I never learned to type correctly. I’ve tried several programs to help me improve but my favourite is Gtypist. It’s available for both Windows and Linux and has helped me improve my typing technique a lot.
Download Gtypist
I’ve had this batch file lying around for a while now, it comes in useful from time to time. On Windows machines with many users, sometimes it’s nice to clean out the temp and temporary internet folders once in a while. This is especially useful on Terminal Server where there can be many profiles with temporary files eating up disk space.
This script cycles through each user profile in the “documents and settings” folder and removes temp files. I’ve adapted this script in the past to perform other tasks on users profiles which has proven to be a good time saver.
CleanProfileTemp.bat
@echo off
cd /D C:\Documents and SettingsREM —-Clean Temp Folder—
for /D %%a in (*.*) do DEL /F /Q “%%a\Local Settings\Temp\*.*”
for /D %%a in (*.*) do FOR /D %%b IN (”%%a\Local Settings\Temp\*.*”) DO RMDIR /S /Q “%%b”REM —-Clean IE Cache—
for /D %%a in (*.*) do DEL /F /Q “%%a\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\*.*”
for /D %%a in (*.*) do FOR /D %%b IN (”%%a\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\*.*”) DO RMDIR /S /Q “%%b”pause
For some reason, I wanted Thunderbird to run at startup, and to run in the tray. Email is just one of those programs I like to have running all the time, but I don’t want it cluttering up the taskbar. I wasn’t able to find an addon to make Thunderbird run in the tray the way I wanted, but after some searching I found AllTray which solves the problem perfectly.
1. Install Alltray from their website or you can “sudo apt-get install alltray” from the console
2. Create the following bash script:
#!/bin/sh
alltray -na thunderbird
3. Add the script to your list of start up programs. In Ubuntu/Gnome: click System > Preferences > Sessions and add your script to the list of startup items.
Alltray is a great program and can be used to put any program in to your tray. There are other ways to put Thunderbird in to your tray, but this way works the best for me.
After receiving some good feedback from users who have downloaded my Tomfox Firefox extension for Tomboy Notes, I’m releasing an update. Here’s what’s new:
Special thanks to everyone who has downloaded the extension and the nice people at the Tomboy Notes project for their support and advice.
I’ve written a Firefox extension which adds a Tomboy option to the right click menu. Text can be sent to a Tomboy note directly from the browser. See this link for more information: http://harrycoal.co.uk/tomfox/
There are a lot of file recovery utilities out there, but my favourite has to be Handy Recovery. They are up to version 4 now, but they very kindly offer version 1.0 as freeware and it has always served me well:
“Due to overwhelming response, high appreciation of Handy Recovery 1.0 and a lot of user requests for an opportunity to make a donation we have decided to go ahead with the further development of this product and created a commercial version. At the same time the lite unrestricted version stays available online for download. We hope that you will find Handy Recovery really handy for your day-to-day activities.”
Maintaining a lot of log-in scripts is a pain, especially the repetition involved in adding someone to a security group (Finance) and then mapping the appropriate network share (\\Server\Finance). I’ve recently switched to VB script instead of batch files. This lets me map network drives automatically based on group membership in active directory:
Dim wshNetwork, ADSysInfo, CurrentUser
Set wshNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network")
Set ADSysInfo = CreateObject("ADSystemInfo")
Set CurrentUser = GetObject("LDAP://" & ADSysInfo.UserName)
strGroups = LCase(Join(CurrentUser.MemberOf))
If InStr(strGroups, LCase("cn=Finance")) Then
wshNetwork.MapNetworkDrive "F:", "\\SERVER\Finance"
End If
Printers can be mapped as well:
wshNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\SERVER\Printer1"
wshNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\SERVER\Printer2"
wshNetwork.SetDefaultPrinter "\\SERVER\Printer2"
This has been working well so far and is a big time-saver.
It’s took me a while but I’ve switched to Ubuntu completely. This is something I thought I’d never do. Ubuntu has lots of nice features, but I’d always boot back in to Windows when I wanted to get something done. The past few months I’ve been using it more and more and have decided to switch over completely.
Encrypted Partitions
This excellent guide on encryption with Ubuntu by Martti Kuparinen helped me encrypt all my partitions (except /boot) on my laptop. All you need to do is enter a password at startup and you’re good to go.
Tomboy Notes
I’m an avid note taker so Tomboy was one of the first applications that jumped out at me. It’s simple and always sitting in the tray ready to use. The only thing that’s missing is a Firefox extension. I do a lot of copying and pasting between Firefox and Tomboy so I’ve started writing an extension. It adds a “Create Note” option in to Firefox’s right click menu when text is selected. It’s working pretty well at the moment, there are still a few bugs when adding text containing special (or weird) characters which I need to take care of. But when it’s working reasonably well I’ll upload it in case others find it useful too.
Printing
Adding a printer in Ubuntu was something I was a bit concerned about. Will it have the right driver? Will my printer be compatible? So, I got a huge surprise when it discovered my printer (a network printer), auto-detected the model and installed the proper driver in seconds. Adding printers in Windows feels like a chore compared to this. On a related note, being able to browse Windows shares was something I didn’t expect I could do without a fuss. I’ve setup Samba in the past on a Debian server and found it tricky at the time. It works so well in Ubuntu and this was one of the main reasons I was able to switch.
My ATI Graphics Card
This is the only downside, and it’s not Ubuntu’s fault. The driver support for my ATI card isn’t good on Linux. They release a new driver once a month, hopefully things will improve soon…