Category Archives: Multiplatform software

9 Essential Design Tools for Non-Designers by https://is.gd/ktvPhr

Content and design work better together – in fact, your content marketing efforts really won’t achieve optimal success if they don’t include a solid design component to bring your words to life. Not convinced your content needs design?

Regardless, you’ll need to work on a design project at some point, and there’s no need for you to look like an amateur when you do it. Here are nine easy-to-use tools that can help any non-designer accomplish common design tasks.

from https://is.gd/ktvPhr

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Firefox 54: more multi-process content processes by https://is.gd/7xLhyI

Mozilla plans to increase the number of content processes of Firefox’s multi-process architecture to four (from one) with the release of Firefox 54.

Some Firefox installations are still not eligible for Firefox’s multi-process architecture. This includes systems with accessibility tools or settings enabled. Multiple processes won’t be enabled for users with extensions either, regardless of whether those are legacy add-ons, or WebExtensions.

Mozilla ran its memory test again to determine the right number of content processes. An increase in the number of content processes for the browser always goes along with an increase in memory usage.

from https://is.gd/7xLhyI

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TrueCrypt – Try it again! Waiting for CipherShed…

Online Speech to Text Recognition

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It’s fast, it’s immediate and it lets you to write an email or a text in a while, anywhere you are. When you use a mobile, you need to find the right app. For my experience the universal app for this doesn’t exist. It depends on the model of the mobile in general and in particular on the type of the installed microphone. This means you need to test different apps to fins a suitable solution for your specific needs. But usually it doesn’t keep much time.

When you are at home or for more complex works that need to be directly edited on a PC, you usually cannot use any Android app and so you need a similar tool. This is my case.

If you google it, you will find different solutions. Some of them are desktop software that can be installed and settled up in a reasonable time (usually few hours). These software are really accurate and have many tools that allow you to develop complex texts typing just few keys to refine some inaccuracies. The “problem” is represented by their cost that, for some products, is high (… certainly, we are talking about few bucks…).

Instead, a good solution could be the online -speech to text- tools offered by different websites. They are usually free but you need to be obviously connected to the web if you want to use them.

Furthermore the text results generated by these on line tools are connected with the particular model of microphone you installed into your PC. Also in this situation you can find enthusiastic reviews for an on line tool that is completely ineffective for you. And as for Android apps you need to spend some hours to discover what is the best online tool for your needs. Last but not least to use them you need to authorized Flash (sic! yes the nosey Flash…) for managing your audio hardware.

In my experience, after some tests, the best sites offering -speech to text- tools are four:

Speechlogger that is really simple to use and the most versatile as for exporting the “written” text but it works just on the Chrome Browser (version 25 or later) and this is a big limitation when you are fond of Firefox:

TalkTyper that is also complete and it is supported by different browser (Firefox included);

Dictation that is very minimalist as web graphics but it really does what it promises in every browser…;

SpeechPad that is very complete but it requires a free registration to use the -speech to text- feature. There are two big features offered by this website. The first is about that it has a good grade of recognition for speeches in Russian. The second feature is represented by the possibility of using an audio file or an url redirecting to audio files and/or video (but only for YouTube or HTML5audio/video).

Some of the above described websites have a large selection of different languages you can be interested to use. Others have a narrow choice of languages but for the accuracy of the -speech to text- work, could really be what you are looking for.

So, to conclude, if you need a -speech to text- online tool, you have just to invest some hours to find the right website for your needs. When you will start to use these kind of online tools you save a lot of time that before you spent for typing.

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!

Installing YamiPod on Linux: a multi-platform, very versatile iPod Manager

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YamiPod is a freeware application to efficiently manage your iPod on Linux. It can be run directly from your iPod and needs no installation. It also has extra features such as rss news and podcast support, remove duplicates, easy notes editor (with multipage support), songs synchronization, playlists export, a built in music player and much more. It has been translated in 12 languages.

On Linux, the installation is really simple:

make sure you’ve used iTunes at least once (under Windows or Mac OS X)

have at least one song on iPod

copy the libfmodex audio library to /usr/lib (you need root privileges). You’ll find this file in the package you’ve downloaded

mount your iPod somewhere inside /mnt or /media with read/write access

make sure you have the df command installed, which is usually part of any standard linux distribution.

To run YamiPod just double-click on YamiPod’s binary.

Using YamiPod is also so simple when you want to Copy Music to iPod: Drag&drop files into the song listbox. You can even drag and drop folders, YamiPod will add all valid music files found in sub folders.

In the window that will appear you’ll be able to assign song information (title,album name, artist…) for each single file or setting them for every file ticking the All checkboxes.

In Playlist tab you can select:

Destination: select a playlist where to add all dragged songs.

Lyric filename: how lyric should be named.

Create playlist from folder: this will add all songs in a folder to a playlist named as the folder. For example if you dragged a folder called Music with 2 subfolders: 70’s and 80’s containing various files. Files in 70’s will be added to a newly created folder called 70’s. Files in the other folder will be added to a playlist called 80’s.

In Advanced tab you can select:

Auto capital first letter: will titlecase all song tags.

If duplicated: what to do if song exists on iPod.

Get song info by path and filename: if your song tags are missing but you named and placed your song following a particular order, you can tell YamiPod to get song tags out of filename a path.

Tips:
Holding SHIFT while dragging will add songs to currently selected playlist. If you’ve selected multiple songs to add you can quickly edit next (previous) song information by pressing ALT+down (up).

Ubuntu to Windows XP folder sharing

LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice! What’s the difference?

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Since the end of September 2010, a group of German OpenOffice volunteers left definitively the project to join the The Document Foundation and develop a fork version of the famous free productivity platform now controlled by Oracle. After just few months we have LibreOffice: a (more or less) new cross-platform productivity software based on OpenOffice version 3.3 beta. We compared both the free suites and apparently we did not notice particular differences in features and tools. Also the graphic interface is similar between the two platforms and the buttons position is the same. At the moment LibreOffice supports less languages in its Linux and MAC OS X versions and it is not compatible with Solaris based PCs. Both the productivity platforms are able to use the OpenOffice extension library. Consequently, it is clear that it’s too early to notice relevant technical differences between the two competitors but, for sure, something will show off in the next versions. In fact LibreOffice has been created to guarantee a vendor independent office suite which can be developed with no copyright software chunks. The goal is prestigious and we can only say, Good Luck LibreOffice!

Strategic market analysis through Twitter – Know your competitors’ strategy and fight them!

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Your competitors are on Twitter and they are very active. Good to know but is their strategy really effective? Difficult to know because normally you have not enough time to constantly monitor more than a couple of them. A good market analysis strategy is to read their posts in a certain period of time but Twitter doesn’t keep this easy because you have to spend hours to expand their tweets before have a good view of what information your competitors wrote. Moreover, Twitter allows you to view only the last 3,200 tweets. For this reason I normally use Twitter XL. This online free service allows you to catch and save the last 3,200 tweets just inserting the Twitter name and click on Get Tweets. After a bunch of seconds (or, more often, some minutes) you will have a complete list including the last 3,200 tweets (retweets included) and you can export them in a CSV format. This file can be imported in a spreadsheet (e.g. OpenOffice) and clearly visualized. If you really know what you are looking for, you have a terrific picture about timing, source, contents and trends of the competitor you are monitoring. Not only you can discover when and about what your competitor is more active but you will also know if he/she is using some particular online service to tweet. This data mining tool is recommended for business or just for fun if you are a meddler.

Prey: a multiplatform, open source anti-thefth free software for laptops

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What about losing your laptop? Obviously the chances to find it and have it back are very few! But there are several software you can install on your laptop to trace the ip and geo-location of te laptop and with a bit of fortune you could find it. Prey is one of these programs you can use and it is particularly interesting because it is open source and free up to three laptops. After the download of the proper version for your OS (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X or Android) you have to run it on your machine and configure it through a very simple interface (on Ubuntu: Applications —> System Tools —> Prey Configurator). Do not forget to select Enable guest account and Wifi autoconnect to improve the possibilities to trace your laptop. You are also asked to provide an email account where you will receive the geo-location reports if your laptop is stolen. When you activate your Prey account do not forget to fill in the Configuration and Modules tabs. Personally we suggest to switch to ON the following commands: Auto update, Notify new reports and all the commands contained in the left column of the Modules tab. At this point, if your laptop is missed, you have to log in your on-line Prey account and, in the Configuration tab, switch the Missing option on YES. Since this moment, Prey software on your laptop is activated and will start sending reports to your email and to your Prey webpage. Last but not least, to better protect your laptop I suggest to hide or cancel the Prey Configurator icon from the OS menu (in Ubuntu: System —> Preferences —> Main Menu —> System Tools and deselect Prey Configurator).