is enabled under Office 2010 for all documents that have been downloaded from the Internet. A click on Enable Editing makes the document writable. Most users should remember to save the document under a different name once they finished editing it to avoid writing on top of previously created charts.

All 17 charts are available free of charge for both PowerPoint and Excel.

Although you won’t find all of the standard features found in most modern file managers, you will find emelFM2 has a few tricks of its own that make it worth (at least) giving a try. And, of course, any old school user will be happy to have this file manager sitting alongside the standard Nautilus, Dolphin, or Thunar.

In this Ghacks article I will show you how to install and make use of the emelFM2 file manager.

Installation

Since emelFM2 is a GTK+ toolkit it’s fairly universal on X11 systems. I found emelFM2 in both the standard repositories for Ubuntu 10.04 and Fedora 13. So installation can be as simple as:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software tool.
2. Search for “emelfm2″ (no quotes).
3. Mark emelFM2 for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

Once installed, you will find emelFM2 in Start > System Tools > emelFM2.

Usage

Figure 1

When you start up emelFM2 the window that greets you will look very familiar (see Figure 1). If you’ve ever used Midnight Commander or even an FTP application like gFTP, you will be immediately at home with emelFM2.

Let’s say you want to move a file (or directory) from one location to another. To do so you would navigate on the left pane to the source, select the file (or folder), navigate on the right to the target, and then click the Move button in the middle of the panes.

Or say you want to just open a file. To do this you would navigate to the location of the file on either the left or right pane, and double click the file to open it. You could also right-click the file and select from any number of actions (such as change ownership, change permissions, copy, link, link-as, delete, and more).

Other features

Naturally, a tool like this would need some other features to make it attractive. And emelFM2 doesn’t disappoint. One of the nice handier features of emelFM2 is the built-in command line tool. at the bottom of the window you will see a small text area (see Figure 1). This text area allows you to enter commands that will be enacted upon the selected file.

You can also calculate disk usage of items. You might be asking yourself why this would be useful, since the file size is already displayed in the main panes. The disk usage tool allows you to calculate the exact file size of either a single file or multiple files. With this you can select multiple files and the click the disk usage button (bottom section of the window, eighth icon from the right) to give you the total amount used by the selected files.

emelFM2 also allows you to mount/unmount devices. To unmount a device you would select the device in either pane and then click the unmount icon (fourth button from the right near the bottom of the window). To mount a device you use the same process.

emelFM2 also has an interesting take on the filtering task. If you click the Filter icon (top right, third from the right for the right pane, top left, third from the left for the left pane) a drop-down will appear allowing you to select from:

• Name Filter
• Size Filter
• Date Filter
• Directories too

When you select any of he top three a new window will open allowing you to create a specific filter. For example, if you want to filter only files modified since a specific date, you would do the following:

Select the Date Filter

In the resulting window select “modified since” from the drop-down.

Enter the date you want to specify.

Click OK.

Figure 2

As soon as you click OK the directory will be refreshed to show only the results that match your filter. You will know when a directory is being filtered because the filter icon will have a line slashed through it (see Figure 2).

Final thoughts

Although many users might find emelFM2 a bit out-dated, anyone that was weened on the likes of Midnight Commander will find themselves right at home with this fast, light file manager. And with a few extra features rolled in, emelFM2 is an attractive alternative to the usual fare.

All it takes is to write a new email, attach the files that need to be shared and add the contacts that should receive it.

Email does have a disadvantage though, a size limit makes it virtually impossible to send very large files. Most providers reject emails that cross the 20-25 MB line. You might want to consider splitting up the files to stay below that limit but it does mean additional work, and there are better options, especially if files need to be send regularly.

Now that we have established that email is not ideal for sending large files we can take a look at other options.

File hosting services come to mind immediately. Hundreds, if not thousands, of file hosting sites compete with each other on the Internet. They allow Internet users to upload files to their servers. The file urls can then be shared with other users. The process is slightly more complicated than sending files per email, as it requires some sort of communication so that the recipient gets the file hosting url to download the files.

There are also specialized file hosting sites, Flickr for instance for hosting photos comes to mind, or Youtube for videos. Those sites offer privacy features to only share files with specific users.

File Hosting Services to Send Large Files

Media Fire – One of the best file sharing services on the Internet. Free users can upload an unlimited number of files, with each file up to 200 Megabytes in size. Downloads are unlimited as well. File urls can easily be shared by email, Instant Messenger or embedded on websites.

mediafire

Transfer Big Files – File size limit of 100 Megabyte without account, can be downloaded 20 times, urls are send to a recipients email address. Uses HTTPS for website and all transfers.

transfer big files

Drop Send – Has a file size limit of 2 Gigabytes and 5 sends per month, transfers seem to be limited in speed compared to the paid accounts offered.

send large files

Send 6 – Another file hosting service that offers to send up to 250 Megabytes without registration. Has an individual file size limit of 250 Megabytes, maximum of 5 downloads per files.

send 6

File Droper – a very simply uploading site with a maximum file size of 5 Gigabytes. Uploaded file urls need to be shared manually though.

file dropper

Windows Live SkyDrive – requires a Windows Live account but is good for sharing up to 25 Gigabytes of data, individual file size limit is 50 Megabytes.

windows live skydrive

Other options (selection)

• Drop.io
• Rapidshare
• Box.net
• Wikisend
• Driveway

The file hosting sites above are just examples, you can easily find more hosting sites by searching for terms like “send large files”, “file hosting” or “file hosts”.

Desktop Clients for big file transfers

File hosting sites offer an uncomplicated way of sending files to other people. Most do however limit the maximum file size, download speeds or number of transfers to upsell premium accounts.

Desktop file sending clients are a great alternative.

Opera Unite – The Opera web browser comes with a feature called Opera Unite. It basically provides web server capabilities directly in the browser. Several applications are available that can be installed including a file sharing app.

Here is how it works. Visit the Opera Unite website above in Opera and install the File Sharing application in Opera. You need to create an account at Opera if this is your first time.

A folder can be picked that is then shared on the Internet whenever Opera Unite is running. The url of the folder can be send to friends via email or other means. Friends open the url in the web browser and see the directory structure and files of the selected folders. Folders are password protected for extra security. Available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

opera unite file sharing

Dropbox – A free Dropbox account has a 2 Gigabyte space limit, which should be fine for most file sending operations. A Dropbox client is installed on the computer system. Files that need to be send to other users can be put into a Dropbox folder to make them available online. Folders can be shared easily by sending invitations to email addresses.

Dropbox is also available for Linux, Mac and Windows. An account is required to share files.

dropbox

HTTP File Server – this program offers a similar approach as Opera Unite. It installs a file server on the system that can be used to share files with other users. Highly configurable.

http file server

Other options

• Gigatribe
• CC File Transfer
• Pando

A third option are Instant Messengers and other communication programs like Skype which often come with basic file sharing options. They are a good option to send medium sized files directly to other users, probably the best choice if both users already have an account.

We did not mention ftp servers which are an option as well. The problem with ftp servers is that they are not that easy to configure and setup. Users who want to delve deeper into this can take a look at the excellent Filezilla Server, which is available for Windows only.

Users who live close to each other have the option to burn the files to DVD or copy them on a USB drive or stick to hand them over in person to the other user.

How do you share and send large files? Let us know in the comments.

YaST started it’s life in 1995 as a C++ written ncurses GUI and was originally written by Thoamas Fehr and Michael Andres. Believe it or not, YaST has retained that ncurses front end (in case you are without a GUI, this comes in handy) and has a gui for both GTK (GNOME) and QT (KDE). Let’s give YaST a look and see just what it has to offer.

Starting YaST

Figure 1

Naturally you can start YaST from either the menu or the command line. From where in the menu will depend upon which desktop environment you are using. If you are using KDE (as shown in Figure 1), you will find YaST in the Computer tab of the “start” menu. If you are using GNOME, look in System > Administration.

You can also start YaST from the command line. Depending upon which version you need to start you would use one of the following commands:

yast –qt

yast –gtk

yast –ncurses

NOTE: The above commands contain two dashes (“-”), not “em dashes”.

You can run the ncurses version even if you have your graphical desktop open and running. Since some of the tools contained within YaST require administrative privileges, you will, upon launching YaST, have to give your administrator password.

The lay of the land

Figure 2

When you fire up YaST what you will see should immediately feel familar (see Figure 2).  As you can see, the left pane contains categories and the right pane contains the entries for each categories. You will also notice that you can simply scroll through every one of the modules (on the right hand side) without having to select a category. You can also search for a module.

Depending upon your setup you will see different modules. For example, I am running OpenSuSE in a virtual machine (using VirtualBox). Because of this I have no video card or monitor to configure. If I were running OpenSuSE without virtualization, YaST would have been able to detect the card/monitor and offer the module for configuration.

As I said, YaST is a one-stop-shop. From within YaST you can also manage your system’s packages. If you click on the Software section in the right pane you will find a number of entries related to the installation and management of software. You will also notice what seems like two tools for installation:

• Add-on Products
• Software Management

These are actually very different tools. Add-on products are products that can be added from a CD/DVD (or, in some cases) on-line source. The software management tool, however, is exactly what you would think it is – Add/Remove Software.

Power at your fingertips

There are also some fairly powerful tools within YaST. If you look at either the Novell AppArmor section, the System section, or the Networking section you will find some tools you might not have ever been able to find in another distribution’s control panel. Some of these are:

• /etc/sysconfig Editor
• Boot loader configuration
• System Backup
• System Restore
• Kerberos client
• LDAP client
• Windows Domain Membership

and much more.

Final thoughts

YaST is one of the most powerful configuration tools in all of Linux-dom. Without installing a tool like Webmin, you will be hard pressed to find any other “control panel” as fully realized as you will with YaST. If you have been looking for a reason to give OpenSuSE a try, let YaST be that reason.

As with any web service, when the volume of data increases, the complexity increases as well. There arises a strong need to manage the data effectively on you Amazon S3 account. Many vendors have developed third-party S3 management tools to simplify S3 account administration and usage for users.

Amongst the most popular S3 management tools are CloudBerry Explorer Pro (developed by CloudBerry Lab, free version available as well), S3Fox (developed by Suchi Software Solutions) and S3Hub. In this article, we do a head-to-head comparison between the mentioned S3 management tools.

CloudBerry Explorer

CloudBerry Explorer lets you manage your Amazon S3 and CloudFront accounts. The tool has two versions – Free and Pro. With the Pro version, you get access to CloudBerry Lab’s professional support and all your queries are answered within 48 hours. For a detailed listing of features of CloudBerry explorer, refer the Head-to-Head Comparison Table below.

S3Fox

S3Fox is a Mozilla FireFox extension for Amazon S3 developed by, a company specializing in developing FireFox Extensions. S3Fox runs in a FireFox browser tab and looks very similar to most FTP clients which follow the dual-pane layout.

S3Hub

S3Hub is Mac OS X only client for Amazon S3. Even if you do not have an S3 account, you can use S3Hub to view other users’ public buckets. It offers limited functionality thorough a neat and easy to use single pane interface.

Head-To-Head Comparison

We compare CloudBerry Explorer, S3Fox and S3Hub in terms of ease of use, features, security and the overall value they offer to users.

[table id=1 /]

Conclusion

Cloudberry Explorer offers several features that the other two programs do not offer. It is on the other hand a commercial program. Users should take a look at the additional options offered by the pro version. Especially the premium support could be worth the money. But that’s on the other hand only valid if Windows is the operating system of choice.

Are you using other tools to manage Amazon S3 data? Let us know in the comments.

This article is a guest contribution by Pavel Bondarchuck. Entrepreneur, founder CloudBerry Lab, developer of CloudBerry Explorer freeware for Amazon S3 and CloudBerry Online Backup

1. If you never empty it, it grows and wastes valuable disk space
2. If you empty it frequently, you lose its buffer benefits for recovery. Plus, who likes frequently doing this highly manual task?
3. Finally, if like me, you get bored by this nonsense, you end up permanently bypassing the trash (with systematic Shift+Delete instead of Delete), which is of course very dangerous

Linux users, rejoice! Enter Autotrash. The name may sound a little scary, but this tiny command-line Python application is actually very friendly and fully solves the problems I just exposed. Its humble task is to selectively purge your trash based on certain criteria that you specify, like Deletion date, Remaining disk space, or Regular expressions.

Edit 2010/04/14: Windows users, Martin found a great app for you, read his followup article.

For example, you can tell Autotrash to delete files that have been in the trash for more than 7 days ago, and to ensure that at least 10GB remain available:

This means our three problems are solved:

1. The trash never gets too big
2. It always contains a reasonable recent backlog of deleted items, ready for the occasional recovery
3. Geeks like me can come back to sane Delete practices

The next question you’ll probably ask is: “Great, but I don’t want to have to run Autotrash manually, how do I setup a schedule?”. In typical GNU style, Autotrash doesn’t do that, and it’s okay because it’s not its job. To do the scheduling, I suggest that:

• Either you setup a cron task running every n hours
• Or, if you are as lazy as I am, you can simply add Autotrash to the Startup programs:
  
  In my case, I generally shut down my computer for the night, so launching Autotrash at startup is a satisfying “good enough” tradeoff.

The most straightforward way to install Autotrash on an Ubuntu machine is to use its PPA. Inside a terminal, enter:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bneijt/ppa && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install autotrash

Once the installation is done, open the manual page to see what it can do, and do your own setup:
man autotrash

Autotrash is free software licensed under the GPLv3, currently available as source or Ubuntu PPA. Special thanks to nekohayo who made me discover it.

Ronan is a geek and musician living in Montreal. He enjoys days when his hard drive doesn’t evaporate because of an accidental keystroke and rambles about software, music and life at flying molehill.

In this article we will take a look at the necessary configurations to get osTicket up to speed for your help desk needs. You should find, upon completion of these configurations, osTicket is quite the useful help desk tool.

Assumptions

This article will assume your support staff is not terribly large and that you already have the necessary tools setup to take advantage of osTicket’s features. Such tools include an SMTP server for the outgoing alerts responses and a POP or IMAP server for incoming mail. And, of course, this will assume you have osTicket up and running. Finally, I will assume you took care of the initial configurations upon installation. These configurations are handled in the Settings tab and should be completed when you bring the site online after installation. NOTE: If, after you fill out the web-based installer, you get a blank screen – most likely you do not have php5-mysql installed. Install that and re-run the web install and you should be fine.

First things first

Figure 1

The first thing you will want to do is set up your departments. By default osTicket has two departments: Billing and Support. You may find this plenty. But for some consulting firms there may be more necessary. For example, you might need Residential Support and Commercial Support. Or you might want Remote and On Site. To set these up click on the Departments tab and then click the Add New Dept link.

If this department wants to have its very own email address, you will need to first create an email address for it. That includes both on your email server and in the Emails tab in osTicket (this is why it’s important to understand the flow of configuration for osTicket).  If the department just needs to use the same email addy as another, umbrella, department you can select it here. This is, after all, just the outgoing email address (which will probably want to be something like support@yourdomain.com.)

Figure 2

Once you have finished creating all the necessary departments you will want to the Staff tab and create the necessary elements here. In the Staff tab (see Figure 2)  you can set up both groups and staff members. Again, this will depend upon your needs. You might, for example, have certain staff that only do one particular type of work (say Residential vs. Commercial). Before you create those staff members, make sure you create any (if needed) groups they would belong to.

You will also notice there are groups. By default there are three groups: Admins, Managers, and Staff. These groups determine the permissions a staff member has. Use caution when you give a staff member Admin rights. You can, of course, add a new group and give that group specific permissions. Take a look at each group to see what their permissions are before you do this.

Finally you will want to take a look at the Help Topics tab. This is a very nice feature added to osTicket. What you can do with Help Topics is create a particular topic that has a specific Priority. Say you have a few clients that always get top priority. You can create a VIP (or such) category that has Emergency priority. This will always bump them to the top of the list. Is it fair? Not really. But when you have VIP-type clients, they expect VIP-type treatment.

Final thoughts

I hope that, upon setting up osTicket, you come to the same conclusion that I have drawn – this tool is the equal to some Help Desk tools costing quite a bit of your IT dollars. If you find a tip or trick that takes osTicket to the next level, share it with your fellow Ghacks readers.

In this article I will show you how to quickly get Nagios up and running. In no time you will have Nagios up and running and monitoring your network.

Features of Nagios

Before we get to the installation, let’s take a look at the features of Nagios. Nagios can:

• Monitor network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.)
• Monitor host resources (processor load, disk usage, etc.)
• Allow for simple plugin design
• Do parallelized service checks
• Define a network host hierarchy using
• Contact administrators when service or host problems occur
• Define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution
• Automatd log file rotation
• Support the implementation of redundant monitoring hosts
• Offer an optional web interface for viewing current network status, notification and problem history, log file, etc

Sold yet? You should be, especially considering this tool is free and open source! Now, let’s get on with the installation.

Installation

Follow these simple steps to installing Nagios:

1. Fire up Synaptic.
2. Search for “nagios” (no quotes)
3. Mark nagios3 for installation (this will also pick up all of the dependencies)
4. Click Apply to install

During the installation you will be asked for an administrator password. This will be the password for the nagiosadmin user that will have access to the web interface. Once the installation is complete, you need to run a check to make sure everything is okay. The command for this check is:

sudo nagios3 -v /etc/nagios3/nagios.cfg

When this command runs you will see something like:

Nagios 3.0.2
Copyright (c) 1999-2008 Ethan Galstad (http://www.nagios.org)
Last Modified: 05-19-2008
License: GPL

Reading configuration data…

Running pre-flight check on configuration data…

Checking services…
Checked 7 services.
Checking hosts…
Checked 2 hosts.
Checking host groups…
Checked 5 host groups.
Checking service groups…
Checked 0 service groups.
Checking contacts…
Checked 1 contacts.
Checking contact groups…
Checked 1 contact groups.
Checking service escalations…
Checked 0 service escalations.
Checking service dependencies…
Checked 0 service dependencies.
Checking host escalations…
Checked 0 host escalations.
Checking host dependencies…
Checked 0 host dependencies.
Checking commands…
Checked 142 commands.
Checking time periods…
Checked 4 time periods.
Checking for circular paths between hosts…
Checking for circular host and service dependencies…
Checking global event handlers…
Checking obsessive compulsive processor commands…
Checking misc settings…

Total Warnings: 0
Total Errors:   0

With the results giving 0 errors and 0 warnings, you are ready to log in.

Logging in

Figure 1

Fire up your web browser and point it to http://IP_TO_SERVER/nagios3 at which point you will be asked for login credentials. Remember that password you gave during installation? That is the password you will use to login (with the user nagiosadmin).

When you log in you will be greeted with the Nagios welcome screen (see Figure 1), at which point you are ready to start monitoring.

Final thoughts

Wasn’t so bad was it? And you though Nagios was impossible to install. Fortunately it’s not. And even more fortunately is how powerful Nagios is. You will be blown away at how useful this tool is.

This can be helpful for instance for webmasters or coders who design their websites and projects offline and want to automatically synchronize the updated files to a web server.

A second purpose could be an automated backup of files on a website to another web server or a local computer.

Core Features:

• supports UNIX, Microsoft, IBM and Novell type FTP servers only new or changed files are transferred
• console type application that can be easily executed from various schedulers and batch files
• FTPSync is intended for computer experts – it has no user interface, so users must know how to edit standard Windows INI files. Synchronization can be configured on the fly from batch files or other applications, making it a convenient tools when sync authomation is required.

The configuration of the file synchronization process or backups are configured in standard Windows ini files. It is recommended to take a look at the extensive documentation to configure the program properly.

Three demo configuration options are included in the download. They demonstrate many features and parameters of the program.

An alternative to FTP Sync is the popular software WinSCP which can also be used to automatically synchronize data between local computer systems and servers. Information on how to create a batch file can be found in the winSCP forum.

FTP Sync can be downloaded from the developer’s website. (via Donation Coder)

The service works by pointing it to an url on the Internet. The website will be loaded by Print What You Like with controls to manage elements on the website in a left sidebar.

The mouse cursor will automatically highlight elements on the website. These elements can then be manipulated in the sidebar. It is for instance possible to remove elements from the website, change the text font and size, fit elements to the width of the page or resize elements.

Print What You Like offers an automatic option as well which works well on some websites but not on all. This option in theory removes all unnecessary elements from the website.

The service is also offering a bookmarklet that sends urls directly to it making the process more user friendly. Alternatives to Print What You like are The Printliminator bookmarklet, Print Friendly or Green Print.

This can result in two problems for the webmaster. Problem one is indexation. It can happen that a tag page gets indexed instead of the actual post. There are plugins that can deal with that problem by adding canonical tags to those links so that the search engines know that the post page should be indexed with priority for the keyword and not the tags page.

The second problem is that the tag page can irritate search engine users as they only see excerpts and not a single article. This can look spammy to some and might have a negative impact on a visitor’s perception of the page and the website in general.

We have posted an option to create custom tag pages in WordPress back in April of last year and that method is still valid and working.

This method basically creates a new template file for each tag that the webmaster wants to customize. It can for instance be used to display an introduction to visitors so that they know what the page is about. This method allows the posting of media as well as text on the tag pages.

Posting those additional information can be beneficial to the search engine indexation of the tag page as well since it adds unique content to those pages.

The disadvantage of that method is that a new template file needs to be created for each tag that the webmaster wants to customize. This is impractical for websites with thousands of tags.

Another method was posted at the Likemind blog. This new method has been introduced in WordPress 2.8. It makes use of a new tag variable called description which can be added to the tag’s template so that it will be displayed on the tag pages of the website.

Some WordPress themes come without a tag.php file. If that is the case it needs to be created and modified to include the description. The easiest way to do so is to copy the index.php file and rename the copy to tag.php. The following code needs to be added before the loop in tag.php

<!–Start Code–>
<?php $tag_desc = tag_description(); ?>
<?php if($tag_desc) : ?>
<div class="tag-description">
<?php print $tag_desc ;?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
<!–End Code–>

Each tag page will from then on display the tag’s description if available. Tag descriptions can be edited in the Posts > Post Tags menu in the WordPress admin interface.

The benefit of this approach is that only one template needs to be created and that everything else can be handled from within the WordPress admin area. That tag description can also be used as the meta description. There are some disadvantages though as it is difficulty to add formatting and media to the description (if at all possible).

It improves on three major points and one of them is better stability for third-party plug-ins. Good to see Apple doing that.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2009/11/12/safari-4-0-4-released-update-now/feed/ 3 http://www.ghacks.net/2009/11/06/software-giveaway-alert-mac-apps-worth-154-for-free-macheist-nanobundle/ http://www.ghacks.net/2009/11/06/software-giveaway-alert-mac-apps-worth-154-for-free-macheist-nanobundle/#comments Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:18:58 +0000 Shailpik http://www.ghacks.net/?p=18169 The folks at Mac are at it again. They are offering to give you 6 great Mac apps completely for free. if you were to buy them individually, you would have to pay $154 for them. But in the MacHeist’s NanoBundle, they will be yours for free. Do not lose any time and get over to macheist.com at once. This thing ends in 6 days. Get as many people in on it as you can. Pic of apps on the other side.

Now there are loads of tools to use for this purpose. I have already covered the Unetbootin tool in my article “Install Linux on a USB drive with Unetbootin.” This time around we are going to do the same trick with a tool that comes pre-installed on any modern Ubuntu distribution. It’s all graphical interface and all easy going.

What you will need

• A USB drive with at least 700 MB in size.
• Either an ISO image or the Ubuntu Live CD

And a little bit of time. If you don’t have either the ISO image or the CD you can just download a fresh copy from the Ubuntu site.

Once you have everything you need, you are ready to go.

Starting the tool

Figure 1

You will find the USB creator in the Administration sub-menu of the System menu on the GNOME desktop. The entry you are looking for is called “USB Startup Disk Creator”. Click that to open up the main window (see Figure 1).

As you can see (in Figure 1) there is neither an image or a CD listed. You either have to insert your Ubuntu CD or, if you’re using a downloaded image, click the Other button and navigate to where you’ve saed your image file.

When you insert your CD it will be automatically detected by the system and listed in the USB Startup Disk window. When this happens everything that is greyed out in Figure 1 will be at your service.

You will notice the only option available is for saving documents and settings. If your USB drive has enough extra space you can designate a portion of that drive for this purpose. With this feature you can effectively have a portable version of Linux that is far more than just a “startup disk”.

Creating the disk

Figure 2

When you have selected your image to use and configured your free space you are ready to go. Click the Make Startup Disk button and the main windo will be dismissed. During the creation process you will see a progress window (see Figure 2) that will let you know how much is done and what is happening. The phases of this creation are:

• Copying Files
• Creating persistence file
• Making persistence file system

Once all three phases are complete you will get a dialog window telling you installation is complete and you can now reboot your machine with the USB drive. Of course when you boot a machine with this device it has to be able to boot from a USB device. Most modern machine can do that so it shouldn’t be an issue.

Final thoughts

As far as tools of this nature, the Ubuntu USB disk creator tool is one of the easiest and most reliable. It’s not the most flexible; but for what it does, you can’t beat it. If you’re looking to have a portable Ubuntu distribution you can carry with you, make use of this user-friendly tool.

Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) is utilised on a range of devices, but especially so by Creative. Creative Zens (and their variants) utilise the protocol. Whilst the Creative NOMAD isn’t MTP, it too uses an awkward protocol not natively supported by OS X. The infamous Zune (in the eyes of an Apple fanboy) too uses MTP, however, Microsoft make it very difficult to transfer data to.

XNJB is a piece of software that provides a graphical front-end to a libnjb and libmtp: free and open source libraries that allow communication with devices like Creative NOMADs and Creative Zens. Unfortunately, neither support the Zune, due to additional restrictions Microsoft put in place. The libraries work on other POSIX operating systems, like Linux, but XNJB does not.

XNJB allows users to upload and download songs from their media players, for ID3 data to be edited and devices searched. All of this has to be done within the software; it is not integrated into iTunes or Finder.

The transfer of data felt a bit slow to me, but I expect this is primarily due to the messiness of my library and the nature of Media Transfer Protocol.

This software is, however, a useful tool when you first got the Mac. I do, though, doubt you could realistically continue to use a MTP device successfully with OS X. Naturally, you could use it inside Boot Camp or a virtual machine, but in my opinion, that too is not an ideal option.

Compatible devices are listed on their website.

Google Reader

Reader’s the center of all my information consumption, but previously wasn’t so good at letting you share that information. If you wanted to bookmark something, or share a cool article with a friend, your options were limited. You’d either star an item, and then come back to it later, or you’d share it – but then only other Google Reader users could see it, and then that was only if you were friends on Google Reader. Which I have, like, three of.

But Google, always in sync with my needs (we have a wonderful and functional relationship, Google and I), has just released a “Send To” feature for Reader. Send To lets you share an article via Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, (though those are sort of the same now, huh?) Digg, Posterous, and many more.

To set this up, open Reader. At the top right of the page, click “Settings.” You’ll then see a tab in Settings called “Send To.” Click it. Then, select the service or services you want to add to your Send To… menu in Reader.

The list is long, but you’re not limited to it. With a bit of know-how, you can create a custom link that’ll let you send the Reader item to any service or website you can dream up – the link to do that is at the bottom of the “Send To” Settings page.

People are already starting to cook these up. There’s a way to send from Google Reader to Evernote; a way to send to Instapaper; a way to send to ShareThis (which has every social network you can imagine), and many, many more. A little Googling, and I’m betting you can add anything you can think of.

Once you’re all set up, sending items can be done in two ways. You can either go to the end of an item, and click the “Send To” button, which brings up a dropdown menu of all your options; or, hit Shift-T to open the same menu for the current item. I use the keyboard shortcut all the time (I heart keyboard shortcuts), and it’s definitely the fastest solution.

Whether you use Delicious, Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk, or just about anything else, you can now send directly to it from Google Reader – skipping at least one step, and a whole bunch of hassle.

What’s your bookmarking and sharing method of choice?

One of those tools is Writer’s Cafe. This piece of software is a very powerful suite of writer’s tools that is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows and has a HUGE feature set perfect for making your writing task much easier. In this article we will be discussing the Linux version of the software. All of the features are included in all of the different operating systems. The cost of Writer’s Cafe is $45.00 USD.

Features

• Storylines: This tool helps you plan and manage the different story lines in your novel/writing.
• Screenplay auto-formatting: Work within screenplay templates so you don’t have to worry about how to properly format your treatment.
• Import from other applications like Final Draft.
• HTML Help books: Export your projects to HTML help format.
• Character profiles: Keep detailed notes on your characters.
• Journal: Keep a journal of your writing.
• Writing Prompt: Random prompts to aid your writing or help you work your writing muscles.

and much more.

Writer’s Cafe is one of those applications that includes so many helpful tools you could spend an entire work day toying around with every feature.

Installation

The easiest way to install Writer’s Cafe is to open up Synaptic (in Ubuntu), do a search for “writerscafe2″ (no quotes), scroll until you see the Writer’s Cafe listing, select the correct listing, and click Apply to install.

You could also visit the Writer’s Cafe Website download page and download the package that suits your distribution and either let the package handler install the app or save the file and install it from the command line.

First use

Figure 1

The first thing you will notice, when you fire up Writer’s Cafe, is that is somewhat resembles a standard PC Desktop with the addition of a sidebar (see Figure 1).

From this “desktop” you launch all of the tools you need to write your book or screenplay. If you notice there is a “Start” button at the bottom left corner of the desktop. This is the proverbial start menu for Writer’s Cafe. If you click this button you will see all of the tools you have at your disposal. These same tools can be accessed by the icons or from the Tools menu.

Storylines

Figure 2

The Storylines tool is probably the most valuable tool in this suite of tools. Storylines helps you to keep organized your various plots and chapters. Figure 2 shows you a simple story line I have created for the purpose of this article. As you can see there are three plot lines I have created (Main Plot, Secondary Plot, and Tertiary Plot). Each of these plots is represented by a different color. To each plot line you add cards. Each card can be thought of as a chapter or a scene. With this type of organization it makes it easy to recognize what plot line a chapter relates to. To add a new card to a plot line you simple double click on the plot line where you want the card to go. Once the card is where you want it (you can drag and drop cards) click on the Summary tab in the upper right pane and give the card a summary. The summary of the card will appear in the overall story outline in the upper left pane. This serves as your story outline. You can also view the master story line which places all of the plot cards onto one story line. To view this click on the “M” icon above the upper left pane.

To actually write the chapter click on the chapter card you want to write and then click on the Content tab in the upper right pane.

Export

Once you have completed (or you just want to see what it looks like) your story you can then export it to a word processor such as OpenOffice. The export features works flawlessly (at least when exporting a file in the Open Document Text format). In the end you will have a complete novel or screen play ready for submission.

Final thoughts

This article only scratches the surface of Writer’s Cafe. This tool is quite large and quite helpful for anyone aspiring to write. It takes a lot of organization to write a novel. Having a tool to make this job easy is certainly worth the price of admission. For all of the writers out there, do yourself a favor and snag a copy of Writer’s Cafe.

The Thunar Bulk renamer can:

• Insert/Overwrite file names
• Add various forms of numbering
• Remove characters
• Search/Replace
• Change Uppercase/Lowercase

The Thunar Bulk Renamer only handles basic renaming. If you are looking for a more complex renaming tool you can look into writing an additional module for Thunar (see the Thunar Extension Framwork Reference Manual for more information.) But for simple bulk renaming – this tool can’t be beaten.

Installing

If you have Thunar installed, the Bulk Renamer is installed with it. If not then you can:

• Open up your Add/Remove Software utility.
• Do a search for “thunar” (no quotes).
• Mark the results for installation (right click the resulting entry).
• Click Apply to install.

Or you can open up a console window and issue a command like:

sudo apt-get install thunar

or

yum install thunar

Once installed if you can not find a menu entry (in Enlightenment E17 it is in the Applications > Utilities > More menu entry) you can run the bulk renamer from the command like like so:

thunar –bulk-rename

which will open up the main window.

Usage

Figure 1

The Bulk Renamer window (see Figur 1) is a very easy to use interface.

The first step in renaming files with this tool is to add the files you want to rename. Once you have your files selected it is time to figure out how you want to rename them.

there are a few different ways to rename your files. From the drop-down list you can do the following:

• Add the date/time.
• Insert/Overwrite.
• Insert numbering.
• Remove characters.
• Search and replace.
• Switch uppercase/lowercase

Figure 2

Each different type selected from the drop-down will offer different options to select or configure. For instance, if you select Remove Characters from the drop-down list (see Figure 2) you will need to configure the:

• Remove From Position: The left-most character in the string to be removed.
• To Position: The right-most character in the string to be removed.

You can also select to include only the Name only, the Suffix only, or the Name and Suffix in your renaming.

Figure 3

As you add your configuration options you will see what the results of the renaming will look like in real time in the left pane of the window (see Figure 3).

Once you have made all of your choices click the Rename files button and the files will be renamed.

One piece of advice: There is no auto-undo feature with Thunar. If you rename files and need to re-rename files you will have to add the files again and then rename the files to either add or remove what you changed. So set up your bulk renaming carefully.

Final thoughts

If you have a need for a batch renaming tool, and you do not want to play around with the command line, the Thunar Bulk Renamer is one tool that can make a troublesome task simple. Give Thunar a try; not only is it a good file manager it can make your job easier.