Category Archives: Tecnologia

Synkron: a flexible & powerful way to synchronize your files or folders on Linux – An “encrypted” example for security and privacy reasons

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Sometimes it is really easy, other times you waste your time. A good synchronization between files or folders is something you need everyday but it could become a nightmare if you miss something.

In my specific case I need to automate a synchronization between a folder (F1) where I usually save my office files (Documents) with a second folder contained, for security reasons, in an encrypted volume/partition (F2). This last folder (F2) automatically synchronize its content with a third folder (F3), located in the same encrypted volume/partition, that is the client folder of a remote storage hosting (F4).

This also means that when I am out of the office and I add a file in the online storage host (F4) the document is automatically copied to the client folder of the remote storage hosting and to the folder located in an encrypted volume/partition (F2 and F3).

Moreover, I need to erase the Documents folder F1 as soon as it is synchronized with its mirror F2 in the encrypted volume.

The described scenario is common in the everyday working life and it is conceptually not hard to solve… in theory… When I tried to set up the above described operations using grsync on Fedora and Ubuntu I had big problems to obtain an acceptable result.

Many times the synchronization was unidirectional and I was not able to run it properly just using grsync still I found one right solution with Synkron. Synkron  is a multi platform software (Linux, OSX, Windows and portable) written in C++ that is really flexible for all multitasking synchronization needs.

First of all, Synkron is multi-tab and this is a winning features because it let you to “slice” any problem (synchronization matter) into simple, easy to solve, tasks.

In my example I determined the two Folders I wanted to sync – F1 & F2) and  decided thath both folders had to be considered as Master by the software.

Then I used the Advanced Menu and I chose to “Move contents to Folder 2, leaving folder 1 empty” and to “Store database in a text file” for my convenience (F1 to F2 deleting F1 contents after synchronization).

At this point, I opened a second synchronization tab where I selected two folders (F2 to F3 sync) and I also asked Synkron to “Synchronize hidden files and folders” and to “Detect collisions”.

At this point I had obtained an acceptable solution to my initial task, simply dividing my problem into two separate operations.

Moreover, I’ld like to focus your attention on the fact that Synkron has a specific feature for multi-synchronizing three or more folders at the same tome. The tuning of this particular feature is really intuitive and you can also selected many of the different advanced options we described here above.

If you have complex synchronization needs and you have many tabs configured you can always choose what tabs you want to activate or deactivate using the “Sync folders” option you find in the upper part of each tabs. Another option for this specific issue is represented by the SyncView visualization that let ypu to have a quick general glimpse about the state of all the sync and multisync tabs.

Synkron has simply fantastic scheduling options that are able to solve any need you may have.

Furthermore you can decide to automatically synchronize your folder as soon as you launch Synkron.

You can also decide to automatically run Synkron at the startup but, in this case, you need to manually configure your Startup Menu.

As extra features you can always decide to create Blacklists that will exclude specific files, folders or extensions from the synchronization.

In addition you can define Filters by extensions to better refine your synchronization.

Last but not least, when you run Synkron you obtain a detailed report in real-time where you can check the state of operations by colors.

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“Username is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported…” How to add a specific user to sudoers on Linux

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Sooner or later, if you use Linux and you prefer Terminal to GUI you will stumble on this message:

Username is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported

The first thing to clarify is that the “incident” will never be reported outside your computer but in the auth.log file. But if you have previously configured your Linux OS to send these kind of logs to you by email, you receive an alert about.. your own activity with sudo…

In any case, to solve the above mentioned specific sudo matter, use Terminal and type:

sudo gedit /etc/sudoers

At this point the text file “sudoers” will be opened and you will be able to modify it using e.g. gedit.

Obviously you can use another text editor you prefer as, for example, nano. In this case the command will be:

sudo nano /etc/sudoers

Now you have to peer into the text and find the “#User privilege Specification” section and add the command:

your-username ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

where ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL stands for: allow the specific user (your-username) to access all the terminals, as if he/she were any other user, and allow him/her to execute the full range of commands.

And you will obtain something similar to this:

# User privilege specification
root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL
your-username ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

Try it! (..if you need…)

——————-

References:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo

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Online Speech to Text Recognition

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radio64It’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.