Ubuntu’s efforts have been pretty successful to develop and flourish a friendly Linux distribution for normal desktop users. Ubuntu has changed the every Joe’s perspective about Linux operating system. The perception of its compatibility with Geek’s suit is now pretty much gone. Still, there are many applications which lack to provide a perfect alternative for its counterparts in popular Windows operating system. I tried Ubuntu 6.06 and didn’t feel much difficulty in getting used to it for normal operations. On the way it has improved much and got friendlier. Recently, I was looking to write my first post on Ubuntu with a desktop blogging client/editor and searched for a Windows Live Writer alternative. The quest has been somewhat satisfying but not successful to find a perfect alternative.

I have found two Gnome desktop blogging clients to use in Ubuntu. They slightly compete with Windows Live Writer and are not best solution to be used as desktop blog editor in Ubuntu.

Drivel

It is one of the popular desktop blog editors developed for GNOME. Unfortunately, the development has paused long since Drivel 2.0.3 release in August 2008. Its design is simple and refined but it provides necessary to potent features to manage a blog from Ubuntu Desktop. Posts can be composed, edited, deleted, and published. It is packaged with an integrated spellchecking and syntax highlighting. It supports LiveJournal, Blogger, MovableType, Advogato, and Atom blogs. The derivates of these standards like WordPress and Drupal are also included.

BlOGTK

This nice blogging client is built using Python and PyGTK. It is meant to be light and fast. BLOGTK can handle multiple blogs and saves your time from switching different browser windows. The latest version was recently released which has fixed many bugs. It also supports popular blog systems like Movable Type, Blogger, and WordPress. Although, it can work with any platform that supports XML-RPC publishing.

Obviously, you have always options to use Firefox add-on like Scribefire or social browser lick Flock. The above mentioned clients are solely developed for GNOME environment. I am waiting to listen your experience of Blogging from Ubuntu Linux.

With the evolution of technology, the quality of video is also increasing rapidly. Despite the amplification of storage capacity to hold high quality video, the demand for video transcoder, converter, or encoder has also increased. The reasons are quite obvious  because every one hasn’t got that much storage size in his device to keep that huge amount of data. The devices may vary from personal computers to mobile gadgets which have got their own apparatus to deal with specific kind of video formats in small sizes. Besides the user may want to send videos to some other place and it is possible that the carrying medium has not that much bandwidth or the destination is short of disk space.

In such scenarios, the need of a video format converter arises. Minicoder is a freeware, elegant and open source tool to convert

most common video formats to each other. It has been designed to be used by a user who is totally ignorant about encoding process. You don’t need to worry about multiple streams like chapters, subtitles, or audios.

The Video formats

• MKV, OGM, VOB, AVS, AVI, WMV, MP4,X264, H264, XVID, DIVX, MPEG-1/2/4, or DVD.

can be converted to

• MKV, MP4, AVI,X264, Divx, Theora.

Minicoder takes the full control of encoding process. You just have to select the video files to be converted in the Input Tab. You can also choose a task to perform after conversion like Shut Down or Hibernate from “When Done” menu.

In the Settings tab, you can view and alter the default conversion parameters.

• In video option’s section , the user can make a choice between different qualities, and codec. The required output file size and bit rate can also be modified.
• The audio option’s section let you audio bit rate and codec.
• The container can be chosen among a list of Matroska, MP4, and AVI.
• Filters gives a chance to vary height/width, noise, and sharpness of the video

The options tab gives you the right to assign output directory and process priority. The user can also ignore, audio, subtitle and chapters in encoding process according to the requirements.



It is a beta release so you may face bugs. Before you use Minicoder, you must install AVISynth.

Copy-Paste or Cut-Paste are one of the most usual actions performed by a computer users. This process is involved in common tasks like editing and writing text documents, code writing, picking text or links from web pages, transferring music or film from disks, moving files within your hard disk and many others. The operating systems has supported this interface right from the very beginning but they don’t provide a native intuitive interface to utilize this capability in a repetitive manner.Now, the need of a skillful Clipboard arises which will let you easily use your clippings several times or some other effective features.

Ditto-cp is a proficient extension to the built-in windows clip board which contains productive features. It uses sqlite database to keep records.You can view, search and

use any item that has been copied at any time. It is portable and you can synchronize clippings  of multiple computers. Ditto can be accessed from system tray or with a hotkey. The items in the clipboard can be pasted into the document or file with double click, enter key or using drag. Due to Unicode support, it shows characters of foreign languages also.

Ditto Clipboard offers ample options to configure it. In the general tab, you can choose maximum number of clipboard entries and their expiration period. There is a choice to compact and repair database if it gets huge or malfunctioned. Duplicates clippings or not allowed by default but they can be enabled here.

The “Supported Types” tab lets you view and add the file types for which clipping is confirmed. For example, I am adding bitmap support. It is even possible to add support for custom file type.

The clipboard can be also handled with hotkeys. The “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab permits you to assign hot keys for different purposes. The first choice can be utilized to activate or deactivate Ditto Clipboard. Similarly, the user can allot shortcut keys to the last ten clippings which eases the way to paste recent clips.

The ”Quick Paste” has multiple customization to offer. You can enable or disable the thumbnail preview of image clippings and also display format of RTF text. You can adjust the positioning and transparency of Quick Paste display. If you don’t like the default look of clipboard you can customize alter the theme and font.

Ditto-cp is also network friendly. You can share your clippings with your remote friend if you know the IP address. The Friends tab presents the network interface to be adjusted accordingly. You can select to add all or selected clippings with password. In this way the clippings sent are encrypted and secure.

If you are tired of copying and pasting with default clipboard in Windows XP then Ditto-cp is right choice which is also multilingual and open source. The list can be retrieved from Ditto-cp’s web page.

In simple terms, Backup is the copy or replicate of digital data which is build to restore your data in case of any mishap. Mishap may be termed as physical damage to the storage device or incidental deletion which results in loss of precious data. In either case, the user is capable to recover all or some of the files depending how much data is lost. The user may keep back up on same storage device but it is strongly recommended that some other storage media is used. The necessity to back up data is becoming compulsory as the figures in the Kabooza Global Backup Survey are alarming. According to this survey, 82% of home pc users do not back up regularly and 66% have lost their data while 71% users are concerned about data loss.

Now, you need a cooperative and free tool to backup the data. Areca Backup provides nice features to easily manage the creation of twin data. This utility is bundled with pretty options which

simplifies the backup process. To create a Backup, go to Edit>New Group and enter the details. Now Select Edit> New Target and you will be presented with a new window have a left side bar with multiple options. In main, choose the target name and the repository location where backup will be created. It may be a local or Ftp directory. Leave Archive Name as it is. Standard choice is recommended from Storage Mode option for common users.

In Sources tab, choose the file or directory to be replicated and then move to Compression. You can choose to compress the archive in Zip or Zip64 encoding. The user can also opt to archive each file separately or combine them in a single archive. If the resulting archive is expected to be large, you can select to split the archive accordingly.

Areca Backup also lets you encrypt your backup for security if needed. There are two algorithms to choose encryption in advance tab. Select the appropriate and enter your key whose strength will be also shown.

The rest of option tabs are not for general users but in last tab you can edit the description of your target. Now, you can directly run Backup command or simulate from Run Menu. The simulate backup can help in identification of errors if occur. The progression will be also show in the main window.

If satisfied, now select back up and  you will be asked to choose backup type

Full Backup : When a full backup is performed, ALL files are stored in your archive (whether they have been modified or not).

Incremental backup : When an incremental backup is performed, only the files which have been modified since the last backup are stored in your archive.

Differential backup : When a differential backup is performed, only the files which have been modified since the last FULL backup are stored in your archive.

After successful backup, almost all the tabs will be populated with some information which you can view for better understanding of the process. You can even search the backups created for a file in Search Tab.

The recovery process is even more simpler. Highlight the archive and then select Recover from right click menu or Run menu. Choose the directory and check the remaining options accordingly whether to recover only deleted files.

One last feature which lets you automate the backup process. Backup shortcut wizard (Edit Menu>Wizards) will create a shortcut to selected place which can be executed in future to create a backup for the specific target.

This handy software is a good fit for free backup of your Hard Drive, PC, and system.works both on 32 bit versions of Windows XP/Vista and Linux. The application requires Java to run.

Printer is one of the most useful peripherals built for computers. In simple words, printer produces a hard copy of documents that are present in digital from. The documents may contain graphics, text, or both. I usually print digital documents to read because it is more comfortable to read than sticking your eyes on computer screen. Although cost per page may be high but still it is more leisure to have a hard copy of digital document for better study.

Sometime, there may be a need to print multiple documents in some context. The type of documents may be different like Word Document, Excel Documents, Text File, Pdf Files, and some others. Instead of executing the document in the associate application turn by turn and then issuing print commands to printers is an inefficient and

time consuming process or we can say that throughput and productivity is low. In such situations, DarkStorm’s Batch Print Handler is an awesome utility which can batch print the documents stores in a single place.

It takes a folder as input and then scans the files stored. the resulting information is displayed in the main window of document. It describes total number of word document, excel document, text files, Pdf files , image files. The quantity of the unrecognized  files is also presented. While selecting the input folder, you have option to include or exclude sub directories.

You can alter some settings according to your requirement. You can choose a specific printer and number of copies required. The job report in multiple formats can be obtained. The choice to move files to a  specific location after printing is also available. Further, you can opt to apply some settings on image files like auto scale and image rotation.

Finally, it is deduced that  is really helpful for batch printing of multiple documents, It saves the time and increases the productivity. This open source application requires .Net Framework and is absolutely free.

As the Pdf acronym stands for Portable Document Format, it has efficiently delivered the purpose for which it was developed. Its feature to be independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system has made it ubiquitous. It was a proprietary format which has become an open standard a years ago. Although its structure is OS independent but Pdf Utilities are still required to view, edit, and manage Pdf files.

Jacrobat is a portable and open source application which can be utilized at different operating system because its  only prerequisite is Java. It offers different pretty services to operate with

Pdf files. Launch the Jacrobat batch file to launch the Word Processor.The word processor allows to save the document in Rich Text Format (RTF) or Portable Document Format (Pdf). It is fairly simple and provide basic functions like Font, Size,and Color Selection along with text alignment. After editing and writing the document, choose the document to Save As “Portable Document Format”.

Besides it contains an itext (Jar Executable File). It provides a lot of functions mentioned below

• Convert Bookmark2XML and vice versa.
• Convert Photos, Tiff and Text files to Pdf.
• Encrypt and Decrypt Pdf Files.
• A lot of manipulation option for like Concat, Divide, Split, Reverse Pages, and Watermark.
• In properties section you can inspect and tree view Pdf files.

There are also other functions which can be viewed from Tools Menu. Their use is almost same. In most cases, you have to select input and output files and then adjust the desired attributes and execute. The task is performed.