If you want to setup a new computer or install software which you use regularly after a system format, You will have to dedicate much of your valuable time for that. Downloading and installing software one by one is boring and “ninite” is here to overcome that problem. Ninite is a multiple software installer which by name helps you to install the software you need by once without going over to every single web site to download those.
SMART data from your hard drives or SSD’s are often valuable to determine the health of the drive and other information such as how many hours it worked. There are several programs on windows to do this and I have covered about one 2 years ago here http://www.ruchirablog.com/how-to-view-usage-time-of-your-computer/ . There are few SMART data monitoring tools available for Linux such as smartctl but those are command line tools.
I don’t have enough words to express, how much I love Linode. If you search my blog with the keyword “linode” you can find the reviews and rants that I’ve done about them. Linode is beta testing a new feature called Linode “Longview” which provides you beautiful live graphs and information about your virtual machines. Its not limited to linode, you can monitor any external VM’s or Dedicated servers with longview.
If you work in front of the computer quite a lot, You might have eye strain issues. On Laptops this is not a big issue because those have the ability to dim the light considerably. But in my case I use a desktop for work and monitors doesn’t have the ability to dim extensively like laptops. Even at lowest brightness, the whites are too bright for me.
I’m using Ubuntu and there is this app called “redshift” to adjust the color temperature and lets see how you can get it running.
Redshift adjusts the color temperature according to the position of the sun. A different color temperature is set during night and daytime. During twilight and early morning, the color temperature transitions smoothly from night to daytime temperature to allow your eyes to slowly adapt.
Lets add the PPA
And Install
MTR its a well known network diagnostic tool which you can use to troubleshoot connectivity problems on your network or servers. As the official web site for MTR says
mtr combines the functionality of the ‘traceroute’ and ‘ping’ programs in a single network diagnostic tool. As mtr starts, it investigates the network connection between the host mtr runs on and a user-specified destination host. After it determines the address of each network hop between the machines, it sends a sequence ICMP ECHO requests to each one to determine the quality of the link to each machine. As it does this, it prints running statistics about each machine.
Evernote is my favorite note taking application which I use everyday to keep in track of my work and even these blog posts. Whenever I get an idea I jot down it on my Evernote app on my Android, Mac or Evernote web page on my Ubuntu PC. If you are frequent reader of this blog you might know that I work on Ubuntu on my main PC and there isn’t an Evernote official app for Ubuntu. But there is “Everpad” which is a nice solution and it just works. It syncs your notes from evernote and its secure and simple. In this guide I will explain how you can install Everpad on Ubuntu and add Evernote to it.
Logwatch is a great tool which emails you reports of your linux server’s log data reports. It analyses the information such as failed log in attempts, software updates,disk usage data etc. Logwatch will email you complete report of the processed logs every day or whenever you want it to. Install logwatch on Ubuntu is easy, just follow these steps
SSH in to your server and run
this will install the logwatch package. If it asks you to set postfix configuration while running the installation, choose “Internet site” option and enter email address there.
Are you working on Arduino on your Ubuntu environment? If you are using it for the first time you might get face a problem that, Ubuntu doesn’t detect your Arduino board and you cant select the serial port by going to Tools -> serial Port because serial port is grayed out.
Fixing this is easy. This happens because Ubuntu doesn’t give root permissions to the Arduino IDE by default so it cant access the serial connections.
Easiest way is opening up terminal and type in