27
Aug 13

Skype : No notification sounds on Linux / Ubuntu

Today I want to share a short hint on using Skype under Linux which cost me some time to discover. I was having audio when calling but the notifications somehow didn’t work. Which is annoying when being ‘Away from Keyboard’ but expecting some calls.

Continue reading →


19
Mar 13

Fotoxx : The IrFanView of Linux?

For years I have been telling people that using Linux is great for almost everything, except for quickly editing and uploading a bunch of photos. I have tried many many image programs (Krita, Gtumb, F-spot, Ristretto, ImageMagick, Gimp etc etc) and while a lot of them are useful for lot’s of things I yet had to find anything close to IrfanView on Windows. My usual method is selecting a picture from the gallery, then crop, resize, sharpen and save the image somewhere else for uploading.

Often I used IrfanView on Wine, but of course that is also suboptimal and not really comfortable. Even apart from some quirks that Wine seems to introduce. Gimp always seems to be a bit ‘too much’ when just wanting to quickly edit a bunch of photos.

Today I ran into Fotoxx ( which sounds a little weird ) by accident and I was happily surprised by the amount of features it has while keeping stuff simple. The interface is clunky and takes some time to get used to. Hopefully this will be a matter of attention in future versions to come.

fotoxx_exampl

Features include everything I need for daily life like crop ( called ‘trim’ ), resizing, sharpen and everything else you might except from fast, simple photo editing software. There is also a gallery which does what it needs to do, but also suffers from bad design decisions ( like single-click map navigating, why? ).

fotoxx_gallery

Another good thing is that Fotoxx comes with a lot of batch-filter options, in case you need to transform a whole bunch of images. I didn’t look at this closely but might come in handy if you are stuck with a use load of similar photo editing you have to do.

Concluding, I don’t think it’s a perfect solution yet but it certainly is much better than what I have seen so far. In some ironic way it looks like IrFanView since the latter’s interface is also far from being perfect. Be aware of very old versions that some distributions still seem to carry by default. You can get the latest packages here.

If you are aware of better solutions for a good Linux image editor share it in the comments!


20
Oct 12

Using SSHFS for quick updates

If your hosts supports SSH and you have the luck to run your desktop on a linux-based computer there is a quick way to do updates to your site.

SSHFS allows you to use mount a SSH-connection just like you would mount other filesystems. The benefit of this is when, for instance, you need to copy a small amount of files you can do this as a local file operation.

Some might grumble by the idea and of course in a professional production environment ( or large updates ) I would not recommend this. And directly updating (or doing untested stuff) on production systems needs to be grumbled upon in my view.

I use SSH often for small configuration settings or when I need to do small maintenance. SSHFS just give me for these minutes some extra flexibility!