Let’s say you are working on an important email, document, or a critical website bug and your computer suddenly crashes and wont boot up. You have to get this work done right away what do you do? With a live CD you can be up and running in two minutes with the tools you need to finish the job. When you are done with your work you can use the live CD to actually fix your computer. Whether you are a computer techie or an average Joe, I think everyone should have a live CD next to their computer ready to go.

What is a Live CD?

 
A live cd is a temporary operating system that runs from a CD instead of a hard drive. This means that it doesn’t permanently effect your computer. When your computer is rebooted and the CD is ejected everything returns back to the way it was. Unless of course you want to use the Live CD to make changes to your computer, like fixing a computer that wont boot. Maybe you need to reinstall but you don’t want to loose those family pictures you saved. Maybe there is 4 minutes left on an Ebay auction and your computer wont boot. Read more »

Flash doesn’t come with Ubuntu by default so we need to install if for all of our browsers if we want to view any sites that have flash. Adobe provides an easy deb installation file to install it for browsers like Firefox but not Opera. Although the package from Adobe doesn’t automatically install flash for Opera, adding it manually is as simple as copying over a file.

Download the .deb file from Adobe and install it like you normally do. Read more »

Google Chrome is the new browser that was just relased by Google in an attempt to capture the browser market to give them a significant advantage to their search/advertising business. With Chrome Google will be able to track what actions the browser takes to further narrow down pagerank of sites. Read more »

Ever dream about automating mundane tasks? Or wish you could train you computer to do your work for you? I think we would all love to have the power of automation in our lives. With AutoIt we can easily take a boring repetitive task and automate it. AutoIt can send key strokes and mouse movements to your computer. But what makes AutoIt most useful is that it is actually a scripting language allowing If/then logic, flow control, variables and has support for PCRE (Pearl Compatible Regular Expressions). Once you create your script you can even compile it into a single .exe file. Read more »

I have a script on my local computer that needs to send data to my website for further processesing. To accomplish this I use a powerful tool called cURL. cURL is an open source program that lets me send or recieve HTML data in pretty much any structure you could think of. I am going to use cURL to send POST data to a PHP script on the site. Read more »

Mutt is my new favorite productivity tool. I have been blazing through my emails and setting up custom macros and commands like crazy. I have have found myself optimizing mutt more than actual reading email since it makes checking email go by so fast. Like Vim I would say mutt has dramatically changed the way I do things. Read more »

Mutt is a console based email client and have been using it heavily the last few weeks. Now that I have everything setup the way I like I think it is the best email client I have ever used. I use Gmail for my email but ever since they allowed IMAP I have been looking for an email client that can provide, productivity and simplicity. Read more »

I love Opera and I am excited to be using the latest version Opera 9.5 that came out just a few days ago. With the new features, fixes, and new Dragonfly Webdeveloper Tool I believe that Opera is pulling away from the competiton and has always been in my opinion faster and better than Firefox or other browsers. Read more »