Category Archives: Computers & Internet

Keep Calibre always updated! Correctly manage your digital library and new e-book formats

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LibraryAs you know, Calibre is a powerful tool that allows you to easily manage your e-book library. It also allows you to back up the e-books that you buy online and to transfer them to other devices when your e-book reader is out-of-order.

Sometimes the problem is that e-book formats evolve rapidly and new versions have been “recently”created. For this reason I personally suggest to update Calibre very often because new version have, obviously, the most updated plugins and consequently support new formats.

The Calibre website has a good download section  where you find easy instructions to update  your e-book reader on almost any OS. In my experience, usually you spend less than 6-7 minutes to update Calibre and the advantages you have worth the time you spend.

Moreover, if you have problems to read an e-book on the last version of Calibre, check the file format (in my case was .azw3), launch Calibre and go in Preferences → Behaviour. Then, be sure that the file format you are trying to open/read is correctly activated into the list you find there. Enjoy your reading!  AddThis

How to obtain a free digital signing service for your personal documents

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Sooner or later you need to digitally sign a document. If you have never done it before it’s only a matter of time, you will need a digital signing service sooner than you can imagine. The problem is represented to be ready without being obliged to spend money for it.

You will find different offers online and many trusty companies will try to convince you that their offer its the best but many of them limit your possibility to freely sign documents when you really need.

During my tests I tried a bunch of them and, for my experience, just few worth any attention.

In particular I was positively impressed by hellosign and Adobe Echo Sign. They are both interesting but hellosign offers something more. I mean you have not to spend a cent for both but Abobe limits the number of documents you can free sign to just 5 documents each month. If you are not used to digitally sign your docs this limitation doesn’t represent a problem but, trust me, when you will begin you soon need more than 5 free signatures a month.

HelloSign also allows you to upload an image file with your handwritten (and, of course, scanned) signature or create a new one choosing between some different fonts. You have no limits for signing documents but you can send only three signature requests a month (enough for my present necessities). Moreover, you can browse into the hellosign Documents folder and find all the  documents you have signed before.

On the other hand, Adobe Echo Sign request more personal information when you sign-up for the service and, as we already underlined, it limits your experience to just 5 activities a month.

Try them and let us know if you have already found a better, free, online service to digitally sign your documents. Good luck!  AddThis

How to manually mount USB drives on Ubuntu

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The first time I had this kind of problem was when I was trying to create a bootable USB drive and a pop-up windows appeared informing me that “you must first mount USB drive /dev/sdc1 to a mount-point. Most distributions will do this automatically after you remove and reinsert the USB drive”. I had never had this matter on Linux because, normally, all the USB drives are immediately recognized and mounted but there is always a first time….

After some googling I discovered that a specific program dconf-editor could help me to check the Linux settings and to consequentlyresolve the situation.

First of all you need to install dconf-editor on your Linux so you have to open a Terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install dconf-tools

After the installation you launch dconf-editor (for MATE environment it’s into the System Tool menu) and navigate it to media-handling:

org –> gnome –> desktop –> media-handling

Now you have to be sure that commands automount and automount-open are both flagged.

If you discover that they are already flagged, its necessary to manually create a mount point using the Terminal.

Open a Terminal and type:

df -H

to see the mounted disks. If you are not able to find the USB drive that you want to mount then type:

sudo fdisk -l

and you’ll see all disks (mounted/unmounted).

Now you are able to know the right drive identity (e.g. sdb1, sdc1, sdd1) that your OS assigned to that specific drive. Memorize it and start to create the mount point:

sudo mkdir /media/newusb

where “newusb” is the mount point name you want to assign to your USB drive.

Then type:

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /media/newusb

where “sdb1” is the drive identity we found before and “newusb” the mount-point name you choose.

That’s it, now your USB drive has a mounting point and you can use it (in my case I was able to create a bootable USB drive usiing Unetbootin)

You can find some extra useful tips about mounting USB drives at the Ubuntu community.  AddThis

How to dig more information on Wikipedia using Google

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WikipediaWikipedia contains many information about million of topics but each single thematic page doesn’t contain all the possible info or links about that specific subject. In fact some other details about a topic, or related to it, can be in other parts of Wikipedia not linked to the main topic.

In my experience, sometimes you can find some really interesting details about a topic if you simply use a Google query as:

site:en.wikipedia.org “Chet Baker”

Where the topic is “Chet Baker” and it is searched by Google into the entire Wikipedia.org website. If you deeply peep the results you can now find some information not contained in the “Chet Baker” page in Wikipedia.

These tip is really simple but I think it could be useful for journalists, data miners or for all that people who are not satisfied by a simple Wikipedia search.  AddThis

Do you really need to buy a scanner?

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Google DriveIf you work in an office where many document are daily processed you will appreciate one quick tip about using Google Drive as a on-the-go scanner. As you certainly know you can set Google Drive to always convert documents into Google Formats when you upload a new one. You can also decide to automate the process and Google will automatically convert the files without asking you again about it but, for my experience, it’s more more flexible and useful to define the conversion parameters every time I decide to upload a new document. For this reason I ticked the “Confirm settings before each upload” option in the upload menu.

One, not so known, feature is represented by the internal Google OCR that is able to read text also contained in jpg files. This means that you can simply take a picture of the text you want to modify and Google will convert it into a text file in few secs. During some test we made, a medium quality photograph is more than sufficient to have good results with Google OCR.

To activate this feature don’t forget to put a tick on the “Convert text from PDF and image files to Google documents” option and to specify the document language when you upload the jpg files into your Google Drive.  AddThis

Spring Time! Now you are ready to protect your Ubuntu – Debian system from Rootkits and Viruses

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It’s Spring Time and after a long Winter surfing the web and testing new programs, it’s time to give a short rest to your computer, delete old files and scan the OS looking for possible rootkits or viruses. I usually use Ubuntu and the possibility of viruses is not high but… why I shouldn’t double-check to avoid viruses or rootkits?

– First step: Rootkits

Open your favourite Software Manager (I am na old school boy so Synaptics it’s my choice) and install rkhunter and chkrootkit. I know, they are two different programs that have the same goals so you can decide to install and use just one of them…

After the installation you can start using them just typing into a Terminal:

sudo rkhunter --update
sudo rkhunter --check

and/or:

sudo chkrootkit

Examine all the results and don’t be disoriented by possible “”false positives”. Try to understand if some “risks” you find in the results logs could be regular software you are using (e.g. encrypted disks, etc..)

– Second Step: Viruses

Install ClamAV to scan your disks and be sure you have not infected by common viruses.

Open a Terminal and type:

sudo aptitude install clamav clamav-daemon clamav-freshclam clamtk

Then to update the ClamAV engine and the virus lists just type:

sudo apt-get upgrade clamav clamav-daemon clamav-freshclam clamtk

At this point you find ClamTk into the Accessories Menu and you are able to scan your PC just clicking on some intuitive buttons in the graphical interface.

Good Luck!  AddThis

How to upgrade your Fedora system when the Software Upgrade doesn’t work!

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Sometimes, if you use Fedora 18 – Spherical Cow, the Software Upgrade program couldn’t work properly. Software Upgrade shows you all the available upgrades but it is not able to install them. The download process starts but it will never finish and you wait for hours with no results. When and if you have this problem you can easily solve it launching a Terminal and typing the command:

yum update

In few minutes (depending on how many updates you need) your Fedora will be updated perfectly.

Last but not least, if you want to have a list of all the potential upgrades on your OS you can type:

yum list updates

and a complete list will be shown.  AddThis

Bodhi: a less known but powerful Linux distribution

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If you are looking for a light Linux OS for your computer you can test Bodhi Linux. This specific Linux version, based on Ubuntu, utilizes the enlightenment graphical interface. For this reason Bodhi is particularly indicated also to give new life to computers with no updated hardware.

The graphical interface is really “zen” or rather clean, easy to navigate but complete. We tested the 32 bit version and it was a smooth experience also if we used a single core pc with 2 GB of RAM.

Before testing Bodhi you have to keep in mind that this Linux OS is really user oriented. It means it has just some few pre-installed programs and so you are free to customize it as you prefer. Last thing to remember is that Bodhi is a semi-rolling distribution ans so it will be updated in occasion of Ubuntu Long Term Releases (LTS). Try it, it is worth a chance!

Google Reader will be soon out of service… What’s the next best solution? netvibes.com or theoldreader.com?

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At this point it’s history: Google will be out of service by the next July. It could appear nonsense but I still think that RSS readers are the most flexible solution for people who need to stay updated. Social media represent a possible solution but, in my opinion, nothing is better and more powerful than RSS.

Digg.com has promptly announced the launch of its own alternative online reader but, for now, none is able to say when it will be ready. Moreover Digg has not provided any information about this new RSS reader and so we cannot comment any of its potential feature neither compare it with the “old” Google Reader.

Surfing the web, many possible alternatives will pop-up but just few are the right ones if you don’t want to wait Digg.com. At the moment netvibes.com (in the past it was also known as bloglines.com) is the most immediate solution because allows you to import OPML – XML setting from your Google Reader. In fact, you can save all your Google Reader settings in a OPML – XML file just using the Import/Export panel into the Settings Menu (Download your data through Takeout) into the Google Reader. Netvibes.com represents an easy and fast alternative but I personally don’t like the graphic layout offered by this free online service. It is easy to use, really flexible and cozy but it doesn’t run properly on old computers because dated hardware, with inadequate graphic cards or small RAM, will slow down your OS when you visit netvibes.com. Last but not least you can decided to keep private your RSS selection, share it on social media or allow people to visit directly the webpage containing all the feeds you selected and/or just a single RSS box.

My other choice is represented by theoldreader.com that is the real successor of Google Reader. Theoldreader.com has the same features than the Google Reader and it is really nice to see and read if you like the clean, evergreen layouts. Theoldreader.com allows you to sign in using your Google account and it is possible to import the OPLM -XML configuration file you saved from your personal Google Reader. The only problem with theoldreader.com is represented by the time you have to wait before it will import the OPLM – XML file you uploaded from Google Reader. In my experience I had more than 22,000 people before me in the queue and I had to wait for, more a less, a week before I was able to use it with the imported parameters… Theoldreader.com has some advanced features which allow you to share your RSS selection and save the most interesting in order to create a more private collection for your specific interests. Not bad and useful!!  AddThis

Get power on pdf files and modify them on the fly with pdfmod (PDF Mod) and PDF Editor on Ubuntu

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Since its invention, the pdf format has been the most versatile standard to share documents with a fixed layout. Everyday we share, read and create a lot of pdf files but sometimes we would like to modify them to create “new” personalized version more suitable to our needs.

For example, sometimes you need to extrapolate just a page from a pdf files or you want just to create different versions of the same file with few variations for your colleagues. For all these purpose pdfmod is the right solution for you.

Pdfmod has not been developed for some years because the versions we were able to find for Linux were the 2011 ones but, for what we know and tested, it still runs on all main platforms as Linux, Windows and OSX. Pdfmod is  a little bit different from other similar programs because it allows you just to modify the pdf file changing pages order, deleting pages or adding new pages from other pdf files. It also allows you to change some main metadata (title, author, keywords and subjest) of your pdf file in just few clicks and, of course, you can save the modified copy of the original pdf file.

These features could be basic for more sophisticated people but I can assure you that, if you have the need to do this kind of work different times in a week, pdfmod is the software you will use more often. Installation on Ubuntu is very simple, you just have to open a terminal and type:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pdfmod-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pdfmod

and you will find a new PDF Mod launcher into the Accessories menu.

To get complete power on your pdf files we suggest pdfedit (PDF Editor) which allows you to “break” protected pdf files and modify them. To install pdfedit, use Synaptics Package Manager or the Ubuntu Software Center.

Don’t forget, when you use pdfedit you just have to open the “target” pdf file, save it using the Flatten feature you find into the Tool menu and open again the “new” file to modify it without any restriction.

Easy to install and simple to use, in few words the above described programs worth a try!  AddThis