Author: Gayan

S.M.A.R.T (Self-monitoring analysis and reporting) is a fail safe technology that’s built into newer hard disk drives that has the ability to monitor the drive and give feed-back about its health. On most occasions, it should be able to notify you just before something bad is about to happen (don’t count on it though… taking backups is still the king). This “health check” is performed by the HDD itself by using various read & write methods, spin up/down tests etc. Other than letting the HDD to inform us when something bad is about to happen, there are tools that we…

Unity 3D (the default desktop) is actually a plug-in that runs on top of the 3D graphics rendering manager called Compiz. And I honestly don’t know whether it’s Compiz, Unity or the GPU driver to be blamed here because since its introduction Unity has had a lot of issues (crashing, top panel disappearing all of a sudden etc). Not just Unity actually, to be fair, the Gnome Shell which also uses a similar 3D rendering technology is known for its similar “issues” as well. I don’t know how it’s with you guys but the recently introduced 11.10 Oneiric has fixed…

Ubuntu comes with an awesome photo organizer called “Shotwell”. It can handle huge amounts of photos collection without much of a trouble and even has some decent support for cropping, changing colors or resolutions etc when it comes to editing pictures as well. But if you want a dedicated image enhancer and an editor that comes with a lot of features but wanna avoid using the popular tools such as Gimp or Inkscape which are a bit heavyweight for that purpose … then you should try ‘Fotoxx’. Starting with the users with simple photo editing needs (such as me) to…

Ubuntu comes with a dedicated app called “sound recorder” which is pretty simple application. But if you want to record, edit (with few effects, etc) and then play the files with all your changes … well that ain’t gonna do that for you. In that case, if you’re looking for a simple (don’t be fooled by the word because it’s quite rich in features!) audio editor that supports decent amount of audio formats such as : Wav, MP3 and Ogg, PCM, etc … then mhWaveEdit is a small yet a useful utility. Main features… *. Comes with a highly simplified…

In Ubuntu we can easily create an ISO disc image of any CD/DVD thanks to the Brasero optical disc burning utility. But what if all you have is nothing but folders and files and wondering an easy way to create an ISO disc image containing them? There is a script called “ISO Creator” and as long as you use Nautilus this script will let you just right click on any folder or a file and create an ISO disc image file with ease!. The script is actually nothing but a front-end that uses the built in optical disc image handling…

The container format is the heart of any multimedia file because it’s what holds all the audio/video/subtitle and other codecs related data. Now there are a lot of multimedia container formats around but in my experience although they may not be as popular as some of the proprietary ones such as .Avi or .WMV … … open-source ones such as MKV and OGM are extremely durable and they also come with built in support for a lot of features (storing lots of different types of codecs, adding chapters etc) when comparing some of those proprietary/close-source formats. MKV (also known as…

Adobe invented the PDF (portable document format) thus their PDF Reader is perhaps one of the most widely used applications for reading PDF files. But in my experience, apart from all of its features and usability, it’s a PC resources hog!. If you have a PDF file with lots of images (and somewhat an older computer) for instance, then you won’t be impressed with its performance. Someone now could say that Adobe has nothing to do with it since it’s your PC which is the bottleneck. That’s what I used think until I found Foxit Reader few years ago! :).…

Usually when you double click on certain types of executable files such as a script (.sh) or a “.bin” file for instance, then Nautilus (default file manager in Gnome and Ubuntu) lets you run them either through the command-line or graphically via a message. But that feature doesn’t work on all the occasions (some Python scripts for instance) Or there could be occasions that some “.bin” or any other scripts has to be associated with some additional executable permissions (“chmod” for example) which can be a bit of a hassle since sometimes you’d have to run it with administrative privileges…