‘Skrywer’ is a new distraction-free text editor for Ubuntu users. It doesn’t have a lot of options, but it comes with few built-in ambient sounds (ocean waves, forest, raining, fireplace & a night outside) and I found them to be quite inspiring . It also lets you change between few font styles & sizes,...
Read more →‘Gnome MPlayer’ is one of the best graphical front-ends that makes a good use of the power of the command-line based ‘MPLayer’. Its features rich, renders ‘Totem’ (now called ‘Video’ -- what a name for a video player, seriously?) pretty much useless and also supports both GTK2 & 3 UIs. Installing it on Ubuntu...
Read more →When a user runs a program, the OS first loads its data into the ‘RAM’. And when that program gets terminated, the OS, rather than completely getting rid of it, moves the program and its data into another location on RAM, called the ‘page cache’. So if the user re-runs the program (say after...
Read more →‘Converseen’ is a free batch image converter & a resizer. It runs on GNU/Linux, MS Windows, Mac OS X, supports a huge number of image formats (more than 100!) & lets you adjust few settings (resizing, quality settings) as well. It was recently updated to 0.6, and that has brought few improvements, such as:...
Read more →‘Stellarium’ is one of the best, real-time, 3D, night sky simulation software available, period . It’s completely free, open-source, runs of GNU/Linux, Windows, Mac OS X & Android. It comes with star catalogs consisting 600,000 stars (more can be added, manually), big nebulae collection, constellations, 3D rendering (360°) with awesome zooming, search, change location...
Read more →‘wxMP3val’ is a utility that scans MP3 tracks & validates them. If problems are found, it can also fix them as well. ‘wxMP3val’ is actually a graphical front-end for the command-line based tool ‘MP3val’. Using it, is pretty simple. Once finished adding files or the folders that contain your MP3 tracks to its main...
Read more →‘ MKVToolNix’ is the official ‘Matroska’ multimedia container manipulation utility. It lets you add/remove various types of audio/video tracks, change a lot of settings (including audio/video sync adjusting), split file’s content etc. Recently, it was updated to 6.2.0 version, which according to the developer, includes a fix that reduces the memory consumption by a...
Read more →The recently released, Ubuntu 13.04, not only brings up-to-date packages (including LibreOffice 4.0), which is pretty usual, but according to its ‘Release Notes’ page, ‘Unity’ desktop 7.0 too brings noticeable improvements, concerning memory consumption & performance. On a side note, I know this might sound a bit weird, but from all the Ubuntu versions...
Read more →‘GParted’ is a free, open-source & a powerful partition editor that runs in multiple operating systems. It runs natively on GNU/Linux, but other OS users have to use the ‘Live CD’ for using it. Now, please don’t take me the wrong way, as it’s a great & a useful tool. However, I have had...
Read more →‘GrooveOff’ is a new & a simple utility that lets you search, download & play songs from ‘Grooveshark’ (free, online music streaming solution) under GNU/Linux (Ubuntu included). Downloading a song using ‘GrooveOff’ is pretty simple. First search for your music, locate the track from the list, then click on the small ‘Download’ icon at...
Read more →‘qpdfview’ is a features rich, fast loading, PDF viewer. It was first released only for Ubuntu, but now packages exist for other GNU/Linux distributions as well. I came across it when it was pretty new, and since then it has been updated with various new features & improvements, including a new ‘settings’ window, which...
Read more →‘B1 Archiver’ is a completely free file archive manager that can be used in GNU/Linux for opening ’7z’, ‘Rar’ & ‘Zip’ file formats. By default, GNU/Linux support ‘Zip’ but doesn’t support ‘Rar’ due to its ‘pure’ proprietary nature & ’7z’ support is also dropped due to file permission incompatibly, though it’s an open-source format....
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