CLI Magic: A little script to customize directory listings

How to make Kontact work with Google Apps

All about Linux swap space

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

"Open-source software for volunteer computing and desktop grid computing"

CLI Magic: No-nonsense network monitoring tools

Free Nature-Based Wallpaper

Create Slick DVD Menus with ManDVD

How-To: Find files on your computer with find

(from LifeHacker.com)

Animator vs. Animation

Useful Windows Vista Sidebar gadgets

See also:
7 gadgets for your Windows Sidebar

Ten Ways to Defeat Brain Drain

How to Build a Print Server From an Old Computer

(from LifeHacker.com)

Winefix - improved desktop integration for Wine

(from Linux.com)

Exploring Samba and Active Directory integration options

(from Linux.com)

A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

"This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry."

Dynamic DNS

• No-IP


• Dyn-DNS

Update 2008/06/24: There's an how-to on the Ubuntu wiki.
There's also an interesting page on the Dyn-DNS website about why it's better to use a software client and not the router one.

250+ Tools and Resources For Coding the Web

(from Linux.com)

Overcoming Shyness

(from LifeHacker.com)

Jane

German progressive space rock band from the '70s.

Use eBay

(from LifeHacker.com)

Reachby.com

"Reachby.com provides a simple and effective way to extend your online presence without compromising the privacy. This service allows you to create a personal Web page where people can learn about you or your business, and contact you by submitting a form."

The Jargon File

"This is the Jargon File, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor".

Getting Started Iinto Fingerpicking with 'Railroad Bill'

Read webmail from any email client with FreePOPs

More performance updates, fixes for Vista released in advance of SP1

Echolyn - Official Live Bootleg: Jersey Tomato

Downloadable official live bootleg album from american progressive rock band Echolyn:

"Strongly influenced by GENTLE GIANT"

Making a backup reminder script

... using at, xdialog and rsync.

Eight tips to start with Python

(from DZone.com)

Number Theory for Programmers, Part 1

(from DZone.com)

The Morningside - The Wind, The Trees and The Shadows of The Past

Free download, and it got 5 stars on its first review on ProgArchives.com.

Edit: Warning - cookie monster. :-(

Alusa Fallax - Intorno Alla Mia Cattiva Educazione

Album page on ProgArchives.com. Features two streaming songs.

A quick guide to DVD authoring

Dev Shed

Open Source Web Development Tutorials

The Annotated Jethro Tull Lyrics Page

How To Extract Your Own DNA

Ubuntu in a Microsoft world: Part 1 - Email and Calendar

How to set up Thunderbird or Evolution to use an Outlook Mail Server.

(from LifeHacker.com)

Lego at Pompeii

(from here)

VirtualBox.org

Free, open-source virtualization software for Linux and Windows (and MacOS and, soon, OS/2...).

(from Linux.com)

Suggestions on how to manage swap in Linux

I don't think any scheduler will help you with that. The slowness is due to the swapping in and out from the disk, and that's going to be limited by the horribly slow speed of the disk.

You could tweak things to make this a less likely ocurrence though.

Disable overcommit by echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/overcommit_memory. No more OOM killer killing some random unrelated process. Memory allocations will fail and programs will be able to handle that correctly.

Set some memory limits in /etc/security/limits.conf

Avoid having too much swap space. It's awfully slow, if you're using it too much all you'll manage is to run more things slower.

Get more RAM, it's cheap. If you're regularly swapping then you definitely should.

(from a comment in this thread on /.)

Anatomy of the Linux kernel

RAI su YouTube

Four Must-Have Vista Updates

(from ExtremeTech.com)

Phideaux

Crossover progressive act. Flash-based streaming samples on their website.

(from ProgArchives.com)

Keeping Opera bookmarks in sync with oSync

(from Linux.com)

Removing Backgrounds Quickly in the Gimp

(from LifeHacker.com)

John Wesley's myspace

John Wesley, guitarist for Porcupine Tree, offers his entire solo catalog for free on his MySpace.

(from ProgArchives.com)

Production Line Built From Legos Builds Lego Cars

(from LifeHacker.com)

Need for Speed: Most Wanted - Tweek Guide

Tips to optimize the performances of this game.

Update / Install OpenOffice.org in Ubuntu

How to install the latest version of OpenOffice in Ubuntu, starting from the official OOo distribution file.

Fixes a number of nasty bugs affecting the Ubuntu version of the software.

(Tip: it's just a matter of downloading the package, extract it, transform the RPMs packages in DEBs with alien, and install them).

Error when running Firefox through VNC

If you followed the intructions to set up a vnc server from this post in the Ubuntu forums, you may have experienced some problems trying to run GTK apps like Firefox, Pidgin and so on.

This post in the forums proposes a solution.

Google for Free Comic Books

How to search for free comic books in Internet with Google.com.

(from LifeHacker.com)

GnuPG

Come usare i tool GnuPG per creare e gestire una coppia di chiavi (pubblica + privata) di crittografia.

In particolare spiega come compiere tutti i passi necessari a firmare il codice di condotta Ubuntu su Launchpad.

InterfaceLIFT wallpapers

Link to a big repository of free wallpapers.

(from LifeHacker.com)

Hands on: Ubuntu Linux – Kubuntu and Xubuntu

Points out to a series of packages to add to a fresh Kubuntu Feisty installation to have a full-featured complete system.

Includes a pointer to the commercial Canonical package repository:

deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu feisty-commercial main

(from The Fridge - Ubuntu Newsletter - #51)

Star Trek all'epoca del cinema muto

Star Trek, silent film style.

HOWTO: Set up VNC server with resumable sessions

Kubuntu version.

Uses xinetd to start the vnc server on-demand. "Resumable sessions" means I can close the VNC client, restart, and join back my open KDE session. Neat.

Laws of Software Development

A collection of funny and interesting quotes about science and IT.

(from DZone.com)

Battle Tanks

"“Battle Tanks” is a funny battle on your desk, where you can choose one of three vehicles and eliminate your enemy using the whole arsenal of weapons."

For Win and Linux.

The multiplayer version is FOSS (Free, Open Source Software).

(from The Linux Game Tome)

Typhoon 2001

"... a freeware game inspired by both the Atari Jaguar hit game Tempest 2000 and the arcade hit Tempest."

BasKet

A multi-purpose note-taking application. Incredibly powerful and versatile.
Here's the link to the package download on GetDeb.

(from the Ars Technica.com Linux Journal)

Assorted guitar links of the day

Here they go:

• Basic blues tips;
  
• Scales, scales, scales;
  
• Improvisation Tools: Pentatonic.
  

Free Online Smalltalk Books

I guess the magic word here is "free"... ;-)

(I don't remember where this link came from - I guess it should be DZone.com)

Python tricks

Assorted Python tips and tricks.

(from DZone.com)

Windows Vista Tips, Tweaks & Sidebar Gadgets

As the subject says.

(from LifeHacker.com)

Create backup of installed packages using APTonCD

APTonCD creates a CD or DVD with the backup of a selection of .deb packages, downloaded with apt-get (or its front-ends).

This post on Only Ubuntu Linux explains how to use it.

(from LifeHacker.com)

WifiDocs/WPAHowTo per (K)Ubuntu

As the object says.

How to tie an "Ian Knot"

Fast shoelace knot.

(from LifeHacker.com)

Two progressive rock bands to try

• Jane


• Pallas

Ubuntu Edgy Upgrade Common Problems With solutions

The subject says it all.

The Art of Maintenance Programming

Very useful guidelines on how to properly maintain legacy code.

Some good, non-obvious points:

• Be Conservative: it's better to fix the original code than rewrite it completely;
  
• Adopt Existing Code Conventions Even If You Don’t Like Them: if you don't you'll ad to the confusion.
  

Another interesting article on the same subject is at Codinghorror.com

VYM (View Your Mind)

A QT4 Mind Mapping software.

Google repositories for Linux software

Supports Ubuntu 7.04 among the others.

(from LifeHacker.com)

How to tune your Ubuntu PC for faster performance

Tuning tips to make (K)Ubuntu faster.

(from LifeHacker.com)

The Last Ripper

Software to rip Last.fm streams to mp3 files.

(from LifeHacker.com)

Free secure VNC through restrictive firewall

Two articles on lifehacker.com illustrate two very interesting free softwares that combined together will let you use your home PCs from anywhere in a secure way:

• Synergy


• Hamachi

(from lifehacker.com)

PDFEdit

Claims to be a PDF Editor. It should be interesting to try.

Van Der Graaf Generator live on WDR TV

It's a 2005 concert with the original line-up. It should be free-to-air. Could be interesting.

Ultrastar-NG

This could be a funny game to play - a Karaoke that tells you how well you're singing... The ideal party game. :-P

(from Debian Package of the Day)

The Lifehouse Method

From The Who's master musician and guitar hero Pete Townshend comes a new web service that aims to create a "theme song" for each and every of us, and so discover "the simple secret of a note in us all". :-)

From this article it seems the system is quite raw and unrefined now but it works for free until July so it should be worth a try.

(from Ars Technica)

Jumbo - Vietato ai Minori di 18 Anni

Italian Symphonic Prog album - sounds interesting. The page offers a song preview from the album.

Kino reaches version 1.0

Kino is a very good non-linear video editor for Linux. I've used it already with very good results.

With 1.0 Kino development switches to "maintainance mode", that means no new features will be added for some time.

The linked article mentions another very interesting non-linear video editor project called kdenlive. From the screenshots it seems a very strong software with a classic interface, featuring a multitrack video and audio mixer.

(The Only) Ten Things To Know About CSS

What CSS is and how to use it at its best.

(from dzone.com)

Curses Programming with Python

How-to beginners guide for using curses in Python.

(from dzone.com)

There's also a link to a message in the Python mailing list that explains how to properly use the curses.wrapper module.

La Maschera di Cera

Italian progressive rock band, active today. It should be interesting.

A few mp3 samples are available here.

ProgArchives has something too.

(from a comment to this last.fm journal. Thanks Joeteren!)

Komodo Edit

A free cross-platform, developer-oriented text editor with many useful features.

(from dzone.com, linking to this blog article)

10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities

He's one of the fathers of usability, so Jakob Nielsen's advices on web-design are always precious...

This article presents 10 suggestions on how to improve a for-profit website; anyway, many of them can be very useful for general purpose sites too.

Contains a link to an even more interesting set of articles about Writing for the Web.

(From dzone.com)

EDIT: corrected Gollum-style "precioussssss" ;-)

Tux Guitar

A Guitar Pro-like software for Linux.

Looking at the screenshots on the site, it doesn't look very much different from KGuitar, but at least this project is alive while KGuitar isn't.

Design Patterns

#1 - The Factory Pattern
(from dzone.com)

GREYCstoration

Great free, open source tool "for image denoising and interpolation".

Take a look at the demo pictures to see the astounding things this tool can do!
:-O

(from Slashdot)

Intro

So what is this all about? The main purpose of this blog is to work as an easy to use/easy to browse link repository, where to store all the interesting links I encounter while I'm browsing the net, when I have no time to explore them further, or are just too cool to be lost. 

I use more than one PC so using the browser's bookmarks wouldn't do the job, especially when I use different browsers! Using the email is, as I've found out, a mess, too. I have 60 emails tagged as "links" in my inbox that are waiting to be visited. I'll probably never do.

I have this blogger account, which I opened some time ago to post on Matgala's Photoblog, but I haven't used it very much, I take less pictures than I thought. So I decided, let me try to put all those links in a blog. It's computer independant, easy to use, reliable... And incidentally, someone may find it's contents useful or amusing.

So here we are. I've just one thing to say: don't spam this blog, nobody reads it anyway. ;-)

Oh by the way, I'm Italian, so if you find my English funny, there's a reason. :-)

Have fun.