Biker|Geek

Finally an excellent Truecrypt GUI for Linux. It’s not a front end but actually Truecrypt. Check it out.

http://polishlinux.org/howtos/truecrypt-5-encrypt-your-drive-in-gui/

A few days ago TrueCrypt 5.0 has been released, a great tool for encrypting your hard drives. It can be used to encrypt existing partitions or create a virtual one located in a single file. In this article we cover the changes in version 5.0 and provide you some useful benchmarks.

http://www.truecrypt.org

An excellent site from what I’ve seen thus far. Thanks to “linuxtechie”

http://linuxtechie.wordpress.com/2008/01/05/my-list-of-useful-applications/

My List of Useful Applications

Posted by linuxtechie on January 5, 2008

I’ve decided to make a list of applications that I’ve found to be helpful/handy. Some of them may be little know, some may be well known. So without further ado:

Blueman

This one isn’t in the Ubuntu repos, but there’s a repository on the home page. This has got to be the best Bluetooth manager for GTK. Coupled with many of the other Bluetooth utilities such as gnome-vfs-obexftp, this is a very powerful application. You can inquiry for devices, keep a list of favorites, send files, and even browse your device right through Nautilus.

 

Gcolor2

I’ve found this to come in handy a lot. It’s a little color chooser that lets you pick any color on your screen along with a ton of preset colors you can choose from.

sudo apt-get install gcolor2

 

Grip

More than once I’ve found myself disappointed by Sound Juicer. It doesn’t have a whole lot of options and, for me at least, the resulting audio files came out very poor with lots of pops and click due to scratches. Then I found Grip. Grip is a very light weight yet highly configurable CD ripper. It can rip in many formats and, the best feature in my opinion, it has Paranoia. No it’s not a suspicious application . It will detect and auto-correct any pops or clicks during the encoding process that result from the unavoidable CD scratches. After ripping a few CDs with Grip I was very pleased with the outcome. Not a single pop or click.

sudo apt-get install grip

 

 

Brasero

Brasero is the official Gnome CD burning application. Previously I’ve used Gnomebaker but now I’ve switched to Brasero. Brasero is the up and coming CD burning application. Sadly the Gnomebaker project appears to be dying. It’s capable of multi-session data CDs, auio CDs, copying CDs, burning CD images, and erasing CD-RWs. I’ve seemed to have better luck with Brasero than with Gnomebaker or the Nautilus CD burner.

sudo apt-get install brasero

 

 

Sound Converter

Ever needed to quickly convert an audio file? This is a great application for just that. It can convert the most common audio file types. The application is pretty much straight forward. I’ve found it to come in handy a lot of times.

sudo apt-get install soundconverter

 

 

Gnome Schedule

Gnome Schedule is a little graphical front end to Cron. It’s very useful if you need to run something at a certain time. You can schedule events recurrently or one time only.

sudo apt-get install gnome-schedule

Nautilus Image Converter

This is another very useful little app. Nautilus Image Converter is a little extension for Nautilus that lets you resize and rotate images. A lot of times I’ve needed to resize an image and found opening the Gimp a bit overkill for that. Now I can just right click on an image and resize or rotate it in seconds.

sudo apt-get install nautilus-image-converter

Htop

This is a great little app. It just like Top only it shows a lot more information. You can sort processes by different categories, kill processes and much more.

sudo apt-get install htop

Conky

Conky is a very light weight, highly configurable system monitor. I’ve found Conky to be extremely handy. I love having all my system stats right on my screen at all times. It’s very easy to catch any run away process. There’s a huge thread in the Ubuntu forums full of people’s conkyrc files. I feel lost without Conky

sudo apt-get install conky

Gmountiso

Gmountiso is very useful for mounting .iso images. Ubuntu can do this natively through the terminal, however if you don’t know the commands this is a very helpful application.

sudo apt-get install gmountiso

One commenter on Digg said we all loose as consumers and I have to agree. I am sad to see the end for HD-DVD even though Blu-Ray was my format of choice. More options/choices for consumers equals more competition and that’s always a good thing in the technology market.

Toshiba just made a statements saying, “It will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders.” Finally.

read more | digg story

What we’re going to do is hypermile these cars. Although, much like Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, we’re not sure you can handle the truth. To be perfectly honest, we were shocked ourselves. Shocked and giddy,

read more | digg story

To be honest, I didn’t see this one coming. Certainly not in the opening month of the year and after the holiday rush. But here it is anyway, courtesy of the NPD, whose numbers are some of the most reliable in the industry. So I’ll just cut to the chase and give you those January 2008 numbers:

274k – Wii
269k – PlayStation 3
251k – Nintendo DS
230k – PlayStation Portable
230k – Xbox 360

read more | digg story