The live cds you cannot live without : Gparted and Clonezilla.
May 26Partitioning your harddrive when you have some data on it, is like doing brain surgery on your own best friend .. with blunt scissors, blindfolded, hanging upside down .. in the subwaycar .. while playing pingpong .. well , you catch my drift. With your precious data on the drives, having to resize, move and add partitions is pretty dangerous. Of course you backed up all your data ( you ARE a ‘Wiseguy’ are you not ?) but still. A great tool that has always helped me in these precarious times is Gparted. Back in the days I had a “Copy” of Partition Magic (from Symantec) to do this. But that was because I was oblivious from the fact that Gparted existed. This free live cd (which is also a Linux app) helps you repartition any system without having to boot into the os. Get your copy here.
The other classic I remember was Symantecs Ghost !. When I had freshly installed a system I would make an image using Ghost for quick reinstalls should it be required. I even remembering re-imaging entire classrooms with Ghost, multicasting the data over the network. When I showed my skills to my colleagues at the time they thought it to be black magic ! A free (and much more powerful) “clone” of Ghost (no pun intended) is Clonezilla. A free and open source solution to do JUST that and more. Their website might make Geocities blush but, Get your copy here.
I have copies of these two disks lying around in my car and on a Usb stick along with some other essentials. Whenever you come across this one friend that needs brain surgery .. you will be happy you have them.
To help you along, Ive found some great tutorials on Youtube. The Gparted tutorial is a little dated but very well explained.
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Kwtv302 : "A look at Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin".
May 11
If you are into linux but Ubuntu’s new user interface has got you puzzled or scared, this episode is for you. We take a look at the latest long term support version of Ubuntu’s latest release : Precise Pangolin. We take a quick look at the anatomy of the Unity interface, how the different parts can work for you and how to customize it to your liking.
Shownotes.
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Geek Porn : Ubuntu on a Transformer Prime.
May 10Sometimes people ask me if I watch porn sometimes. I look at them (mostly square in the face) then I slowly nod .. and grin. 🙂 This usually makes them pretty uncomfortable, so the next step to REALLY freak them out is ask if they want to see some .. some GEEK PORN that is. If they haven’t run towards the door screaming or shuffled away backwards on their but cheeks , I tend to google up a video like the one you see below. Running Ubuntu on and Asus Transformer Prime. In all it’s not THAT hard to do once you root your Android phone / tablet, but the porn part is : Making stuff do things its not supposed to do 🙂 Taking control of the technology and make it jump through hoops the way YOU want it to. I haven’t tried this myself yet, (so please : Blame the guy in the video if you brick your Droid device) but it does look like the ultimate destiny for those overpowered quad-core tablet devices whose main effort in life is to run Angry Birds. Don’t forget to wash your hands when you are done and enjoy some Geek Porn.
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My favorite five productivity apps for the iPad.
May 06With my iPad three on the shopping short-list, i’m once again looking at reorganizing and tweaking all of the applications that I have on there. As a great man once said : The greater your skills, the fewer tools you need. And as tempting as it may be to fill up your home screen (and those darn folders) with all kinds of tools, keeping it simple is a better way. So i’ll try to give you a rundown of the stuff I use the most.
Wunderlist : This little to do app has cross platform siblings on my iPhone, my Android phone and on both my Mac and Linux machines. Wunderlist is everywhere. I keep this little task manager as a constant weapon against procrastination AND to store random ideas i get on the road.
Evernote : Wether its taking notes, voice memo’s or pictures : Evernote is becoming my central repository. I use it as my iPads main text editor, but also to keep track of the thousand nicknacks of random info I want to keep track of. Again : The cross platformity (is that a word ? it is now !) of the app is great. When I cruise the web and find a random article I would like to use later on, I use the evernote bookmark tool to snip up the page and put it into one of my many notebooks. A very very VERY powerful little tool indeed.
Ithoughts HD : The biggest challenge with being creative is to organize it. Wether its at work or at home, I use Ithoughts HD to mind map projects, show notes and use it in meetings quite a bit too. Hook up the iPad to the beamer and you can quickly take notes of whats going down and who has to do what. Not free, but worth it.
Notability : Suggested to my by Allison Sheridan of Podfeet.com its THE app for scribbling. but instead of just sitting there and trying to write down my horrible handwriting on an iPad I use it for sketches AND for adding notes and arrows to pictures. I take pictures or screenshots with the iPad, start scribbling on them and adding notes and use the built in voice memo option to babble away what I need to get of my chest. Then I ship the whole thing in an email and the recipient has a much more clear idea of what it is I want to do.
iBooks : ‘Reading books’ is not a very productive act, of that I am aware , but using my iBooks library for storing manuals, documents for work, reference books and more is making it the ultimate portable library for me. Whitepapers, documents for trainings I take .. I just don’t believe in paper anymore and am mandatory that people send me their stuff in PDF.
In all , these things turn my iPad into a very productive environment. The thing I had to do to get it working is to tweak my thinking and my behavior in using the iPad, more then I had to tweak my tools. Many of these apps are also available for android or have great alternatives. If they aren’t enough for you try Mat Gemmell’s list who came up with a complete DIFFERENT list then mine .. maybe there is a gem there too. If you want to see what how I use an iPOD to the fullest : Check out great docucast on getting the most out of your iPod touch.
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IOS : Learn to use Goodreader with the power of ScreenCasts.
Apr 30Don Mcallister is probably the master, no, the emperor when it comes to screencasting and making instructional video’s for Mac and IOS users. His website “Screencasts online” is packed with great instructional video’s for both payed and free users. One of these screencasts for the “non premium” users (or a ‘free screencast’ ) deals with the must have tools for your Ipad (or Iphone for that matter) called Goodreader.
For those of you ignorant of this fantastic application : It is the missing link between Steve Jobs’ original idea of a filesystem for the ipad , and the ‘sane” version of that idea. A filestructure, SSH connection, Download functionality, Dropbox syncing .. just about everything at the tip of your fingers. Its been my favorite tool to shove data over the wall of Apple’s walled garden towards my Linux and Windows machines. If you have some time to spare : Catch Don’s screencasts and consider becoming a payed member for more goodness. Download Part 1 and Part 2 of the Goodreader screencast and visit the site for more.
