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

Tags: 4.0.4, apple, safari, software update

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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So where do you turn when you need an open source solution for course management? ATutor is one of the best and easiest tools available.

Of course many would wonder what can be added to a CMS tool to make course management easier. That answer is simple:

• Assignments
• Blogs
• Chat
• Course Email
• Profile Pictures
• Reading Lists
• Statistics
• Student Tools
• Syndicated Feeds
• Tests and Surveys
• TILE repository search
• Web search
• and much more

So ATutor is not just a re-write of a standard CMS. ATutor is a serious tool to help serious educators.

Getting and installing

Installing ATutor isn’t really that difficult. It will require a running LAMP server and root (or sudo) access to your web servers’ document root. You will also have to create a database for the installation. I like to use PhpMyAdmin for creating databases on my LAMP servers. Create a database named “atutor” (no quotes) and you are ready to install.

Download the archive from the ATutor download page and save it in your servers’ document root (on a Ubuntu server this would be /var/www). When then file is in place unpack the archive with the command:

tar xvzf ATutor-XXX.tar.gz

Where XXX is the release number. This command will create a new directory called atutor. Before you point your browser to the ATutor installation issue the following commands (from within the /var/www/atutor directory):

sudo mkdir content

sudo a+rwx content

sudo chmod a+rw include/config.inc.php

Now you’re ready to rock.

Point your browser to:

http://ADDRESS_OF_SERVER/atutor

and the installation will begin.

The installation of ATutor is incredibly simple. You will walk through a few pages where you will enter the necessary information unique to your installation. The final step is to send the information collected during the installation to the ATutor site. You do not have to do this, but it will help the developers know what their application is installed on. You can also submit your installed URL if you like, but you can uncheck this option if you are uncomfortable sending this information.

Figure 1

When you are finished you should go back and remove the /var/www/atutor/install directory for security.

Figure 1 shows the main window for ATutor. As you can see this tool offers quite the amount of tools. Your best bet to get up to speed with ATutor is to simply start poking around.

The first place you will want to look is the System Preferences tab. Within this tab you can enable self registration (which will save you a good amount of time.) Take care of this tab and then head on over to the Course tab where you can begin to set up your courses.

Final thoughts

ATutor is perfect for anyone needing a course managment tool but doesn’t want to either have to do any development or spend a lot of money. If you are looking for a single tool to handle all of your course management tasks, ATutor is the tool for you.

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Every server has an IP address and using specialist websites, a list of domains which point to that IP address can be returned. Several websites do this, and many charge for the service.

If one types in a domain or IP address on myIPneighbors.com, the site lists other domains that point to that IP. It can be a little unreliable, though, no doubt due to the site’s heavy load.

I have already mentioned that this site does have practical uses. It’s interesting to see how packed your host’s server is, so you can see how good a deal you are getting, and what they are hosting. This could be useful as it’s something hosts rarely reveal but is very important to company’s reputations.

It could also make an interesting tool for doing investigations. Using it, you can see what projects companies are launching if they’re silly enough to put the domain on the same server.

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For most of us (at least for me), that research involves the fun little dance of switching between Microsoft Word and the Internet, constantly reading, writing, losing my place, cursing the world, crying uncontrollably, and then getting back to work. But I digress.

One of the best tools out there, of the many I’ve tried to avoid that vicious cycle, is WebNotes. I use it constantly as a student and a professional, and it offers the most features and best usability of any application out there.

WebNotes, at its most basic, is an annotation tool. The first step is to install the toolbar (which works in Firefox and Internet Explorer), or the bookmarklet (which works in pretty much every browser, but with a couple fewer features). When you visit a website, the WebNotes software lets you can either highlight the text on the page, or make sticky notes with comments on the page. Everything you annotate is automatically added to your WebNotes organizer, for easy access later.

Once you’ve annotated a few pages, check out the WebNotes organizer. From there, you can either see the Web pages in their original form, view your highlights and comments on top of the page, or see only your markups. You can also search through your highlighted text and annotations, which makes finding that killer quote you came across an impressively easy proposition.

You can share notebooks, or individual notes (the organization and filing features of WebNotes make sharing them easy), which makes WebNotes great for collaborating on research within a group. There’s no emailing files necessary, no trying to figure out which version is most up-to-date; instead, all your research lives in one constantly-updated place.

For the more professional users, there’s the ability to create a “Report,” which is a well-designed aggregation of all your notes and highlights on a given subject. I’ve used it for giving presentations, or just summarizing research to someone else – it’s much more useful than I initially thought it would be.

The bottom-line of WebNotes is that it streamlines all your research. One, everything goes into one place, meaning there’s no hunting through twelve different Word documents to find what you want. Two, there’s no copy and paste – just highlight or comment, and everything gets saved automatically. The best thing about WebNotes, though, is that it lets you avoid the inevitable hunt through a page you know is useful, but that you can’t for the life of you figure out why.

A few weeks ago, WebNotes launched a “Pro” version, which adds some serious functionality to WebNotes. The biggest update, at least in my own use, is that WebNotes Pro lets you highlight and comment on PDF files. Particularly in school, I do a ton of reading PDF’s, and hate changing between the PDF and Word constantly so I can take notes. With WebNotes, that’s all avoided, and PDF markups go right into my organizer. (If you love the idea of PDF markup, but don’t want to use all that WebNotes has to offer, give Foxit Reader a look – it’s got all the markup love you could want.)

The Pro version also offers better support, and Multi-Color highlighting. It’s aimed squarely at professionals and students who do a lot of research from a lot of different sources, and WebNotes wants to be the source for all your research and informational bookmarking. For me, personally, it’s become indispensable in both cases.

The Pro version costs $9.99/month, but there’s a 50% discount for students who use the promo code “student101″. For gHacks readers, however, there’s an even better deal:

3 FREE months of the full, WebNotes Pro interface. The first 50 people to click this link will get three months free of the Pro features, to test to your heart’s content.

If you don’t want the added features (and the price tag), you’ll be reverted to the free version of WebNotes – which is pretty great itself – after three months is up.

What do you think of WebNotes? Is there a better application out there?

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The list of supported applications reads like a who is who of the most popular free computer software programs. Everything seems to be there from Firefox over AIMP to Notepad++, True Crypt and WinSCP.

Liberkey comes with its own application launcher which can be extended with software that the developers have not already included in the packages. Software can easily be added by a simple right-click in the program’s interface. It is furthermore possible to remove and add categories and applications from the application launcher.

A left-click will attach a new window to the launcher that contains information about the computer program while a double-click will load the software right away.

Liberkey will automatically check for computer program updates which can then be downloaded to replace the old programs. A free account is required to make use of the auto-update feature though. Liberkey is an excellent portable software suite that shines because of its update feature and extensibility.

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After much searching I saw nothing. I even started at the / directory and was coming up with nothing. So naturally I went right to the log files. Believe it or not, it was not in the log files that I discovered where the problem was. Of course I thought I should share this experience with ghacks in order to illustrate how troubleshooting a Linux machine can go.

After the futile manual file search for files I went to the logs. The first log I went to (which is the first log I always turn to) dmesg which prints the message buffer from the kernel. To view this you just type dmesg at the terminal window. This was my first strike as the kernel buffer knew nothing of my capacity drive.

My next step was to head on over to /var/log and take a peek around any of the log files that might offer up a clue as to why my hard drive was maxed out. My instincts always take me to /var/log/messages first. This particular log file keeps track of general system information regarding boot up, networking. Another strike.

At this point I realized I had to take a break and clear some space because the warnings wouldn’t stop. I doubled checked to make sure the reports were correct by issuing the command:

df -h

which confirmed that /dev/sda1 was at 100% usage. I managed to free up a couple of gigs of space by deleting some torrents. The errors went away and I could continue working.

My next step was to check the size of my proxy logs and Dansguardian logs. I had to move both systems over to my main desktop and had a feeling those logs needed to be rotated. I was right, but it didn’t solve my problem. The tiny prox logs weren’t huge (by any stretch of the imagination), but they were many. So I deleted the older logs and moved on.

I was running out of log files to check and nothing had given me any idea what was going on.

Search and destroy

It was time to go back to the search method. But instead of using the manual method (how long would it take to weed through the ENTIRE Linux file system – I didn’t want to know) I opted to employ a little help thanks to the find command. The find command allows you to add switches to your search to indicate file size. In my case I wanted to first see if there were any files larger than 100 MB in size. To do this I will issue the command:

find / -size +1000000k -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l

as either root or using sudo. What this command does is tell find to search for files > 1000MB and send them to the standard output (that’s basically the terminal window), and pipe them to xargs so that you can see the detailed list (using “-l” of ls).  Because I was starting at the root directory, I knew this would take some time.

It did. But after some time I discovered five files that were each 12 gigs in size in /var/cache/. These files were from a backup program I was working with and forgot to disable. So once a week my entire /home directory was being backed up. I deleted the files (recovering sixty gigs of space) and disabled the backup program. Problem solved.

Final thoughts

There are times when even the best logging system available will not tell you what you need to know. At those times you have to employ your best sluething techniques. Fortunately the Linux operating system encourages these types of administration tricks.

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The typing course is divided into different courses from beginner to advanced and specialty courses and even problem key courses at the end of all typing courses. The online service keeps track of the progress of registered users which is important as the typing courses can take quite some time to finish.

Each typing course consists of several separate lessons. The typing tutor will display various statistics after each separate lesson and each typing course. The first courses show the computer keyboard and fingers that should be used to type the requested key. This is helpful for users who need some visual guidance in their first lessons.

The beginning courses for example target the different computer keyboard rows. They start with a single line of different computer keys that need to be typed in by the user. The typing courses become more difficulty with time. Advanced courses for example ask the user to type in multiple key rows without the visual aid provided in the beginner’s courses.

TypingWeb’s Online Typing Tutor is a helpful typing course for beginners but also advanced users who want to work on their typing speed and decrease their typing error ratio.

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I am not a huge fan of mobile computing (as in phones), but Evernote is one app I would use myself. Phones basically suck for surfing. I mean the biggest smartphones still have tiny screens, so, at least for me, mobile surfing is a long way away. However, I do frequently have the urge to jot down a few things, which I currently can’t really do. Evernote is a huge help in this, and now that you can take it with you on your BlackBerry everywhere (or you iPhone), taking notes are as easy as… well, taking notes should be.

The best part of the deal is obviously that you can sync fully with your PC version, and this is the selling point for me. I can write notes on the fly, view some in offline mode, take a pic right into the app, or create a quick voice note. This is an especially big help for me, since I usually drive places, which inhibits my texting capabilities.

Anyway, Evernote is a great note taking app weather you use it on your PC, on you Phone, online or offline, so take a look!

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With no install needed, just run it, select a drive and watch as the table structure fills up with folders and sub-folders. You can double click on any folder to bring it into main view (cool animation here), so you can see more detail. If you’ve zoomed in on a folder you can click the name again to zoom back out, or you can use the forward and back buttons like on a browser.

There are options to show unknown space, free space, but apart from that this app is a simple hard drive space analyzer, but a really very well made one. It is beautiful, it is elegant and it gives you the information you need in a form very easily digested by the human mind. I simply love this app, if you can and you like it too, please consider donating to them. (via Freeware Genius)

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TiddlyWiki is one such wiki, which you can download as a single file to your hard drive, or your can host it online using TiddlySpot. I recommend you visit the site and download a copy for yourself, there are easy to follow instructions, and no real set up is required.

To organize your notes you can use tags, and the whole database is easily searchable from the search box at the top. For example, I usually think up my designs as a single HTML page, without any PHP, just laying out the design. Depending on the general structure of the design I have a few templates at the ready, all in my trusty wiki. To get the one I use for a “content on the left, sidebar on the right” layout I just type “template sidebar right”, and the first note will be the one containing this layout, I can just copy paste the code into my file.

There are a number of other uses you can put your Wiki to of course. If you’re learning to code, you can simply copy the snippets you find and you want to study, and tag them by language, for future reference. You can also store some helpful links, ideas, project plans and so on.

You can use this is a regular notebook too, the real use of a Wiki is that it is very unobtrusive. You can use the same file for your personal notes, your diary and your coding organizer. Since you can use tags and search, you can display only the tiddlers (or notes) you want, so your coding stuff doesn’t have to get in the way of your other notes.

The see the power of a Wiki you really have to take a look yourself, so head on over to TiddlyWiki and grab yourself a copy. Wikis are not everyone’s cup of tea though, so you may not like it as much, but it is a bit different than most systems so give it a chance, try forcing yourself to use if for a week or two, you’ll definitely see the benefits.

If you’d like to get some more tips and tricks for web development and specific languages like HTML, CSS, PHP and the rest, head on down to Scriptastique for yumm coding treats!

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You can invoke the tool by pressing the print screen button (you can bind it to anywhere else), and the tool will pop up. It has a great mechanism because you can draw on your desktop before you create the “snip”, so depending on what you draw you might decide you need a bigger area. You can then use a box or a freehand tool to select the area you need and snip it.

Once that is done the snipped image will sort of hover on your desktop in a very cool way, you really have to see it to appreciate it, take a look on the website above or at youtube directly. You can save it to the clipboard, edit it with Paint or your can save it to your hard drive. My only problem was that the edit option opens up Paint and apparently there is nothing you can do about this. Since you can send to clipboard it’s not that bad, you can open it up in Gimp or Photoshop by simply pasting, but since you can choose saving format, timer option and so much, to me the inclusion of this feature would have been obvious. Great looking app though, give it a go!

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It may seem like a timely process, but software can quickly hasten the process and if you’re willing to pay $10-$20, you can buy hardware which will further minimise the needed time.

You must initially decide how you will input your possessions into whatever software you choose to own. Naturally, you can input the product’s details but this can be timely. Other options are to buy an inexpensive barcode scanner or some software even allows you to utilise your webcam as a barcode scanner.

With regards to software, there are options for every platform.

The de facto official cataloguing software for OS X has to be Delicious Library. Delicious Library allows you to search Amazon for items, through keywords, barcodes, titles, authors, directors etc., and then import the data, including the current price used versions sell there, straight into the software. Items can then be displayed in a number of ways, including an aesthetically appealing ’shelf’ mode which shows the picture of each item on a shelf and is at the item’s size. One can also rate items inside the software. Supported input modes are typing, scanning barcodes with the iSight camera (to varied degrees of success) or using their Bluetooth barcode scanner (which costs over $100!). It also allows libraries to be shared over a local network. It costs $40.

MediaMan is similar software for Windows. It too grabs data off Amazon, displays it in a ’shelf’-like view. It supports USB barcode scanners and webcams too. It works on XP and Vista, and also costs $40! Basically, it’s like Delicious Library for Windows!

GCStar is free and open-source cataloguing software, for Linux, BSD, OS X and Windows. The software can grab data from a host of sources.

I use a CueCat Barcode Scanner, which when modified works with all of the above software. It simply converts barcodes into keystrokes. You can pick one of these up for around �10, but ensure it’s modified or it won’t work.

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You can enable this is the labs settings in your account, and once you do, you should see some suggestions come up. For me this didn’t work perfectly because I actually rarely email groups, let alone more groups. If you use email mostly for client-to-client work you probably won’t find this too useful, but in an office-like work environment this could be really handy.

For myself I’d rather like a better contact management system instead, something better integrated with the compose screen, maybe once that can read your first line and decide on the recipient. You could tell Gmail that if you begin a letter with “Hi Daniel” you want to send an email to me. Based on names this could be automated to some extent too. Do you have any contact feature suggestions for Gmail you’d love to see?

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So instead, I gave Paint.net another go, an application which I have tried before, but gave up because I heard GIMP was so awesome. Paint.net is a graphical application just like Photoshop, but without many of its fancy tools. If you just need some cropping, resizing and positioning action for images in your blog, Paint.net will be great. At around 6Mb in size, it doesn’t take a toll on your system either.

For me it works quite well for basic web design too, simple gradients, some web 2.0 style reflections, nothing too complex. The two things which I miss most about Photoshop though is the text capabilities and vector graphics. Text capabilities in both GIMP and Pain.net are shabby compared to PS, and Paint.net doesn’t really have great pen tools either. If you need way more power than the simple Windows Paint, but way less than Photoshop, Paint.net is a solid, well built, lightweight image editor for you.

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