One of the ways to optimize photos for the web is to use CSS sprites. Sprites work best for images that are used inside navigation or other site elements, that are going to remain the same more or less. The other option is to optimize the image size by altering the amount of information contained in images, compressing them and removing any unnecessary metadata.

Here are some of the options you can use to optimize images for the web.

Use Your Image Editor

Most image editors have one or more ways to optimize images for the web. Photoshop and GIMP let you choose the quality of the saved file which can be used to control the file size. In addition Photoshop also offers a save for web feature, which not only optimizes the size, but also takes care of color profiles so that the colors in your images look the same on the screen as you intend them to.

Smush.It

Developed by Yahoo, Smush.It analyzes the file format of the specific image file that you are trying to optimize and then applies the specific optimizations for that particular image format. Great thing about Smush.It is that it doesn’t alter the quality of the image. You upload the images that you want to optimize, Smush.It processes them and gives back the results in a downloadable zip file.

Online Image Optimizer

Online Image Optimizer lets you upload a gif, jpg or png image of 300KB or less and optimize them. Just choose an image from your computer, upload it and Online Image Optimizer will do the rest for you. It presents you with a number of different versions of the image along with the size and optional preview. Depending upon the purpose you are using the image from you can choose from a set of options. There is evident degradation in image quality in the very low size images. Optionally Online Image Optimizer also gives you an option to convert the format of the image file to one GIF, JPG or PNG.

PNG Crusher

PNG Crusher is a Mac application. As the name suggests it specializes in PNG file optimization. The application gives you a container of sorts that lets you drag and drop PNG files onto it. The files are then compressed using OptiPNG as the backend. The site notes some PNG’s are already pretty optimized and PNG crusher can’t do much with them. The PNG files are replaced with the optimized versions only if the compressed files are smaller than the original ones.

GIFWorks

GIFWorks performs a number of operations on GIF files. You can upload an image from your computer or specify a web URL and then edit the GIF file, add transition effects between frames as well as optimize the GIF image. GIFWorks provides you with three options to optimize GIF images for the web, you can reduce colors, restrict the palette to only web safe colors, or split the frames to pick and choose which ones to keep. In addition GIFWorks also lets you create 3D text from scratch as well.

PunyPNG

PunyPNG lets you optimize GIF, JPG and PNG images for the web by converting them into compressed PNG files. There is minimal to no loss of quality during the compression process and the results are excellent. The site requires flash and has a maximum file size limit of 350 KB.

Which apps do you use to optimize images for the web?   Let us know all about them in the comments.

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Some time back we showed you how you can administer a Linux server using Webmin and a browser. Let’s look at another tool aimed at something similar, only this time it is a command line tool, albeit the only command you need to remember is “proshield”. ProShield is available for Debian and Debian based distros (think the likes of Ubuntu and Linux Mint).

The installation process for Proshield is a little different than the simple apt-get command that you are used to, simple nonetheless. All you have to do is to download the DEB package and double click on the downloaded DEB file (or if you are so inclined you can also do this via dpkg -i <fullpath of the downloaded deb> inside terminal). All the dependencies will be taken care of automatically and you will have ProShield installed in no time.

ProShield does a lot of heavy lifting for you. Keep in mind that everything that ProShield does to to secure your computer system can be accomplished separately as well, without requiring ProShield at all. However, ProShield looks at a number of important areas of your system to decide if it is secure, up to date and well backed up. If you are a new user, ProShield is great for you as you might not know where to look for the required information and how to resolve the issues. On the other hand, if you are an experienced sys-admin, ProShield can be a valuable addition to your favorite tools that can simplify maintenance and to greatly secure your computer system.

As detailed on ProShield’s webpage it performs some important tasks like helping you in backing up your system weekly, checking for extra root accounts, checking for correct access control permissions, checking to see if apt is fetching only the information that is required, deleting unneeded packages from the local archives, synchronizing the system clock and plenty more.

ProShield is a command line tool that is very simple to use. All you have to do is to issue “sudo proshield” and follow the prompts. ProShield requires that you are connected to the Internet for proper functioning, so you should keep that in mind. If everything is fine, ProShield will set about its task and examine the system for you offering status and seeking input where ever necessary. After it’s done ProShield offers a set of recommendations based on your computer’s analysis.

So now you know where you need to put in your efforts to fine tune your system. You can now set out to follow these recommendations if you know how or want to, or you can stick around and ProShield will also help you fix these issues. Hit Enter and ProShield starts resolving the issues one by one. Read the description and instructions carefully and choose an option (usually something as simple as a Yes/No), ProShield will do the rest for you. This continues till ProShield goes through each and every issue and tries to resolve them. At this point, depending upon your choices you have potentially resolved all the issues reported by ProShield.

ProShield will even backup your computer if it has not been done in a long time. While it doesn’t offer all the features of a sophisticated backup software, it still lets you choose the important locations to backup and would create a Gzipped backup archive for you to use whenever you might need to restore back the files and folders.

Overall ProShield is an excellent tool which is useful for new users and experts alike. It checks your debian (debian based) Linux install to identify potential issues that can compromise security, tries to optimize apt functioning, manages local package archives and most of all – it is simple and easy to use and can save you a lot of time with just a single command – ProShield.

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First off you need an image. The effect looks good on a wide variety of photos. It can be used just as well in close up shots as in landscape shots. It looks especially great and surreal if you have a good amount of white in your photo in front of a colorful background, but that is just a personal favorite. You can experiment with most photos although an overall dark photo would not be a good candidate unless it is a close up shot done with studio lights.

Open up the photo in Photoshop. Go ahead and duplicate the layer (Ctrl + J). Select the newly created layer. I will be working with the following image from stock xchange.

Choose Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and play along with the radius slider. The actual amount that is good will vary from photo to photo. What you are looking for here is a blur that is evident but doesn’t take away the details from the photo. You can pretty much ignore faces and close up objects while making this decision, because we are going to take care of them in the coming steps.

With the blurred layer active, its time to play with the opacity slider. Again there is no hard and fast rule or a magic value that will do the trick, you have to experiment and go with what pleases the eye. However the general range would be around 50-85ish percent opacity. If you find yourself dropping below 50, you need to reconsider either the photo or the effect you are going for.

So far so good. Things are already looking nice and everything seems set. However, there are a couple of small things you need to look at before you send the master piece for print. First we need to bring back some details. In this case we will be working mainly on the faces, if you are working on a close up shot you might want to concentrate on eyes and lips. In other words if there is anything that you think should not be blurred this is how you would do it:

With the blurred layer active, add a layer mask by clicking on the “Add layer mask” button in the layers palette. Now grab the brush tool (B), choose a round brush, make sure you take the hardness slider all the way down to zero. Now make sure the layer mask is selected (indicated by a rectangle around the mask) and with black as the foreground color, start painting over the faces (eyes or other objects you want to be in focus) in the photo. You will notice details appearing from the layer underneath. (You can also choose different opacity settings for the brush to make this more subtle).

We are almost done here. As a final touch you can bump up the saturation a bit. Hit Ctrl + U to bring up the Hue/Saturation dialog box. Move the saturation slider to the right to make the colors pop. A nice subtle change is what we are looking for. With that done, the photo is now ready. And here are the results:

While I can only show you one of the applications of the soft focus effect it can be used with equally good results to reduce artifacts due to JPEG compression or high ISO setting and better still to hide those wrinkles!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Flash cards have been used to learn foreign languages, improve vocabulary or learn just about anything that can be written in a question and answer form. Using physical flash cards, you have to create cards; manage them and then keep track of which ones you have learnt and which ones are yet to be learnt. Using a computer-based freeware flash card program, you can leave all that to the software and concentrate on the learning. Pauker is one such Java-based flash card software.

Being a Java application you can run it on Windows, Linux and Mac. Pauker can be found here. The Pauker site recommends that you use Pauker via Java webstart. However, you can also download and run the freeware flash card program. Pauker doesn’t require installation and works as it is. Of course you would need Java on your computer.

On the first run, the application looks like above. You would first need to create flash cards to use with the application. Enter a description for the lesson and click Add new cards. You can now create new cards. The dialog that opens lets you enter the contents of the flash card and allows for basic formatting as well.

If typing the content seems tedious, you can also import cards into Pauker. Pauker can import from CSV or Pauker XML files. To import existing cards; click on Open, choose the appropriate format and then browse to the required CSV or XML file. Pauker will import the flash cards contained in the file and create a new lesson for you. You can also download ready-made flash cards from the site if they fit your need.

If you can do without formatting to aid your learning, there is quicker way to create flash cards. Choose Text import from under the file menu and type or paste the text that you want to convert to flash cards. The front and reverse text of the cards should be present on separate lines for the cards to be created correctly.

So much for creating flash cards. Next up is the all-important task of learning and then mastering the cards. Choose one of the lessons you created above and then click Learn new cards. A new window opens which looks the one shown below.

This is how it works: Two timers are displayed at the bottom of the window. One is aimed at Ultra-short term memory, while the other is aimed at short term memory. While the first timer is active, try to go through as many cards as possible. Just a quick read and move to next, don’t worry if you don’t get everything. When the first timer is up, Pauker activates the short term memory timer.

Here, the same cards are flashed but the reverse side is hidden. You have to recall the reverse side and interact with the application. If you remember the reverse side, seeing it again will further strengthen it in your memory. If you don’t remember, you should take a few seconds and try to commit the reverse side to memory.

After the second timer expires, Pauker begins with the real test. If you answer a card correctly now, it is moved to completed state meaning that you have memorized it. For the ones that you answer incorrectly, the above process is repeated untill you have learnt them all. At any time, your progress is represented in the form of bar graphs which displays the number of cards which are not learnt, committed to ultra short term memory, committed to short term memory and number of cards that have been learnt.

Pauker offers learning by typing and learning by remembering modes. You have to type the answer in the former. In the latter however, you have to tell Pauker whether you remembered the reverse side or not. You can customize the time for both the timers and learning strategies which govern how expired and forgotten cards are presented to you again.

Pauker does majority of heavy lifting when using flash cards. You can also find MiniPauker which is Pauker for mobile devices which support Java applications.

Do you use computer-based flash cards for committing things to memory? What are your favorite freeware flash card programs?

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

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It is very common to forget the file name of the document you require but you almost always have a good idea about the contents.

Docfetcher is one such software that lets you peek and search documents for words to find exactly what you are looking for.

You can get DocFetcher here. It works with Windows and Linux. DEB packages are available for users on Debian or Debian-based distros. For Windows users, there is a choice between installer and portable versions of the software. Running DocFetcher the first time, you will be presented with a screen that looks like this:

First off, you need to create an Index of files that you want to be searchable. Click the file types that you want to be included in the index, then right-click inside the search scope and choose Create Index. Choose the folder you want to index and DocFetcher will create an index for all the documents inside that folder.

Keep in mind that index creation may take some time depending upon the number of files in the chosen folder and size of files. Index creation is a necessary step as it allows DocFetcher to know the contents of the files so that it can search documents for words and give you almost instant results.

With the index ready, you can now search for text inside your files. Just type the term in the search box and hit Enter; you will be presented with the results instantaneously. The results section display the relevance, file size and filename of each result returned. Clicking on any results opens up a preview of the file with the search terms highlighted. Double click on any result and the corresponding file is launched for you to work with.

DocFetcher automatically keeps track of additions and modifications to the folders you have configured it to watch. You don’t have to create/rebuild index again, it will automatically update the index if it is running or the next time it is run.

You can use operators in your search query to fine tune the results. An important point to note about DocFetcher queries is that by default, a search for “web development” will return documents that contain the word “web” or documents that contain the word “development”. This is in contrary to what you might expect (being used to Google search). So to search for documents that have both the words you need to search for “web AND development“. Frankly speaking, this requires a little getting used to and could have easily been fixed by the developer. Nevertheless, there are other operators that work as expected:

• You can use “-” to indicate a term that should not be present in the document
• “+” indicates a required word.
• You can also search document metadata, eg “author:varun” will search in documents created by me (as mentioned in properties)
• Last but not the least, you can also use the ubiquitous wildcards – the “?” and the “*” (with their obvious meanings)

DocFetcher also lets you specify file extensions that you want to be treated as plain text files. This can be especially useful if you do a bit of coding. As an example, you can tell DocFetcher to treat .php and .java files as text, this would make the source code inside these files searchable via DocFetcher as well. This can be specified via the preferences dialog, or while creating/rebuilding index.

DocFetcher is a great alternative to Google Desktop. Sure, it doesn’t index image files and may lack Google Desktop’s bells and whistles, but that is precisely what makes it worth trying. It’s lightweight, you can invoke it on individual folders, intricately specify what to index, share repositories and index, and has all the options you may need from such a software.

What is your preferred desktop search tool to search documents for words?

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

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The problem is that you have to constantly change your computer network settings to match the place and Internet connection that you are using. Ideally, you would want to be able to switch these settings instantly, perhaps that is why we define different network connections with different settings. Keep in mind that these still need to be enabled and disabled explicitly.

Then there is another situation where you need certain services only for some time, but they startup every time; slowing down the computer. Developers would be able to relate to this. Often one needs to install resource-hogging Database Management System or Servers to write and test code. Ideally, you don’t need them to be running or bothering you when you are using your computer just for browsing the web. Many people even install another copy of the operating system to take care of such situations.

Quick Config can be downloaded as a portable version or an installer package to quickly change computer settings. Fire up Quick Config and you will be greeted by a welcome screen. Click “Create new” under Profile and you will be able to create a new profile. You can specify a name, description, hot key and a custom icon that will be used to represent the profile. Within the profile, you can specify your preferences for a number of items. These are broadly classified into Application, Network, System, Browsers and Desktop. Each one lets you choose your preferences for a different set of settings.

Under Applications you can specify the default browser and email client as well create your own set of startup applications.

Network connections rids you of the problem that I mentioned above. It detects all the network connections that are configured on your computer automatically. You can then specify which one you want to use for the profile and then specify its network settings as well. Not only this, you can also change the domain, computer name, add entries to the hosts file, configure routes, shared folders and network drives all specific to this very profile.

The System entry lets you change computer settings like sound levels, sound themes and default printers but the real strength lies in the ability to specify which services to enable for which profile. This single feature has been a God send for me personally. In addition, you can also change registry values for different profiles. This can come in handy if you want to change environment variables.

The Browsers section detects all the browsers on my computer and lets you change subtle settings like the home page, profile location etc.

Last but not the least, the Desktop section can be used to change computer display settings like the resolution and color depth for different profiles.

Keep in mind that all the plug-ins are disabled by default. Changing the preferences for a plug-in doesn’t automatically enable it and you would have to do that explicitly. So if things don’t look the way they should, double check that you have enabled the desired plug-in

Apart from the dozen or so settings that Quick Config lets you change for your computer, you can also customize Quick Config via the Settings. You can for example, enable or disable plug-ins (I didn’t find any additional plug-ins), change default language, autostart Quick Config with Windows and do other similar thing.

Quick Config is really an awesome application that takes the pain and repetition out of changing settings ever so often. If you can relate to the situations I described in the beginning then you must check out Quick Config. On the flip side, if you have your own clever ways or applications to switch settings easily, we would love to hear about them.

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What Predator does very well is change how you login to your computer. First and foremost, it enables you to use a USB key to lock/unlock your computer without having to enter your password every time. Obviously this has it advantages and disadvantages.

On the upside, it let’s you unlock the computer without having to enter the password so users won’t need to compromise between the password strength and ease of use. On the other side, if anyone gets a hold of your USB drive, all they have to do is to plug it in and they will have access to your system.

You can download the Predator USB security software here. Once installed you need to run Predator with administrative privileges. It asks you to configure a USB drive as a key on the first run. Plug in a USB thumb drive, create a password and then create the USB key. With that done you are now ready to use the USB drive as the key to lock/unlock your computer. You can still use the USB drive to store any files as you would normally do. From now on if you want to lock the computer have a look at the Predator icon in the system tray, wait if it is red and if it is not, you can remove the USB key. The computer will be locked after a fixed interval of time that can be specified in Predator settings.

Talking of settings, lets have a look on the things you can configure inside Predator. First off as I mentioned above, you can customize the time interval between your pulling out the USB drive and the moment your computer gets locked. You can control how the screen looks like when the computer is locked. You can turn down the screen’s brightness all the way to 0, hide desktop icons and minimize all windows to show through the wallpaper when the computer is locked. You can also specify if you are using a multi monitor setup. You can set it to autostart with Windows and enable or disable pause. If pause is enabled you can use the system tray icon to prevent locking your computer when you remove the USB drive. Very handy, if you just need transfer a file or two with your USB key.

The thing I like most about the Predator USB security software is that the keyboard and mouse are disabled when computer is locked. So it is not easy to figure out how to unlock the computer. You can of course unlock the computer by simply plugging in the USB drive that you configured to work as a key. That being said, you can still unlock the computer using the password you set inside preferences dialog. Predator displays a password prompt if anyone hits 3 keys on the keyboard. The user then has 10 seconds to insert the USB key or enter the correct password after which the computer starts beeping, if there have been 3 unsuccessful attempts, an alarm is set off to let you know.

In addition to all the above mentioned features, Predator also logs every event so that you know if someone has been trying to get into your computer. Overall, Predator offers a nice feature set. While it doesn’t add any additional security layers, it obscures the expected interface, disables the mouse/keyboard and makes it that little bit harder to get into the computer without having authorized access. Predator works on Windows XP through to 7.

Let us know what you think of such solutions and how you prefer to secure your computer?

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

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First off, this alarm scheduler is a Linux application, specifically for Gnome users. It is called ‘Alarm Clock’ but it is capable of so much more. In fact the name doesn’t entirely do justice to the application. With a little effort you can get it to do some pretty neat things.

Debian/Ubuntu based users can install using “sudo apt-get install alarm-clock“. It can also be downloaded if you are using some other distro. Of course it does alarms. Create an alarm, set the time and you are done. You can also choose between a countdown timer or a new alarm. If you go the countdown timer route you will be able to specify the hours, minutes and seconds after which the alarm will go off. The “Create new alarm from scratch” offers much more features and options that can be used for a number of purposes as you shall see.

The alarm scheduler options can be used to set up when the alarm repeats. Alarm clock offers excellent, scheduling options second only to cron. You can set an alarm to repeat on the said days of the said months. You can, for example,  run an alarm every Monday of January and February (as shown in the above screen capture). There is also an exclusion list if you want the alarm to repeat on all Mondays of January and February but not on the 25th of January. In short: the alarm scheduler capabilities have all your needs more than covered. Rarely would you need a finer control on scheduling, in which case you are probably better off using cron itself.

You can run custom actions at alarm time. In fact I seldom use it as an alarm clock, mobile phones are enough to wake you up from sleep. I had come across Alarm Clock when I was looking for an application that could remind me of a task and display a notification as a reminder. There were many that would let you create a todo list but not many that would alert you when an item is due. So I have been using Alarm Clock as a reminder.

This can be easily achieved by using the options available under the Notification tab. There are five options you can choose from, here is what each of them does:

• Play a sound – You can play any sound file as the alarm tone. Hit browse and point it to any sound file that you want to be played when its time for the alarm to go off.
• Display a passive window – A window of this kind is great to display a notification that will pop up as a window to remind you of the task that was to be done at this hour. Of course you can customize the text that will be displayed to reflect what you want to be reminded about.



• Display a dialog window – A more advanced version of the previous option. In addition to the title and message you can also customize the look of the window that will be displayed. You can choose to put a snooze option, and if you are so inclined you can also create an entirely new UI using Glade that will be displayed when the alarm goes off.
• Run a command - You can run any command at the desired time. With the entire list of Linux commands at your disposal this is a very powerful function Alarm Clock offers.
• Run an action – This option lets you run a pre-defined action such as shutdown or reboot, lock the screen or turn off the monitor.

As you must have figured out by now, you can easily use the passive window or the dialog window option to create a reminder that you will be notified of at the said time. You can also set it to repeat using the fine control you get while creating the schedule for an alarm.

In addition the alarms or reminders can be arranged into separate lists for easy management. You can also create birthday and anniversary reminders, excellent to keep track of meetings as well. You can create templates that can have pre-configured alarm settings – you just create a new alarm from a template, set the time and you are done.

Last but not least, you can also view a list of all the alarms that you have missed and didn’t act on.

On the whole, Alarm Clock is an excellent application that can be used for so much more than just alarms. If only it could sync with one of the online calendar or scheduling web apps, it would be truly awesome. That being said, if you can find a use for it in your day to day work, it can prove to be much easier than using a combination of cron and zenity to remind you of tasks that need your attention.

Do you use any other Linux application for such purposes? Let us hear about them.

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

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Maintaining an organized computer requires a fair bit of discipline. That said you can use some of the following tips to make the task just a little bit easier. These, coupled with a desire to keep things organized can go a long way in helping you arrange files and folders nicely.

Group Content In An Unorganized Folder

As one of the first measures, it really doesn’t take more than a right click and you can set the items to display in groups. Grouping lends the folder some organization. You can choose to group by name, size, type etc.

I usually prefer grouping them by type for the simple reason that somehow the type of file sticks with me longer than its name. Its not rare when you download a video file to view later then forget about it, then it comes to your mind but now you don’t remember its name. However, you still know it’s a video file so you can look around for one if you have grouped items in a folder by type.

Use Libraries

It’s one of the greatest additions to Windows 7. Something which perhaps you couldn’t have written on your wish list, but seeing it in action makes you wonder how you managed without it this long.

Libraries let you view content from multiple folders consolidated into a single view which is called – well a library. So you can have things arranged into different folders all neat and tidy, if you want to view them as if they were in one folder create a new library and add those locations to it. The above tip to group items in a folder still applies to the libraries, but now you have an added advantage that the content is already organized into different folders and you don’t have to mess with it only to view them under a single name.

Digital Janitor Or Belvedere

Libraries are all fine and dandy if you have say your music in different folders, you can still maintain the folder structure and view all music as if they were in a single folder. However what about folders like the “Downloads” folder? It just keeps on growing. No matter how hard you try, there comes a time when it gets the better of the cleanliness freak in you. To rescue you from such situations you can use a couple of software solutions:

Digital Janitor can watch a folder for you and then organize the contents into different folders according to the file extension. Download and run Digital Janitor and it lets you specify the rules that would be used to move and organize the files. Rules are nothing but instructions as to which filetype should end up in which folder. With the rules set you can relax as any file that lands in the monitored folder will be dispatched to its righteous place according to the rules you defined.

Created by the folks over at Lifehacker, Belvedere solves the same problem as Digital Janitor does but offers you finer control over the rules. So if the simple “move files according to extensions” doesn’t cut it for you, give Belvedere a try.

Use A Download Manager

Moving on to organizing the downloads folder, you can use download managers to do some work for you. Leave aside all the acceleration they lend to your download speeds, I am talking of their organizing benefits. Most download managers maintain a history of locations where you have been storing your files. Now in the “Too much mess” situation you would only have a single location in your download manager as well and we would still be at square one. What I have been doing for some time is to create a folder structure (perhaps in the downloads folder) that would keep things nicely organized.

As an example you could create folders like d_setups, d_archives, d_torrents (or anything that suits your need). Now the first time you download a software setup, archive or a torrent file, you would have to tell your download manager to use these locations. However, from the next time, all you have to do is to click on the drop down list and choose the appropriate location according to whatever you are downloading.

Upside: I trust my judgment more than my computer’s.
Downside: Requires two extra clicks which can be two too many for some people!

Manage Archive files Better

Archives are the preferred way to package files for transfer. As a result you find them everywhere – email attachments, source code packages, software bundled inside zip or rar files and what not. A common problem this creates is that the archive file continues to stay on in the folder even after the contents have been extracted. It might be useful to have the archived version in certain cases, but most often that is not the case, so the obvious solution would be that you either delete the archive or the extracted contents. The problem is it can be hard to find which archives have been extracted and which not. In such cases you can either:

• Delete the archive as soon as you have extracted the contents.

• or use wildcards in search to find which archive files have already been extracted and then get rid of them. eg searching for organic* would list organic_design folder as well as financial_docs.zip file. So you know that you have already extracted organic_design.zip and you can go ahead and delete it. Linux (Gnome) users can use Ctrl + s inside nautilus and then specify the pattern. Similar files will then be highlighted in the nautilus window. Keep in mind that this assumes that the archive file contained a similarly named folder or file which is the case very often though not always.

Have you got some tips of your own? Share them with us in the comments.

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We recognize this and we have covered a plenty of tools and applications that you can use with USB drives. There is also an excellent post which lists some tools that make things easier when using a USB drive.

However, it’s been quite a while since it was published back in 2008. Its about time to add a few more tools for your USB drive!

USB Safeguard

We have often highlighted the importance of encrypting sensitive files if you want to protect them from prying eyes. Mark even wrote a complete article on how you can encrypt your USB drive with Truecrypt. Truecrypt is great and awesome and useful in many ways. However, its not exactly the tool for a USB drive that every beginner can get the hang off instantly. I remember that it took me a fair bit of reading documentation and trial and error to figure out what is what and how things work in TrueCrypt land.

If your sole need is to encrypt files on your USB drive than you can look into USB safeguard. It uses AES 256 to encrypt data on your USB drive and all you have to do is to copy the downloaded executable onto your USB drive and set a password. Keep in mind that it needs to store some files necessary for it to operate on your USB drive and requires some space for that, so the entire storage capacity of your USB drive won’t be available to you.

You can choose to encrypt selected folders or the entire contents of your USB drive. It gives you the option to store the password in a file in case you forget it because there is no way to get your data or password back once you lose it. After it is done with the encryption, it lets you choose if you would like to keep the original unencrypted files on your drive or shred them.

USB Agent

The name sounds like what you would get if you’ve just done a system scan and your antivirus software returned a nomenclature for a virus. In fact, there is one which has a similar name. However the USB Agent I am demonstrating to you is a neat little application that can help you launch applications automatically whenever you plug in a USB device.

This can come in quite handy in a couple of situations. You might have a flash drive that you use to store office documents. In such a case, you can configure USB Agent to fire up your favorite Microsoft Office application for example, or you can use it to launch a web browser whenever you plug in a USB drive. In fact, you can even use it run a batch file which opens up endless opportunities.

The application requires some configuration. You need to create a usbagent.inf file containing:

[usb agent]
ON = <application path>
OFF = <application path>

The ON app will be launched when you plug in the USB device and the OFF app is launched when you remove the device. More information can be found on USB Agent’s website (which is in German but big G can help you with that)

USB Dumper (Direct download, read below before clicking)

USB Dumper lets you backup the contents of your USB drive automatically when you connect it to your computer. Just plug your device in and USB Dumper copies all the files to a desired location on the filesystem. The dump folder is named using the date on which the backup was made.

Geek Alert: USB Dumper has been used for “other” purposes as well. It has also been used to download data automatically from a user’s pen drive as soon as it is connected without the user knowing. However, there is no reason why you cannot use it for backup purposes. Personally, I use USB Dumper to backup the USB drive automatically when it is connected. Needless to say that Antivirus software will display an alert on seeing USB Dumper but as I always say, antivirus applications are tools that assist you and they can be wrong (although in this case they are kind of right). So if you are the slightest bit disturbed by it, perhaps you should stick with something like SyncToy. Have a look at the awesomeness:

Do you know of any other applications  and tools that you find particularly useful for your USB drives?

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For starters let me point out that you can find ready made Xsplash screens (as boot splash screens are called) on gnome-look, ubuntu-art and other such sites which we have discussed about so many times before. That being said there is a different joy and sense of accomplishment seeing a custom made boot splash screen and theme in action. Not to mention the personal touch you can put in. You can use your photos, put in your name or tag line, a motivational quote and what not. This is a great thing about Linux that I truly adore, you can chip in with code, with themes, with translations or just about any other thing you might want to change in the Operating System to suit your needs. In this article we will focus on the boot splash screen. I am using Ubuntu to demonstrate the steps but the tutorial would work for any distribution using xsplash.

Before Karmic Koala, Ubuntu used usplash to display the progress bar you saw when Ubuntu boots. Customizing Usplash, while very much possible, was a very involved task. With Karmic, Ubuntu now uses Xsplash which uses images as the background and is comparatively a lot easier to customize and tweak to your needs. You can change the background image, the “Ubuntu” text as well as the throbber that is displayed when Karmic boots up. Let’s start with the background image first.

By default Ubuntu displays a brown background with what looks like a spotlight behind the Ubuntu logo. We are going to change all that. If you have ever poked around your /usr directory (which you should) you must have noticed that this brown image we talked about is located at /usr/share/images/xsplash directory. Open it up and have a look inside the said directory, which would reveal that the same image has been made available in different resolutions. This is to make sure that the boot splash screen is displayed well irrespective of the screen size and resolution

Now, there are two ways you can change the Xsplash background image:

Option 1 requires that you know the screen resolution that is being used, you can then change only the image that corresponds to the resolution that is being used. This is trickier than it seems, because the resolution that is being used while you are working on the desktop may or may not be the same when Ubuntu displays the Xsplash screen.

So a better bet would be to use Option 2, in which you change images for all the resolutions. This way Ubuntu will use your custom image no matter what resolution it uses.

Changing the images is easy. You can use GIMP. Go under the Image menu and choose scale. Key in the required numbers, keep the ratio intact. If you don’t get the exact numbers, go for slightly larger values but keep the ratio intact. I suggest you back up all the images in /usr/share/images/xsplash into another folder on your hard drive just in case things go wrong. Then put the required file(s) into /usr/share/images/xsplash. That is it, no editing of configuration files required. The next time you boot up, you should see your custom xsplash background.

You can also customize the logo or add your own, all it requires is a little extra effort. You have to mind the positioning of the logo and the alpha transparency. In any case, if you are not familiar with the concept you can continue using the default logo. This is how it looks with what we have done so far:

If you want to go another step forward, you can create your own text or logo and save it inside /usr/share/images/xsplash with appropriate names (see image below). You will have to create different sizes depending upon the resolution so its best to start with a larger image and then you can always scale it down.

Go ahead play with the images. If you are not the one who would spend time creating images from scratch inside GIMP, you can always start with a high resolution wallpaper or photo, add your own elements to it and then scale it down to the required sizes.

What custom-made Linux boot splash screens have you made?   Let us know all about them – and how you made them – in the comments.

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

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There are a few applications that make coming up with your ideas to make a collage easier. Most notably Google’s Picasa has an option to make a photo collage but the options are limited. It lets you make a collage quickly and easily but sometimes it doesn’t quite do justice to the photos and you are left yearning for more.

At times like these, you would rather spend some time and take things into your own hand. You can then choose how to arrange the photos and which parts of the photo (if any) should be covered by other photos and other similar subtleties. As it turns out, the one program you look up to when you need that extra control and power to express you imagination – is Photoshop. So here are the steps you would need to follow to make a photo collage.

I am going for a more ubiquitous collage effect, which depicts as if your photos were taken using a Polaroid and then arranged on a table of some other surface. Using the same cues, you can create arrangements and styles of your own to give your collage a truly unique look.

First off, choose the photos you would like to make a collage out off. You should always have more than what you are intending to use in case a certain photo doesn’t blend in with the mood and overall look of the collage.

1. Create a new document. Give it the dimensions according to the purpose you want it to serve. I intend to use the collage as a wallpaper on my laptop so I am using 1280 x 800 as the dimensions.

   

2. Give it any nice background. I am going for the desktop look so I will be using wooden texture. Open it up in Photoshop. Copy and paste it into the working document. The image will appear as a new layer. At this point you can hit Ctrl + T to bring up the free transform tool to resize the pasted image if it is larger than the document.

   

3. You are now set to pull in your images. Go to File > Place… and browse to the photo you want to place into the collage. Photoshop will place it in the center of the document and give you a frame around it. Now this is where you get creative. Feel free to move, rotate and resize the photo just placed.

   

4. Now its time to add some layer styles to give the illusion as if the images are really lying on the table. Double click the photo layer. Add a drop shadow and a stroke. Refer to the images below for the settings. You can of course play around with these and use different values.

   

   

5. Go ahead and add as many photos as you like, repeating step 3 for each one as you add them. To duplicate the layer styles you can hold the Alt key and then click and drag on the “fx” icon and then drop it onto the new layer to copy the layer styles.

Here is the finished collage that you’ll get. The great thing about this technique is that you can move and re-orientate the photos any time you like. You can even add more and remove some of the photos if you so please.

Interesting Variations

The above was a “bare bone” collage to get you started. You can do loads more and get as creative as you like. Here are some ideas to make a photo collage:

• You can try a different background image that we used in step 2
• You could add captions to the photos. This would require adding a blank space to the photo having the same color as we used for the stroke. You can then type in blank area to give captions to your photos.
• You can use the warp tool to warp in a corner or two of the photo to give it a more realistic look.
• You can go for a whole new look, arranging the images in rows and columns and overlaying it with another image.

There are endless possibilities and I can go on and on about them. How about you chipping in a few ideas? We would love to hear about them.

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

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An RSS feed for your site is essentially an XML file. You must adhere to a specific format for the XML file (as we shall see) for it to be identified as an RSS feed.

Let’s first have a look at how to create an RSS feed for your site from scratch.

All you have to do is to specify your information for all the necessary tags. You can use any text editor. Notepad would work fine but have a look at Notepad++. Let’s see what each of them mean. To create an RSS feed, you start off the RSS file as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>

The first two lines specify the XML and RSS version as you can see. The third line opens a “channel” tag. This is what would contain all the information for your channel or website. Add these three lines as they are.

<title>MakeUseOf RSS Feed</title>
<link>http://www.makeuseof.com/</link>
<description>Cool Websites, Software and Internet Tips</description>

Those few lines specify information about your RSS feed and your website. The title tag houses any title that you would like to give to your RSS feed, link tag points to your website, description tag contains a brief introduction about the RSS feed or the website. Whatever is inside your file now, lets call it the HEADER

Next up we have the actual content of the RSS feed that will be displayed as distinct entries when viewed using a feed reader. Each entry is contained within a pair of <item></item> and must have the following content at least:

<item>
  <title>Entry Title</title>
  <link>Link to the entry</link>
  <guid>http://example.com/item/123</guid>
  <pubDate>Sat, 9 Jan 2010 16:23:41 GMT</pubDate>
  <description>[CDATA[ This is the description. ]]</description>
</item>

Again the title tag would refer to the heading or your content, link is the complete web address at which the entry can be reached on your website, guid is a unique identifier for the entry. Since all of your entries would be located at a different URL, you can use the link as the guid (if of course no two entries would point to the same URL in your setup). pubDate houses the date on which the entry was published.

The data has a specific format, refer above, the time must be in GMT, you can also refer to RFC 822 section 5 for more details on other date-time specification format. Finally the description tag houses the actual content or description of the entry. Remember the above would be repeated for every entry on your website. For example if you have a blog with 5 articles, a complete RSS feed should have 5 item tags to house 5 entries.

Close off the open channel and rss tags and save the file. Upload it to the appropriate location on your web server (the site root would work fine) and you have an RSS file at your disposal.

Now if you sit down and think about it, you would at once realize that the file you just created is static, meaning that the entries that you wrote inside the item tags would remain the same and wouldn’t change to reflect the most recent content of your website. So before we wrap things up, we have a couple of issues that need to be addressed.

Make the feed dynamic

Now this would require a fair bit of programming. If you are not confident with your programming skills, I suggest you’d be better off using a CMS like Joomla, Drupal or still better – Wordpress (if that suits you). CMS’s have a number of plug-ins for RSS feeds and most of them would offer RSS functionality out of the box. However, since you are reading this, I assume you are brewing your own solution and so let’s get coding.

You can use the same programming language that you have used to program your site. All we are going to do is to fetch the entries from the database and insert them into appropriate tags. I can only briefly outline the steps because the actual code would vary according to the programming language you are using

1. Connect to the database containing all the information we require (refer above).
2. Fetch all the ENTRIES that you want to add to the RSS feed. Usually it is the 10 most recent ones (so you can use “ORDER BY <the date column name here> DESC” in your SQL query)
3. Generate the first part of the file, ie the HEADER (refer above)
4. Step 4: For each ENTRY in ENTRIES do the following
   1. Generate an <item> tag
   2. Fill in the required tags and content (refer above)
   3. Generate the </item> tag
5. Generate the FOOTER to close off the file.

Make the feed discoverable

Another thing you need to keep in mind is that feed readers should be able to identify the generated feed as an RSS feed. There are plenty of ways to do this:

• You can create an XML file as the RSS file and open it up, manually add items everytime a new entry is published or whenever the feed should be updated.
• Or if you using a script to create the RSS feed each time it is requested, you could send a Content-Type: application/xml header before any other information.
• You could save the script as an XML file and have your web server software treat it as a scripting file. Example, by adding:

  AddType application/x-httpd-php .xml

  in .htaccess would make Apache treat XML files as PHP files.

Ideally, Firefox should recognize the RSS feed when the feed’s URL is entered into the address field as opposed to showing the contents of the script.

This means that Firefox detects that the file is an RSS XML file. You can then head over to services like Feedburner with your feed URL to get all kinds of analytics and other options to play along with.

Did this tutorial help you create your own RSS feed?

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All this while I had been using the terminal to encrypt a file or two when required. Seahorse makes the work so much easier by offering you a nice GUI to GPG. Under Ubuntu you can access Seahorse encryption via System > Preferences > Passwords and Encryption Keys. The menu entry is not entirely descriptive and you might write it off as a tool to manage stored passwords and encryption keys. Well Seahorse does that but it offers much more as we shall see.

First things first, lets set the ground a bit. If you don’t know about GPG here is a quick line or two, specially for you. GPG stands for Gnu Privacy Guard and it is a tool that you can use to encrypt information. GPG implements the OpenPGP, which sets the norms and rules as to how data should be encrypted so that it can be passed along safely. If that doesn’t make sense, don’t scratch your head too much. Just remember whenever I mention OpenPGP I am referring to a standard, and when I say GPG I mean the program/application/tool.

One important thing to realize is that a password along cannot solve the problem when dealing with sensitive information. There are tens of ways you can read a file without even entering the password let alone needing to crack the password.

The Public Key & The Private Key

These two terms used to confuse the heck out of me. Things have gone better now and I would try to put it in as simple words as I can. Whenever you need to encrypt any file or message using GPG you would create a set of keys. One of them is called the Public key and the other is called the Private key. Both of these are like two keys to the same lock, either of them can be used to encrypt the file or message, but – there is a twist. The twist being that If you encrypt the message using the Public key it can be unlocked using the Private key and if you encrypt the message using the Private key it can be unlocked using the Public key.

You might wonder, why use two keys in the first place. The answer to that will become clearer as you read ahead. For now remember that one of these keys is to be given to the recipient. Since you cannot actually use your handwriting or signatures you use GPG to “sign” messages. A signed message is accepted to be coming from the mentioned user and can be verified using the public key.

Let us see how you can use Seahorse:

Step 1: Create A key

Click File & New and choose PGP key. Enter in the required information. Leave the algorithm to DSA Elgamal if you are not sure about other options. You can bump up the strength if you want. With everything entered, click Create. You would then be prompted to enter a password or passphrase. Choose a real tough one, make it hard to guess, make it long. Remember a chain is only as strong as the weakest link and in this case the password/passphrase is the weakest link. At the same time, keep in mind that if you forget the passphrase all the information you encrypted using it would be lost.

Step 2: Publish The Public Key

As I explained above two types of keys are generated. A public key and a private key. The recipient. will need to have your public key before he can view any messages or files sent by you. Choose Remote > Sync and Publish keys. Choose a server, click close and then Sync. While the idea of putting your public key on a server might seem scary, it is completely safe and foolproof as we shall see.

Encrypt The File

Now that you have done all the hard work, encrypting the file is easy peasy. Right click on the file and choose Encrypt… In the window that pops up check all the recipients whom you want to be able to see the message/file. Also choose the account you would like to sign it as. Send it along. The intended recipients will be able to view the file after entering their own passphrase.

Decrypt The File

Any file that was meant to be seen by you can be decrypted by entering your own passphrase. Keep in mind that you will need to have the sender’s public key. It is the combination of the fact that the message was meant for you plus you have the sender’s public key that makes it possible to decrypt the file and view its contents.

If you are interested in not only seahorse encryption but all types, you might want to check out how you can create a private encrypted directory on your Linux system, if you would like to do all the above on Windows you might want to check out this.

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

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So here I am with a piece on how to back up hard drive data on your computer when the operating system won’t boot. The easiest most hassle-free way to achieve our objective is to use a Live CD. Period. Forget about all other ways and all the advice you get. If you have a functional CD drive and a Live CD or can arrange one then this is the way to go bro. You won’t regret it.

A Live CD, if you don’t already know, allows you to run an Operating System from your CD drive. There are lot’s of Live CD’s available on the Internet. A large number of Linux distributions are available as Live CD’s. Just pop them in, make a few choices and you get a complete OS on the fly with no changes to your data on the hard disk. You can do pretty much anything from there in, even update a status or two on Twitter/Facebook while waiting for the file transfers to finish. Here are a few Live CD suggestions if you care for one:

• Knoppix
• Damn Small Linux (DSL)
• Ubuntu
• A Windows Live CD – requires some effort.

How would you burn a disc when the freaking operating system won’t boot? My apologies if you are reading this after the problem has occurred. I am afraid you would have to ask a friend to create a Live CD for you or you can use another computer if you have access to one. That being said, it is always a nice thing to prepare a couple of them beforehand for the rainy day. I say a couple of them because 1) most of them are free and 2) you never know if one of them decides it doesn’t like your video adapter (for example) and refuses to boot.

The links listed above will let you download an ISO file. Next step is to burn the ISO file to a disc. Here is a list of our favorite disc burning software to help you along.

• Download the one you like and run it. Look for an option that burns an image file or ISO file to a disc.

• Choose the said option, let the software know where the ISO file is that you want to burn.

• Pop in a blank CD and the software should do the rest. When the burn process completes you should have a Live CD in your hands.

What If The CD Drive Is Broken Or Not Available?

A very valid scenario indeed, specially with the ultra thin laptops and netbooks these days. In such a case you can either use a USB CD drive or what we would call a Live USB stick. We have written about how you can create a Live USB from an ISO file or even from an installer CD. One thing to keep in mind is that some old computers just cannot boot from the USB drive.

Set The Boot Device Priority

Before your computer can boot from either a CD or a Live USB drive you might have to change the boot device priority from the computer’s BIOS settings. This is not as scary as it sounds. Follow along:

• Power on the computer. Most computers will display a graphic depicting the processor or the manufacturer or some general information. If you look around you will also see that the computer prompts you with a Key combination that you can use to enter the BIOS settings page. Generally it is the F2 key but it can vary.
• Hit the desired key (F2 if it is) and you are in. Now look for an option that lets you change the boot device. Different BIOS have it named differently and under different menus, but if you look around it should not be too difficult. The setting will list devices like CD drive, external drive, first hard disk drive and the likes.
• You can move these devices up and down in the list. Make sure that CD drive (or external drive if you are using a USB key) is listed before the hard disk. You can change this back once have a functional Operating System. Save and exit.

We Are Set

Now restart the computer with the Live CD inside the tray and the computer should pick up the contents of the CD and load the contained operating system. You will get a fully functional system once the OS boots up. The Live OS should automatically detect your hard disk and list the various partitions as drives. From here on you can use the computer just as you would use it normally and you can easily back up the required files.

You would of course need an external media like an external USB disk or a USB flash drive depending upon the amount of data that you want to back up. Just copy the required files to the destination as usual. When you are done, just shut down the computer, take out the hard disk and now you are ready to format the computer or attempt any other fixes without worrying about the precious data on the hard drive.

Have you been in a similar situation before? How did you recover your important files and restore the system? We would love to hear and learn from your experiences.

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There are, of course, other uses for batch processing photos limited only by the type of application you are using. We have shown you some batch processors before. However, those were focused on fairly trivial tasks that you could automate.

If you want to achieve something more challenging you would have to resort to Photoshop Actions or GIMP scripts. Or, as we shall do now, you can look into the cross platform application – Phatch. Phatch is an awesome tool that lets you do a number of operations to a batch of your photos in a snap. As the Phatch website details, Phatch is actually “photo + batch”!

DEB packages and a PPA are available for Ubuntu users, installation on Windows and Mac is bit more involved and requires you to download and install Python and wxPython separately before you can use Phatch. Nevertheless, follow the instructions on the Phatch download page and installation is fairly trivial.

Once you have Phatch on your computer, fire it up and let’s see what this baby can do. You will be greeted by a Phatch window prompting you to add actions. Click the ‘+’ sign and it opens up a window wherein you can choose various actions that Phatch photo batch processor can perform on your photos.

There are a number of actions you can choose from. The actions are categorized according to the function they perform. For example, you can find actions to downsize or crop an image under “Size” and actions to remove or manipulate exif data under the “Metadata” category. Click on the action you want to perform and hit Add. You can now specify various parameters as required by the actions. You can enable/disable added actions, remove actions from your list or change the order of the actions to achieve what you want. You would need to add a “Save action” at the end of the list. If you don’t, Phatch will prompt and add one for you.

Let’s now put Phatch to test and try to accomplish something fairly challenging. Let’s say you have got a batch of images out of your camera and they seem too flat. You would like to adjust contrast, add a border, crop them to a specific size, remove metadata and add watermark so that they all look the consistent when you upload them to say – your Facebook album. Here is one possible way Phatch can accomplish this:

• Add the Crop action, specify the parameters according to your requirements
• Add the Auto Contrast action
• Add the Border action and specify the border size and color
• Add the Delete Tags action and choose all
• Add the Watermark action, choose the watermark image and specify other details
• Add the Save action, choose the filename and location and you are all set to roll

Now go to the Tools menu and choose Execute. You can choose the files/folders containing the images you would like to apply the action list to. Choose the filetypes you want to process and uncheck the ones you want to ignore. Customize a bunch of other settings according to your needs and hit Batch. Phatch will faithfully do whatever you taught it above and you can then view the results in Save action’s configured folder.

Phatch is really an extraordinary tool if you need a tool for batch processing photos. It offers a lot of functionality and actions that can utilize in your batch processing. Do you know of any similar application? Let us know in comments!

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

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Hoping that these follow up Photoshop tips will help you do your work faster and much more easily, let’s begin where we left off and set the ball rolling:

Pick Colors Quickly

Who creates swatches these days? Well OK some people do. However if all you need is to sample (pick) a color from an image that is open, don’t go rushing for the Eye Dropper tool. Just hold down the Alt key when using a tool that requires color and you will see the pointer changes to eyedropper. Click on the color you want to sample and there you have it set as the foreground color.

Switch Colors Easily

You might know that clicking on black and white squares next to the color indicator switches the color back to defaults (i.e. black and white) and clicking on the arrow flips the background and foreground colors. These buttons are however, way too far to be useful while in the middle of a composition. Instead just hit the ‘D’ key to get the default colors as foreground and background and use the ‘X’ key to switch foreground and background colors.

Sample Colors From Anywhere On The Screen

Another Photoshop tip – say you are creating a wallpaper and you would like it to match to the current theme. You would like to sample the color of the Windows taskbar. Can Photoshop do it? Sure it can. This time go ahead and choose the EyeDropper tool. With the EyeDropper tool selected click anywhere inside Photoshop’s document window. Now keep the mouse button down and drag the EyeDropper outside the Photoshop window. You will see that the foreground color block updates to reflect the color of the pixel under the EyeDropper tool. Move to the taskbar and you can have the exact color you want!

Create Clipping Masks Easily

Don’t go looking in the menus for creating a clipping mask when it just can’t get any simpler than this: Position your mouse pointer just between the two layers, hold down the Alt key and the mouse pointer changes. Now click once and you have an instant clipping mask!

Restrict The Scope Of An Adjustment Layer

Adjustment layers are a great way to work on your photos non-destructively. You can create an adjustment layer via an icon at the bottom of the layer’s palette. However, did you know that you can limit the scope of an adjustment layer to affect only a single layer beneath it via a clipping mask?

You can use the tip just above or if you hold down the Alt key while creating an adjustment layer you can not only name the adjustment layer, you can also choose if you can also check the use previous layer as a clipping mask to have the adjustment layer just affect the layer underneath.

Zoom On The Fly

Another one of my favorite Photoshop tips. Can you imagine having to go to the zoom tool every time you want to zoom in or zoom out?  I say ditch the zoom tool. Hold down the Ctrl + Spacebar keys and click anywhere on the image to zoom in. Similarly Alt + Spacebar keys and a click zooms out. You can also use the Ctrl + Spacebar keys and draw a marquee with the mouse to zoom in on a specific area.

Modify Selections On The Fly

While using the rectangular or the elliptical marquee tool you can use the Shift key to constrain proportions (get a square or a circle). Keeping the mouse button depressed you can use the Spacebar key to re-position the selection. Depressing the Alt key lets you create a selection from the center outwards.

If a selection already exists you can use the Shift key to add to the selection, Alt key to subtract from the selection and Shift + Alt to select only the common area of overlapping selections.

Hide The Selection

When you have a selection active you can use Ctrl + H to hide the selection. The selection is still there, only you can’t see the marching ants so that it lets you concentrate on the work. Hit Ctrl+H again to show the selection or you can deselect using Ctrl + D.

Merge All Layers To A New Layer

Very useful. Hit Ctrl + Shift + Alt + E and all the visible layers will be merged to a new layer, keeping all the layers intact. You can then work on the composite layer without affecting any of the other ones and discard it if something goes wrong.

Select A Layer Without The Layers Palette

Sometimes if you don’t name your layers as you move along you can find it difficult to find them in the composition, especially if there are lots of them. In such a case, hold down the Ctrl key and click on the image – the corresponding layer which houses that area will then be selected in the layers palette.

Do you have any Photoshop tips & tricks of your own? If so, then let us know all about them.

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

• (43)20 Photoshop Tips & Tricks That You Should Know About
• (10)How To Make A Cool Collage Using Photoshop
• (5)How To Create An Awesome Soft Focus Effect In Photoshop
• (7)How To Change The Background Of A Photo In Photoshop
• (3)An Idiot’s Guide to Photoshop – Part 2 [PDF]

They will help you in getting things done quickly, save you a lot of headache and steps and overall inflate your Photoshop-fu! So here we go:

Change Brush Size On The Fly

If you are even the slightest bit serious about Photoshop or you have used the Brush tool a couple of times, this single tip is worth at least a dozen alone. While you are using the brush tool you do not have to go back to the options palette to change the brush size or softness. Left bracket key ‘[' decreases the brush size and Right bracket key ']‘ increases the brush size. Similarly Shift + [ decrease hardness (makes the brush soft) and Shift + ] increases the hardness of the brush.

Create Guides Easily

Guides can help you align objects in your composition. You can quickly create guides using rulers that appear at the top and the side of the document window. Click on the ruler and drag to create a guide. Release the mouse button where you want to create the guide. Once created you can quickly show/hide guides using Ctrl + ;

Don’t Cancel Just Reset

Photoshop can be pretty tough to get and even harder to master. Moreover, the nature of work dictates that you must experiment and things don’t always go the way you anticipate while experimentation. So if you are inside curves, or hue saturation or perhaps levels and you make a series of adjustments that didn’t turn out the way you wanted, you would want to start over again.

But wait don’t hit cancel just yet. Instead hold down the Alt key and see how the cancel button changes to Reset. Now click reset and the adjustments you made will be undone while sparing you the round trip to open the same dialog again.

Scrub The Input Boxes

There are a lot of controls in Photoshop that let you enter a value using the keyboard. Font size, brush size, opacity and who knows how many others. Well a peculiar thing about these input boxes is that you can increase or decrease the value that’s in them by just scrubbing with the mouse pointer. As you move close to any such control the mouse pointer changes to something like the one shown above. Now just click and drag in the direction you want to change the value. Generally dragging towards the right side increases the value and towards left side decreases the value.

Adjust Opacity Quickly

The opacity controls can be manipulated even faster! Just hit a number from 0-9 and opacity will be adjusted in increments of 10. This means that 1 would set the opacity to 10%, 7 will set it to 70% and 0 will set it to 100%. If you are looking for a definite value say 57% you can quickly type 5 followed by 7 to set the opacity to 57%. The trick works with layer opacity as well as for any tool that has an opacity setting.

Change Intensity Of Filters Without Dialog Boxes

Say you just applied the Unsharpen Mask filter to sharpen your photo. If you find you went a bit too far you can take back some of it by using Shift + Ctrl + F. If you would like to intensify the effect further you can use Ctrl + F to do so. Remember these would work just after you have applied the filter. If you performed other operations after applying the filter, these might not work as expected.

Unlock Background Layer

You might have noticed that the background layer has a little lock icon besides it. This indicates that the layer is locked. You can quickly unlock the background layer by double clicking on it, or Alt + clicking on the background layer or simply catch hold of the lock and drag it to the bin at the bottom of the layers palette.

Duplicate A Layer

Duplicating a layer can be very useful when saving selections or when you are unsure about the sequence of adjustments that you will be making. You can drag any layer onto the New Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers palette to duplicate the layer or you can select the layer and press Ctrl + J.

Duplicate Layer Styles

More often than not, you want to apply the same layer styles to two or more layers. You can remember the settings or trust your eye and go on applying layer styles one by one or you can hold down the Alt key, click and drag the “fx” icon onto the layer you want to duplicate the layer style on and you are done!

Multiple Undo(s)

So what is the universal shortcut for Undo?  Ctrl + Z. Yeah right, and you would expect that hitting Ctrl + Z multiple times would take you back interatively. Only it works a little different in Photoshop. Ctrl + Z toggles between undo(ing) and redo(ing) the most recent operation. So if you want multiple undo(es) use Ctrl + Alt + Z. Similarly for multiple redo(s) you can use Shift + Ctrl + Z

Oh, I remember a few more. However, let’s just save them for another time in part two of our series. Meanwhile let us know if you have any Photoshop tips & tricks of your own!

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

• (12)20 Photoshop Tips & Tricks That You Should Know (Part 2)
• (10)How To Make A Cool Collage Using Photoshop
• (5)How To Create An Awesome Soft Focus Effect In Photoshop
• (7)How To Change The Background Of A Photo In Photoshop
• (3)An Idiot’s Guide to Photoshop – Part 2 [PDF]

Now, I am not saying that you shouldn’t help people out, in fact it is always nice to do so. What I am actually trying to say is: wouldn’t it be great if there was an easy solution to the same common windows problems that you have to fix every time? Missing Recycle Bin icon, hijacked IE homepages and the likes are very common. If the computer happens to be running Windows you can use the following tool to quickly fix a lot of common problems and save yourself some time!

Case in point: Fixwin. Fixwin is excellent little tool that can save you a lot of time that you would spent searching for a solution or a registry key value on the Internet. You can download FixWin here. The software doesn’t require installation, just extract and run FixWin and you are all set to squash some problems!

The Fixwin page as well as the application start page recommends two initial steps (which make a lot of sense) that you should follow before using FixWin. First step is to run the System File Checker utility. SFC as it is known, checks for corrupted Windows file and can replace them if required. Follow that by creating a System Restore point.

Once you have created a System Restore Point you now have an assurance. You can always restore the computer back in case things go wrong. You are now ready to fix some issues!

FixWin provides one-click fixes for a number of common windows problems. The issues (and their fixes) are divided into categories like: Windows Explorer, Internet, Media, System and a miscellaneous category. Click on any category and you will see the many common problems that can confront you. Towards the right is the “Fix” button that will do all the magic. Click on it and behind the scenes, FixWin will modify a value or two in the registry to give you the desired results. FixWin can also be used to enable utilities like task manager, command prompt, registry editor and others which may have been disabled due to virus infections.

There may be occasions where the computer at hand has multiple issues that need fixing. One important thing to keep in mind in such situations is that you should only apply one fix at a time and then restart your computer. This lets you know if the last fix was successful and in case something goes wrong, you instantly know what caused it.

Keep in mind that there can be many reasons leading up to a single issue, FixWin tries to fix the most common cause for an issue. If something else is causing the problem, then the problem can persist after applying the fix as well. In such a case, we advice you search various forums that are out there for your problem, before applying other fixes

All in all, FixWin is a great tool to have in your repertoire for dealing with common windows problems. Granted it may not offer solutions for every issue that you are likely to encounter but it can save you valuable time and headache when dealing with common issues pertaining to Windows. Do you know of other applications that provide similar one click solutions? We would love to hear about them.

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

• (18)Top 3 Fixes For Common Internet Explorer Problems
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• (5)Speccy – An Advanced System Information Tool For Your PC
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• (6)Easily Change Computer Settings Instantly With Quick Config

So why am I talking about alternatives? Because I am about to present one! Almost all distributions offers a default Application Launcher menu. Then you can use various other docks as we have shown you previously. Another very slick application menu is the GnoMenu. GnoMenu is a highly customizable application launcher. Let us see what all it can do.

GnoMenu was originally conceived to emulate the Windows Start Menu but it has grown a lot bigger than that. The theme engine supports nice fresh looking themes and supports transparency even if compositing is turned off or not supported on your configuration.

GnoMenu is not listed in the Ubuntu Repositories. So you will have to add the PPA. Karmic and Lucid users can use the add-apt-repository ppa:gnomenu-team command to add the repository to your software sources in a single step. If you are using another non-debian based distribution you can always compile from source. Now just issue the apt-get install gnomenu command and you have got GnoMenu application menu on your system.

Once installed you can access GnoMenu through the Add to Panel dialog. Just right click on a panel and choose Add to Panel. Look for the GnoMenu listing and add it to the panel. Right away you will see the GnoMenu icon on the panel. Click on it and it gives you access to applications, places and the system menu.

By default GnoMenu application menu uses the KDE start menu (Lancelot) theme. You can change this easily and choose from amongst the many themes that are available. GnoMenu comes with a collection of about 10 or so themes, however you can download many more at Gnome-look, which has a separate category for GnoMenu themes.

GnoMenu lets you customize the theme, button and the icons for the menu. Plenty of options are available for each of them. Right click on the GnoMenu button and choose preferences from where you can customize GnoMenu’s look.

GnoMenu is not all eye-candy, it offers plenty of other options as well. For instance you can change bind custom shortcuts to bring up GnoMenu, choose how the programs are listed, number of programs in the list and many more.

The commands tab in GnoMenu settings allow you to customize the commands that you want to run when a particular item on the menu is clicked. If for example you are using wicd for network management, you can tell GnoMenu to run wicd when Network Config is clicked.

GnoMenu is a very nice addition to your panel. Not only does it offer eye candy for your Linux desktop, it does so pretty well. You can use themes that use transparency even if you have compositing disabled or your computer just doesn’t have the required juice. It can also be used with cairo dock, avant window navigator and xfapplet. The only downside that comes to the mind is that you cannot drag items to or from GnoMenu taking away some flexibility and intuitiveness. Other than that you can use it in place of the standard Application menu on your distribution any time.

What application menu or docks do you prefer to use on your Linux computer? Tell us about them in the comments.

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

• (21)Your Easy Guide to Windows 7 Themes
• (13)Vista Switcher – Replace Windows’ Alt-Tab With Something Cooler
• (22)Ubuntu System Panel Gives Quick Access To Your Applications
• (8)The 7 Simple & Great Tricks to Tweak Your Dock on Mac OS X
• (12)How To Customize Your Linux Desktop With GnomeART-NG

Photoshop has the excellent “Extract” filter built especially for such tasks. Photoshop CS4 however, no longer features the Extract filter. So we will first look at how to use the extract tool to pull off the maneuver, then briefly see how you can enable the extract filter in CS4 or use an alternative to the Extract filter. Let’s get working straight away, shall we?

Change the Background of a Photo with The Extract Filter

If you have pre-CS4 version of Photoshop, you can find the Extract filter under the Filter menu. The Extract filter is very useful to cut out or extract a person/object from the photo and then use it on another photo to change the background of the original photo. The tool is very simple to use. Although it opens a giant dialog box there is really no need to be intimidated by it.

First off, go ahead and check the Smart highlighter box right away. Now choose the highlighter tool and draw around the object you want to extract. Make sure you cover the edges, this means that the highlight stroke should roughly lie half on the object you want to extract and half on the background. You don’t have to be precise or want a Wacom tablet. Photoshop will help you along. Somewhat like this:

You can change the brush size of the highlighter for greater precision in corners and smaller areas. Then choose the fill tool from the extract filter toolbar and click once inside the area you want to keep. Hit the preview button and you will be shown what the final image will look like once extract finishes its work. Click OK if the results seem close to what you are looking for, or else you can start over once again.

Expert Tip:

Duplicate the layer before starting the extract filter. That way, you still have the original image when extract finishes. Now Ctrl + Click on the extracted layer’s thumbnail to load it as a selection. You can now use Select > Refine Edges to improve the selection and hence the extract. Once done hit Ctrl + C and then Ctrl + V to get the extracted-refined object on its own layer.

The Extract Filter in CS4

As I mentioned earlier, the extract filter is no longer present in Photoshop CS4, the latest offering from Adobe. You can simply copy and paste the ExtractPlus.8BF file from your CS3 installation’s Plug-ins/Filters/ folder to the corresponding folder in CS4 install directory. Oh, you can also download it from Adobe’s site if you don’t have a CS3 installation handy. My Bad!

When you fire up Photoshop the next time, you will see the extract command under the Filter menu. You can now use it as detailed above.

Alternatives to Extract Filter

There are always more than one way to achieve similar results in Photoshop. So if you would like to ditch the extract filter altogether you can use the improved quick selection tool. It does a pretty good job of detecting edges. In case it goes wrong, you can always add to (Shift) and subtract from (Alt) the selection. As an added advantage, it gives you a selection you can easily refine, so you wouldn’t have to work extra to get the selection as we did in the expert tip above.

You can also use the freeware InstantMask to mask out a person or object from any photo. It uses a slightly different approach that reminds one of the commercial plug-in Mask Pro from OnOne software but the results vary hugely.

Here is the finished result using the extract tool. Just added a background and some text!

Keep in mind that there is an algorithm doing the processing behind what seems like magic. The application has no idea who or what the object is in the photograph. You get best results when there is good contrast between the object and the background. That is one of the reason people shoot against a green or blue screen because then you can get excellent contrast in the green/blue channel and creating a mask to extract an object is super easy.

Have you attempted the task of changing the background of a photo before? How did you do it?

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

• (5)5 Free Awesome Graphic Design Tutorial Sites You Should Check Out
• (10)How To Make A Cool Collage Using Photoshop
• (5)How To Create An Awesome Soft Focus Effect In Photoshop
• (3)An Idiot’s Guide to Photoshop – Part 2 [PDF]
• (20)10 Must-know Introductory Photoshop Skills For Beginner Photographer

Ever wondered why it is that the desktop gets cluttered very easily? Maybe because it is the one folder that is visible and easily accessible. So you end up putting everything you think you need on there, not realizing that most of them will only be needed once or twice in a week. I mean really – take out the web browsers, an important document or two, perhaps the ‘computer’ icon and what else do you need on the desktop?

For the download junkies – there is the Automatic save folder extension for Firefox. Now let us look at some ways to clean and organize your Windows desktop.

Desktop Teleporter

Desktop Teleporter is a software that constantly keeps an eye on your desktop and quickly moves various files and items on the desktop into folders. You specify rules, and Desktop Teleporter waits for any new additions to your desktop. The rules are then applied to the new item and it ends up being moved from the desktop into the appropriate folder automatically.

The software doesn’t require installation, just click the executable and you can find it running in the system tray. By default it is configured to move everything except the items in the exclusion list from the desktop. So anything that you would like to remain on the desktop should be added to this exclusion list. The interface has a strange Mac OS-like feel, but then you don’t have to look at the UI often if the rules you specified are working as expected.

If you need greater control on the rules and want the magic on other folders as well, have a look at Belvedere.

Fences

Desktop Teleporter helps you move things from your desktop and organize them into other folders. If you would rather keep all the stuff on the desktop then I suggest you have a look into Fences. You can download and use the community (personal) edition of Fences for free, only thing is it starts bugging you after a month or so to re-install the latest version.

Fences lets you organize Windows desktop items into different categories. It does a great job and picks up items to put in different categories automatically. For the ones that are left out, you should evaluate if that item is worth being left on your desktop and then either move it or categorize it into one of the default categories.

In addition to that you can create your own categories and layouts. The thing with using Fences is that you can have a desktop full of junk and still make it look pretty. How is that you might wonder? Well just double-click on the desktop and Fences will hide all the icons and files on the desktop. Double-click again and you have them back.

While this may appeal to many, it is another reason for lazy people like me to dump everything on the desktop. After all who is going to see it?!

Wallpaper

The wallpaper can be very effective for de-cluttering and arranging items on your desktop. Drawing inspiration from some GTD wallpapers like these, you can easily create some for your screen resolution.

Creating such wallpapers is easy peasy. All you have to do is think about the various categories you would like to arrange your desktop items into. Then using any image editor create a new blank image, and then simply draw rectangles depicting the various categories. That is it, you are done at this point.

If you are feeling creative you can add different colors to the background, rectangles, some drop shadow perhaps and throw in a quote or line that gets you working. There you have it, your very own customized desktop de-clutterer that looks amazing. It is just like having virtual trays on your desktop on the screen.

So how do you keep your desktop neat and clean? Any special tools or tricks that you would like to share with us?

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

• (4)4 Proven Tips To Keep Your Windows Folders Organized
• (18)3 Useful Programs That Help Manage Multiple Monitors
• (16)Wally- Awesome Wallpaper Rotator for Windows, Mac & Linux
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• (15)Use Videos As A Screensaver Or Wallpaper [Windows]

The good thing about Linux is that you almost never have to hit the reset button due to unresponsive or hung applications. There are so many ways you can gain back control that you never have to resort to such extreme measures. In this article, we take a look at some of the ways you can deal with unresponsive applications on your Linux box.

Dealing with Linux Unresponsiveness – Using System Monitor

First and foremost you can use the familiar System Monitor tool. It looks a lot like the Windows Task manager, only it is better. Not only does it provide you with lots of information about the current state of the computer system, you can use the Processes tab to look for any misbehaving applications and choose to Kill or Stop the process. Both of these operations are very different in the Linux world: stop suspends the execution of the process and kill would close it completely.

Using the ‘kill’ command

So far so good, however there are times when you cannot use the GUI altogether. Starting the System Monitor is out of question in such situations. In these situations, you can leverage the power of Linux command line to your advantage. You can enter these commands in a terminal if it is available or you can switch to a virtual terminal using Ctrl + Alt + F1 and logging in using the text mode.

Each running process has a unique process ID under Linux. If you know the process ID of the miscreant you can straightaway issue:

kill <processID>

to kill the misbehaving process. This should hopefully restore some sanity to your computer and you can switch back to the GUI using Ctrl + Alt + F7.

Using the ‘pkill’ and ‘pgrep’ commands

If on the other hand you don’t know the process ID then you can either kill the process by its name or you can analyze all the running processes to diagnose the problem (using something like the top command).

You can use the pkill command to kill using process name. As an example the following command would kill Firefox:

pkill firefox

Notice how you didn’t have to know or specify the process ID. Alternatively, you can use the pgrep command to get the process ID of any running process on the system. The process ID can then be used to kill or send other signals to the process.

Using the ‘xkill’ command

When using the GUI you can also use the xkill command which makes your mouse pointer all mighty and powerful After issuing the xkill command you can click on the application you want to kill and it will be gone and killed for you in a click!

Using the ‘killall’ command

Last but not the least, there is the killall command. Terrifying as it may seem, it doesn’t kill all the processes running on the computer. Instead it is used to kill multiple instances of the same program. eg killall firefox will kill all windows and Firefox profiles that might be currently executing.

There are a lot more to these commands than what can be covered in a short write-up. ‘pkill’ for instance, lets you search for a process not only by its name but by the user who owns the process, the time it was started or lists all the processes that do not match a certain criteria. In addition, these commands can be used to send other signals to the processes as well. By default, SIGTERM is sent which may be ignored by some processes in which case you can use the kill -9 <processID> to send a KILL signal. You can learn about all the options by reading the manuals for the respective commands.

Have you ever faced similar situations with Linux unresponsiveness? What did you do to resolve them?

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

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One thing that is common with most launcher applications is that they let you launch programs using the keyboard. There is usually a combination of keys that you need to press and the appropriate application will be launched. This is great for keyboard ninjas, but a lot of new computer users prefer to use the mouse more than the keyboard.

If you are one of them, or you prefer to work more with the mouse there is this great application called MouseExtender that was made for you.

MouseExtender is program launcher with a heavy bias towards the mouse. The application is available for download as a zip file. It runs without installation. Just extract the zip file and fire up the included executable file. You might not notice any activity on the screen when you do so. A glance at the system tray would let you know that MouseExtender is running.

Once it is running in the background, MouseExtender can be summoned using a configurable mouse button. The default is the middle click. You should avoid setting it to a simple left/right click for obvious reasons. The MouseExtender User Interface pops up right under the mouse pointer which allows you to perform various actions. By default, it shows you a button each for the Control Panel, Restart and Shutdown.

Now, what good is an program launcher if you cannot launch your favorite applications in a breeze? MouseExtender thus lets you add commonly-accessed items to its user interface so you can launch them in a snap. MouseExtender lets you add any file (which means any program), any folder, any web address or any running program to the user interface as a launcher.

Things can quickly start getting out of hand if you have too many launchers inside MouseExtender. Perhaps for this reason, MouseExtender also lets you create tabs that allow you to sort the added launchers into different categories. However, grouping into tabs means that you would have to click an additional time – first to go to the tab that houses the launcher and then on the launcher to actually launch the application. So we suggest to add only the most commonly accessed items on MouseExtender.

MouseExtender offers a few simple settings that you can configure as you deem suitable. You can show/hide the 3 default buttons that let you restart and shutdown, you can configure how you want to summon MouseExtender, change the number of icons in a row, set it to auto start or use the compact mode. If you are up for it, you can also customize the launcher icons and pass additional parameters to the launched programs by right clicking on the program launcher icon that you want to edit.

MouseExtender is a great program launcher if you are biased towards the mouse. The one thing that irked me was that – it does require some initial configuration to add all the programs and folders that you want to launch with it. On the flip side, it stores all the settings and configurations in an XML file (found in the same folder as the MouseExtender executable) you can backup or take over to another computer to skip some of the configuration chores (provided the programs are installed in the same location, of course). Barring this minor complaint from a lazy me, the program looks and works great and helps you launch your favorite applications in a snap.

Do you use application launchers? Are you a “keyboard” or a “mouse” person?

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

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What is MP3 format exactly? We will now take a deeper look into such questions concerning MP3’s in this article.

What?

So what is MP3 format? We addressed the question to some extent above. Simply speaking, MP3 is a file extension for an audio file. OR to be a little more precise – it is a digital audio encoding format that can be used to effectively compress sound files with minimal loss in percieved quality.

MP3 stands for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. Despite the seemingly scary translation the technology involved is surprisingly simple. One important thing though – MP3 is strictly an audio encoding format, which means that it cannot be used for photo or video encoding, unlike some of the other formats out there.

Who?

As is often the case, there has to be an organisation or a person who specifies and mantains the standard. MP3 is no exception. It was designed by Moving Picture Experts Group which is responsible for setting the standards for audio and video encoding.

When?

While it is difficult to point out a single date when MP3 was created / first became popular, it can be said with a fair amount of certainty that the first MP3 files started appearing in the early 1990’s. From then on, riding atop the Internet’s popularity and peer to peer networking (think Napster) MP3 quickly became the audio format of choice.

Why?

So why was MP3, and is, so popular? In those early days of limited hard drive space, MP3 proved to be a blessing because it could reduce file sizes to as much as a 10th of the original size. Add to that it is super easy to create MP3 files, and there is no evident loss in sound quality and you have got yourself a winner in audio encoding format.

How?

The MP3 encoding algorithm is wily and cunning. It is based on what is called perceptual noise shaping. The perceptual noise shaping technique takes into consideration the following rules based on the characterstics of the human ear:

• Rule 1: Remove any sounds that the human ear cannot hear.
• Rule 2: If a loud sound and a soft sound occur at the same time, only keep the loud sound because the soft sound won’t be heard anyway.
• Rule 3: There are some sounds the human ear is particularly receptive to, always include these sounds in the final encoding.

Apply these three rules to any sound file and you will end up removing those sounds which the human ear was not going to hear anyway. Moreover, there is no perceived loss in sound quality when compared with the original uncompressed, non-MP3 file.

Despite of all this MP3 is referred to as a “lossy” format because it doesn’t contain all the information that was contained in the original sound file and it is thus smaller in size.

That said, there are situations when you might not care about the file size and you might want to include more information in the resulting MP3 file. This is certainly possible by using a higher bit rate. There is always a tradeoff between bit rate and file size when creating an MP3 file. Higher the bit rate, the more information there will be in the MP3 file but it also means that the file size will be larger.

On the other hand you can achieve an insanely small file size with low bit rates but that leads to loss of information and introduces compression artifacts (or noises) in the resulting MP3 file. Most MP3 encoders allow you to choose a bit rate either directly or as a quality setting, so you can tweak things around according to your needs.

Some Free Tools For MP3 Files

That’s enough information you can bang your head on. Now it’s time to get a little pragmatic. Here are some tools and articles that should get you started:

• Technology Explained: What is the Difference Between MP3 & MP4?
• 5 full free MP3 albums you can download legally right now
• How to convert CDs and Audio cassettes, LPs to MP3
• Make MP3 ringtones with Audacity
• Merge MP3 to join multiple MP3 files together
• MP3Gain to normalize MP3 volume levels
• An application or a webapp for all your MP3 needs

MP3 is presently the most popular audio file format out there. Now that you know a thing or two about MP3, go reward yourself with a few minutes of your favorite track. Banshee here I come.

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• (11)Normalize MP3 Volume Levels with MP3Gain

Ubun-student is an interesting application that enhances your Ubuntu experience and makes Ubuntu easy to use for new users, including things like how to install software, change configurations and tweak things around. It is not included in official Ubuntu repositories so would have to configure software sources and add the PPA for Ubun-student if you want to install it using apt-get. Here is how you can do that quickly: (open up a terminal and issue these commands)

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubun-student
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install ubun-student

This will install Ubun-student on your computer. If you prefer, you can also install it from sources, as detailed at Ubun-student Google Groups page. Once it is installed you will find it listed under System Tools in the Gnome menu.

Go ahead, fire it up and we shall see what it can do.

By default, it opens in the Apps view, where in you can easily install software. You might think that synaptic and the new Ubuntu software center already made it pretty easy to install new software, however with Ubun-student you can look for applications by category as well as by what they will help you achieve. As an example – if you look under the Development section, not only will you find common tools that are useful while developing software, but you will also find an entry: Make gedit more suitable for programmers. Click on it and you will find that it installs gedit-plugins package and also does other cool stuff using GConf tool like displaying line numbers and setting auto save etc. There are plenty of such actions (if I may call them so) under the apps sections that not only downloads the necessary packages but also configures the already installed software for you.

If it is the configuration and tweaking that you are more interested in, go ahead and click on Adjustments. You can now change various configuration settings related to your Ubuntu installation. The settings are appropriately named and the application gives you additional details if you hover over them.

Ubun-student also offers an awesome hardware and system information tool. Click on Info and then choose either Hardware information or Ubuntu Information to get details about the hardware capabilities and the current Ubuntu install respectively.

Ubun-student also makes it a snap to configure a number of third-party repositories. It offers Google, PlayOnLinux and Dropbox repositories by default. Now this list is missing a number of repositories that you might like to add software from. For a more comprehensive list, check out the guide to the New Ubuntu Karmic Koala. That said, you can enable the listed repositories by simply clicking the checkbox and hitting apply. Ubun-student than lets you launch Ubuntu software store or Synaptic package manager to install software form these repositories.

There is also a menu entry named Study, that basically lists a few web pages offering tutorials like “How to compose a latex paper?” and also lets you revisit Tips that Ubun-student offers when it first starts up. I feel that a dynamic listing of articles/tutorials from respectable sources would have made more sense in here. It would be interesting to see how this develops in future.

Overall Ubun-student is a great application that makes Ubuntu easy to use. It provides access to a number of common functions that a beginner to intermediate Ubuntu user might want to perform. If you are new to Ubuntu, it will help you along and you also let you learn what it is doing, if you are an intermediate users Ubun-student will save you some time that you would have spent installing, configuring or tweaking the traditional way.

Do you know of any other similar software that might be of help to new Linux users? Let us know in the comments.

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Well as it stands today, with so many Firefox addons, almost anything is possible in Firefox. Here are some add-ons that add common features of various browsers that are not present in Firefox by default:

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is the one browser that really comes close to being the default browser on my computer. Extensions are possible but the API is limited. Once the extensions API opens up you can expect to see a slew of extensions for the Chrome browser as well.

Here are some Firefox addons that replicate the features found in Chrome:

1. Locationbar2 – Adds Chrome-like domain highlighting and other interesting features to the Firefox address bar. It allows you to click on segments of the URL for navigation. The colors and text are customizable according to your liking.

   

2. New Tab Jumpstart – Replaces Firefox’s default start page with a Chrome-like start page displaying thumbnails and recent history. Although the start page’s design has changed in the latest version of Chrome, jumpstart still offers you the start page from previous versions.
3. Chromifox Extreme – If you like the looks of Google Chrome you should check out the Chromifox extreme theme. It’s as close as you would get to the Chrome look and feel. If the title bar irks you, you can try Chromin Frame. It didn’t work on my side when I was writing the article so you might want to keep that in mind.

   

4. Download Statusbar – Chrome displays downloads at the bottom of the window whenever you start one. Download statusbar lets you do just that in Firefox. You can customize it with a host of options and appearance settings. It also features a mini mode, which you can use if you would want to save on screen real estate sometimes.

   

5. App Tabs – Lets you pin selected tabs permanently to the tab bar. The tabs are locked and remain open across different browser sessions until you explicitly close them.
6. Mozilla Prism – Lets you prism applications from Firefox. The applications can be opened using a shortcut just like any normal desktop applications and feature a minimum browser UI.
7. Omnibar – Omnibar is a nice attempt (although it falls short) at replicating Chrome’s incredible address bar and what all you can do with it.

Firefox’s Newer Versions

Quite a lot is known about how upcoming Firefox releases will look like and what they will all feature. Here are some Firefox addons that let you enjoy those features in Firefox 3.5:

1. Ctrl+Tab – Lets you switch and list tabs by using the Ctrl + Tab shortcut. So what’s new about that? Ctrl+Tab presents an Alt+Tab like UI, which lets you see thumbnails of all open tabs when you hit ctrl + tab.

   

2. Tab Progress Bar – Displays a progress bar on top of each tab.

   

3. Strata40 and Stratabuddy – These are more for the visual overhaul than functionality. Here is a glimpse of what Firefox looks like after installing Strata40 and Stratabuddy

   

Opera

1. All in One Sidebar – Opera features a very functional sidebar. You can get a sidebar for Firefox using the excellent All in One Sidebar extension.

   

2. FireGestures – There are many Firefox addons that add the ability to execute commands using gestures. FireGestures lets you do almost all of them. You can use mouse movement gestures, wheel gestures, rocker gestures and keypress gestures. An absolute must try if you love mouse gestures in Opera.
3. ImgLikeOpera or ImgLikeOpera Reloaded – These add-ons give you greater control on how Firefox loads images. You can block images altogether, display cached images only or load all images. You can also selectively load images if you have turned them off for some reason.

   

4. Smart Stop/Reload – I absolutely loved the idea of a single button that acts as stop and reload depending upon current browser activity. If a page is currently being loaded the button changes performance to the ’stop loading’ action, else it acts as a reload/refresh button.
5. FireTorrent – Opera can act as a bittorrent client. If you want to add such capabilities to your Firefox install have a look at FireTorrent.
6. Speed Dial – The name says it all. It replicates Opera’s speed dial which is shown on new tab pages. I personally prefer it over something like Newtab Jumpstart, mainly because of too much information that the latter presents. The add-on gives you access to the 9 most visited websites from the new tab page.
7. Tab Preview – Gives you a thumbnail representation of the contents of any tab when you hover over it within the tab bar.

   

Internet Explorer

1. Fireclip – Loosely replicates the Web Slices feature that is available in Internet Explorer 8. The addon lets you clip various parts of a web page and monitor them for change

   

2. myFireFox – A theme that simulates the IE8 look and feel.

Safari

I must confess that I am not a big time Safari user so I am looking for your help on this. I had it on my computer for maybe an hour or so before I got sick of it. So based on that little meeting, here are a few suggestions:

1. Fission – Takes the progress bar inside the address bar. You can customize the color or use your own images as the progress bar. Neat!

   

2. Tabs Open Relative – This add-on makes new tabs open next to the currently selected tab, instead of opening it all the way to the right at the end of the tab list.
3. FoxTab – Brings cool 3D effects to Firefox. It replaces the default tab switching action with something a lot more spectacular. Not only that, it offers you different layouts in which tabs are arranged when you summon FoxTab’s powers

   

You can of course mix and match all these. In fact many of them could have easily featured under more than one browser category. App Tabs and Fission could have been mentioned under upcoming Firefox features while tabs open relative could have been featured under Opera as well. The Firefox addons mostly play well with each other, themes can cause the occasional problems, in which case you can always switch back to the default theme, or start Firefox in safe mode.

Got some more suggestions? I am sure you do. There is always a little more when talking about Firefox addons. Share your recommendations in the comments.

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As with any popular open source project, there are a number of forks, mods and releases of the Chromium OS on the interwebs already. One such release which has greatly impressed users is called Diet Chromium.

An odd name for an Operating System, it refers to the amazingly small size of the release – sort of a “Chrome Lite.” A mere 300MB, it is by no means a trimmed down version of Chrome OS. In fact, it supports more hardware than Chrome OS. Heck, I even got it working on my aging desktop computer using a 1 GB USB drive I had lying around. That is what I expect and want a cloud based OS to be.

Here is how you can get this Chrome Lite OS working as well:

You can download Diet Chromium from here. After the download is complete, extract to get an IMG file. IMG files are to USB drives what ISO files are to CDs. So you would need a software to write the IMG file to a USB drive. You can use Win32 Disk Imager as Jorge suggested if you are on Windows. If you are using Linux for creating the bootable USB drive you can use the ever so handful ‘dd’ command like so:

dd if=<path to IMG file> of=<path to USB drive>

With that done you are all set to try out Chrome (Chromium) OS. Plug your USB drive in and restart the computer. Make sure to set the boot order to check external drives before it checks the internal hard disk or it will default back to the operating system you have got installed.

The OS boots as fast as touted about. Almost instantaneously you are presented with the login screen, use your Google Account to login. After it signs you in you see a – yes you guessed it – ‘a browser’, Chromium to be precise. Gmail and Google Calendar open as separate pinned tabs by default. Everything is the browser and the browser is everything, so without much surprise the applications are all web apps. You can access them by clicking on the Chrome/Chromium icon.

The operating system is in early stages and not many options are available at this time. You can toggle ethernet or wifi on or off depending upon your preference (It detected LAN on my PC and WiFi on the laptop automatically).

Besides this there are a few options pertaining to Chromium itself that you can mess around with:

Help! My Computer Doesn’t Boot From My USB Drive!

Have a really old computer that can’t boot from a USB drive? Fear not, we have got you covered. You too can have a piece of the Diet Chromium pie courtesy of VirtualBox!

Although there are a few extra steps you would have to keep in mind. Remember that Diet Chromium is available as an IMG file. We created a bootable USB drive using the IMG file, well now we have to create a bootable virtual harddisk that Virtual Box will recognize. Doing so is easy, just run the following command:

VBoxManage convertrawformat -format VDI <IMG file path> <filename>.vdi

You might have to cd to the Virtualbox install directory if it is not included in the PATH environment variable. Now attach this VDI file as the virtual hard disk when you create a Chromium OS virtual machine. You can now start and use the virtual machine just like any other.

Trying out Chrome (Chromium) OS is even simpler now. All you need is a 1 GB USB drive and a reasonably good computer and Diet Chromium. Check it out and let us know what you think about Google’s new operating system! Will you switch to it full time once it comes out in 2010?

em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!

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So let’s get started right away.

Adept Ubuntu users would already be thinking about the System > Preferences > Remote Desktop menu entry. Of course we will use that. However, it lets you configure your computer to allow/disallow remote desktop access. It doesn’t let you connect to a remote computer. Extra software is required for that, which we now look into.

Allow Remote Desktop Connections

First off, you would need to enable remote desktop on the Linux computer that you want to access via remote desktop. Doing so is easy by using the System > Preferences > Remote Desktop option. In the dialog that shows up – check “Allow other users to view your desktop”. You can also configure additional options like requiring password for remote access and notification icons. It is advisable to use a password for remote access, so that only trusted users may be able to establish a connection.

With all that set up, its time to connect to it from another computer. Two possible scenarios arise: you can connect using another Linux machine, or you might want to connect using a Windows PC. Both require slightly different approaches. Here’s how.

Connecting From Another Linux Machine

Ubuntu uses Virtual Networking Connections for remote desktop. Your best bet would be to use a VNC viewer to access the remote desktop. Use the command sudo apt-get install xvnc4viewer to install VNC viewer. Now all you have to do is to issue the vncviewer <hostname/ip> command. You will be asked for a password (if it is configured on the remote machine) and you can then view and interact with the remote desktop.

Connect To Ubuntu From A Windows PC

If you would to connect from a Windows computer, you can use TightVNC or uVNC (There is also a seemingly portable version available that would run off your USB drive without installing, however it stores entries in the registry). Specify the IP address and the port number (default is 5900 and is not required to be mentioned explicitly), specify bandwidth that is available to you, hit Connect and you can access the desktop of the remote machine easily.

Mac users can also use their favorite VNC client (like Chicken of the VNC) and you should be able to remotely access the desktop of the said Linux machine.

Keep in mind that none of these clients support encryption and you have only established an unencrypted connection up until now. Teamviewer and LogMeIn encrypt the the data flow between the two computer. You can use a SSH tunnel to encrypt the flow of data. Here are the steps in brief:

• You need OpenSSH. (sudo apt-get openssh-server).
• Create the tunnel using ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 <ip address>, where IP address is the address of the remote computer. If you are connecting using a Windows computer, you can use PuTTY to create a tunnel.
• Establish the connection as before however, this time you need to connect to localhost at port 5900 (or whatever port you specified in the command above). VNC client will then utilize the tunnel you just created and traffic between the two endpoints will now be encrypted.

While this a lot of work compared to the one-click solution offered by Teamviewer or LogMeIn, it is certainly more configurable and caters to a wide variety of needs. Moreover, you only need to do the configuration once and you can also establish a VNC connection with a headless server (with some more configuration though!).

If you use a simpler or still better – a one-click solution, we will be happy to know about it. Tell us about it in comments.

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GRUBv2 is the next iteration of the immensely popular GRUB boot loader. It offers improved capabilities like a graphical interface and better design. If you are fan of mods like me and tried the previous tutorial with GRUBv2, you would have realized it no longer works that way. So let’s update the steps and see how we can create a custom GRUB 2 splash image.

• Choose a photo of your choice and open it up in GIMP. Unlike the previous tutorial for GRUB, where you had to choose fairly subdued images which didn’t have a lot of colors or gradients, you can be a bit more extravagant with image selection in GRUB 2
• Once you have it open, resize it to 640 x 480 pixels. (You can use different dimensions, but that requires a bit of extra effort as we shall see below). To do so, go to the image menu and choose scale.

• You can modify the image to your liking, perhaps add a motivational quote or your company’s logo or anything you want.
• Now go to File > Save as. In the dialog that appears, choose to save the file as .tga file.

With the image ready, its time to get into configuration mode. A lot has changed in GRUB2, so read along even if you are familiar with the procedure for the legacy GRUB loader.

• First off, you need to copy the file to the appropriate directory so that you can tell GRUB about it. So copy the file you just created to /boot/grub directory.
• Fire up your favorite text editor and point it to /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme. Now look for a line mentioning image files. On my system, it is line number 16 of the said file and looks like this:

• We need to edit it and replace the image file name, with the name of the file you saved in previous steps (sunrise_splash in my case)

We are almost done here, now issue the sudo update-grub2 command and verify it completes successfully. It tells you if it found the image you mentioned. If it doesn’t, it most likely means that you missed something in the steps mentioned above.

You can refer to this Debian Wiki page for more details on GRUBv2 splash images. The wiki also lists template files that you can use as a guide when creating your own custom splashimages. If you want to use higher resolution images and not merely 640 x 480 ones, you can do so by editing /etc/default/grub. Remove the # sign if it exists on the line that lists - GRUB_GFXMODE and change its value to the custom resolution you want to use. Keep in mind that not all resolutions may be available. You can view a list of available resolutions by pressing ‘c’ on the GRUB menu and then using the command vbeinfo.

If all goes well, you should be able to view your custom splashscreen the next time GRUB menu is displayed. If the image is not displayed correctly you might want to change the resolution to match the one listed in the /etc/default/grub file. Remember the default is 640 x 480. In case you are running short on imaginative ideas, you can install the grub2-splashimages package, that will give you a set of images that you can use as a splashscreen.

Give it a spin and let us know how things went. We would also love to see your custom splashimages if you feel like sharing them with the world!

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