Author: Gayan

Different file formats have different ‘characteristics’ embedded into them, so the operating system can use that information to distinguish them and assign different icons, associate programs (for opening) etc, so at the end, users can deal different files with ease. For example, let’s say due to a virus, all of a sudden the icons and the ‘extensions’ were gone from your OS. Then the text, video, audio, saved web pages, PDF, word file icons etc will all look the same and the file association should also be gone. And I don’t have to tell you the hassle one will have…

‘Steghide’ is a pretty useful tool (steganography program) that lets you encrypt and hide a file inside another file’s content, so it’ll be ‘invisible’ to others (under most situations) thus helping while enhancing the security of your sensitive data. For example, let’s say you encrypted and attached a text file into an image, then there’s no way that anyone (most users at least) could even suspect, that particular image has a text file, hidden inside. The image will appear to be perfectly normal, anyone can view it etc, yet, the attached text file won’t be visible. Even if they were…

Whenever I save the recorded audio files into the ‘WAV’ format using the audio recording tool in Ubuntu, though most players play them without any issues, but, when trying to load them into an audio editor or trying to convert them for instance, some tools give me the following error and exit: ‘premature end of file “your-audio-file.wav” while reading audio data’ This is usually caused by incomplete or somewhat a ‘corrupted’ WAV file ‘header’ (a special part of a WAV file that contains information such as its length, the codec that should be used for decoding, bitrate etc). These tools…

Every operating system has a special kind of software that communicates directly with your computer’s hardware which is known as the ‘Kernel’. It’s actually a set of software tools, and not a single utility. And one of the important tools inside the Kernel is called the ‘Task Scheduler’. It’s purpose is pretty simple (though the overall process is complex), and that is to help the OS or the user run multiple processes (multitasking) as ‘smooth’ as possible. When you run a process, the Kernel assigns it with a value called ‘nice’, which resembles how important that process is (from the…

Unlike with the classic version, the ‘new’ Gnome Shell does not come with a desktop right click menu. In the past, when you right click on the desktop, you could create a folder, document, copy-paste files or change the desktop background etc. But when you right click on the Gnome 3 desktop, nothing happens, why? because it’s disabled. Now I’m not even gonna talk about this because to be honest, after trying the latest Fedora 17, I’m a bit pissed. Everyone said it’s so cool and gives you a ‘pure’ Gnome Shell experience … and you know what, they’re right…

If you want to measure the actual performance of your computer, then a benchmarking utility is a must have. For instance, let’s say that you just upgraded your Kernel (a low level of software utilities that communicate with your PC’s hardware) and it’s said to improve your CPU’s performance while multitasking, then the only way to know if it really has been improved or not is to use some sort of a benchmarking tool. Though a large number of tools available for the MS Windows OS (both free and paid ones), but for the GNU/Linux platform, there aren’t a lot…

I still prefer to memorize my ‘main’ passwords rather than storing them in software tools (I do store some but not the ‘major’ ones). But there are powerful tools that you can use to securely store you online/offline user accounts, and if you have a lot of different accounts, then whether you like it or not, you will be forced to use one anyway. Now I’ve written about several utilities in the past, but because I loved its simplicity and ease of use, I thought bragging a bit about ‘Pasaffe’ wouldn’t hurt ;-). ‘Pasaffe’ is another relatively new password manager…

In KDE (Gnome does that too), whenever you press the ‘Power’ button or try to Logout/Reboot or Shutdown the computer using the start-menu, you’ll be greeted with a dialog box asking you to reconfirm the changes. In general this is a good thing, because if you’re in the middle of doing something, and accidentally clicked any of those options (say while browsing the start-menu for example), then you’ll still have the chance to Cancel it. But then again, it can be a bit of a pain in the as* too :). Though in Gnome you cannot disable it that easily,…

‘Gnome’ and ‘KDE’ are among the oldest and the most widely used desktop environments in GNU/Linux. They’re both basically trying to achieve the same goal — creation of a fully functional and an easy to use desktop, interestingly though, by based on two entirely different ideals. Gnome tries to follow the ‘philosophy’ of ‘Unix’ (another operating system that ‘inspired’ the initial development of ‘GNU/Linux’), ‘do one thing and do it well’, thus their applications are extremely simple and don’t have a lot of configuration options (very similar to Apple’s Mac OS’s UI guidelines). KDE on the other hand, comes with…

Like most other GNU/Linux users, I’m sure you’re too one of those users who’s really pisse* off because Gnome Shell developers decided to remove those beloved ‘minimize & maximize’ buttons from the application windows. Having a single button (‘Close’) doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me either. Because whenever I’m using multiple applications, I too usually run into nothing but troubles. So, quite recently I decided to try Gnome Shell one more time, and this time I decided to add that missing ingredient ;-), the ‘minimize’ button. I didn’t add the ‘maximize’ button, because I actually don’t miss…

“Ddrescue” is  command-line based (easy to use) data recover tool for the GNU/Linux platform, that lets you recover data from devices such optical discs Hard disk drives. If your default file copy tool gives you read-errors and cannot copy files, then “Ddrescue” might be able to help you out. But please be aware that, depending on the size of the damage (say that you have a disc with lots of scratches etc), it might or might not be able to fully recover the data. But one advantages of using such a tool is that, it lets you “skip” the sectors…

If you use Ubuntu’s Unity desktop, then you must have noticed the small mail-icon that’s displayed on the top menu-bar (to the right side). It’s real name is “indicator-messages” and is sort of a simple “command center” that lets you control some of the functions of Gwibber (microblogging client), Empathy (the default chat client) and few other internet-messaging related applications that come with Ubuntu. For instance, you can set-up your e-mail account via Thunderbird and when you have new mails, it’ll display small and somewhat less distracting notifications. Or, you can change your online “status” (available, invisible, away etc) of…