LInux Mint 12 XFCE

For those who read this blog from time to time, it's no surprise that I'm a linux user. The machine I'm currently using is a bit of a dinosaur, being about 6 years old and it's been without a Windows partition for all but the first week of its existence. I develop websites, so there are still a few version of Windows installed on some machines in the house for testing purposes, but they get used very rarely. One XP, one Vista and one Win7 - none of which get updated on any kind of regular basis. So be it.

Yesterday, I added Mint 12 XFCE to this desktop, adding it to a new partition (because I'm lazy and wanted to keep my old stuff, just in case). Less than half an hour later, the new OS is up and running, and everything works without issues, with the exception of my unsupported scanner. Even my HP1006 printer fired up without needing to be tweaked, a nice change from having to compile a driver on the fly for it, as I had to do in the past. Quite sweet!

Evernote and the iPhone

The iPhone is a very cool device. WE all know that, but what I didn't know was that one of the best of all the free apps for the iPhone, Evernote, also runs on the web so I can update Notebooks from my browser. And, even ore cool, there's a version of it, called NixNote, that runs on Linux!

If you haven't seen Evernote, it's a real simple process. There's a central server where you log in to your account and any notes you create in the program can then be accessed from any device that you then use to login to the server. It reminds me a bit of the old Palm Pilot and how it could synch its contacts to my desktop, but Evernote is a lot more powerful than my Palm ever was.

We're gearing up to start using it for our business, as it will allow the guys to be kept up to date while they're out on the road - instead of always calling me when they need a customer's phone number. The system supports the use of tags, so I can tag as entry with all sorts of keywords that will help us find data in many different ways. For example, our customers always have a 2 year commitment when they sign up for service, so I'm tagging their accounts with the future month when they can be updated. Very cool!

Intriguing Private Monetary System

I must admit, there are many times when I want to be able to buy something without having to deal with somebody capturing all those lovely personal details about me. And there have been times when I have wanted to sell something without having to be held over the barrel by some payment processing system that seeks to capture any possible profit I might be able to garner. Oh, and, did I mention that I don't have a huge amount of faith in the US dollar at this point? So when I saw the following video, it caught my attention - ooh, shiny objects!

Take a look and see if it might work in some way for you too!

Be Cautious!

There's a major email virus galloping across the internet today, causing all sorts of havoc in its wake. If you see a message with a subject like "Here you Are" that contains a link purporting to be a PDF file, delete it. The PDF is a fake and actually contains a script that can infect your email and spam your contact list. Apparently, quite a few major companies have been hit with the virus today and there appear to be several different variations of the virus. Be very careful with any email that contains links, even when coming from people you know as this virus infects contact lists.

Organizing Ebooks

If you're like me, your hard drive contains all sorts of ebooks spread all over the place, with varying degrees of organization. It can be a real challenge to locate a particular text when I want it, simply because the ebooks are sitting in a deep hierarchy of directories. Luckily there is a nice solution to help get this mess organized and make it easy to find a particular ebook when I want it - a program that handles all sorts of digital texts - designed for Linux.

Calibre can not only import your ebooks in a wide variety of formats to a central directory, it allows you to modify information about the text and add tags to make it easy  to categorize your collection.

In this view, you can see a portion of my partially loaded collection, with some tags added. By default the program will bring up the listing of everything in the collection. On the left side of the program are some of the criteria selections that can be used to find texts within the collection. Since the system supports using multiple tags for each book, the system can act like a huge index of your collection, making it easy to find a book no matter how you have it tagged. When you add a book to the collection, the program actually makes a copy of it in the main directory and creates a separate directory structure based on author.

The tagging feature is what this system so useful to me, as I have a large number of texts that could easily be categorized in numerous ways. Most of the books I can catalogued so far are actually PDF format, but the system can also handle many other formats as well, such as Word files or OpenOffice files.

This screenshot shows a tagged selection of the collection, pulling up only those books with one particular tag. By selecting any work shown, I can easily open the book using the View button at the top, or modify the listing further with the Edit Meta Information button.

Though the program also has the capability of converting ebooks to other formats, I'm mostly interested in using it to get my unwieldy collection under control, and for that, it does a great job!