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Today I found this excellent firefox addon called feedly - which calls itself as a more social and magazine-like start page for firefox. I see this as a great RSS feed reader which is integrated with Google reader, twitter and other social thingies.

This is very well integrated with Google reader that any feeds you subscribe here automatically is reflected in Google reader. Reading a post here marks the post as read in Google reader.

You can recommend, tweet and annotate articles which enables your friends to know what you are doing with your feeds. One important feature is allowing the user to view the post from the site directly in an IFrame. So, I can comment on a post without leaving my feed reader.

On a whole, the art of Web design has begun to be better understood as a necessity in the world of ecommerce and content management. After all, content is only as good as its design and vice versa. Once viewed as something that made your site look pretty but had little significance to the bottom line, web design is now considered an integral part of a site's success.

Linux FUD Pattern #5: Linux is not secure

There are some out there who would like for you to believe that Linux is unsafe. What better way to instill fear than to form doubt in your mind about a system’s abilities to protect your data?

This is a list of ten tips that may help you out in getting started with KDE 4.0. All of these I discovered since installing KDE 4.0 in Ubuntu.

Change my hostname in Ubuntu?

Easy.

That is.

Simply replace the name in your /etc/hostname file as superuser (sudo) and save the file, as tech-recipes.com tells us.

Or:

gksu gedit /etc/hostname

As pie.

To see the change, restart your system.

EXTRA TIDBIT: Remember that gksu is the same as sudo, but it is the recommended command to use for graphical programs. In this case, gedit (Gnome’s Text Editor). Sudo is best suited for terminals, or command-line. You could have also typed in gksudo, but that is the same thing: it’s a symlink to gksu. And in KDE, you could have used kdesu (KDE SuperUser).

Congratulations to all the new Christmas owners of the year's hottest subnotebook, the ASUS Eee, putting Linux square in the mainstream and right in the hands of the masses. Here's a collection of tiny – but dead useful – hints and tips to help you get the most out of it.

Jokosher is a great multi-track audio recording tool for Linux. It’s not quite ProTools, but it’s really easy to use, and has some great effects available. I’ve seen it described as GarageBand for Linux. The effects aren’t installed with the Jokosher package, so if you want the effects, just run this command to add them.
sudo apt-get install blop caps cmt fil-plugins mcp-plugins omins swh-plugins tap-plugins vcf

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For people who have been using Turbogears, Catwalk is an excellent tool to manage the database models and for populating the data into the database. But the footer which displays “Turbogears under the hood” is irritating as I couldn’t select items in which lie directly below the div. So I thought of writing down a quick userstyle where the display property of that div is set to none.

Find the Turbogears Catwalk - Remove footer userscript here. You may need to install the Stylish firefox extension for it to work.

For people who have been using Turbogears, Catwalk is an excellent tool to manage the database models and for populating the data into the database. But the footer which displays “Turbogears under the hood” is irritating as I couldn’t select items in which lie directly below the div. So I thought of writing down a quick userstyle where the display property of that div is set to none.

Find the Turbogears Catwalk - Remove footer userscript here. You may need to install the Stylish firefox extension for it to work.

Printing to PDF isn’t setup by default in Gutsy, but it’s easy to implement. Just follow this guide.

Ubuntu 7.10 actually comes with some pretty good security practices already set up for you. For example, the root account is locked and no network services are enabled by default. If you’re planning on making your Ubuntu system publicly accessible, here are some things to consider before you forward a port or public IP address.

If you run an ssh server on your Ubuntu system, and allow password based authentication, then you’ll want to install DenyHosts. It watches the log files and blocks the IP address of those who fail to authenticate too many time. As always, while this article is Ubuntu oriented, the same basic procedure works on other distros.

The first step to blocking the baddies with DenyHosts is installation.

sudo apt-get install denyhosts

Once you get it installed, there is a bit to adjust in the configuration file.

sudo gedit /etc/denyhosts.conf

If they’re attacking your ssh service, they’ll probably attack every other service you run, so deny everything. Remove the hash, or pound sign, from the beginning of BLOCK_SERVICE = ALL and add one to the beginning of BLOCK_SERVICE = sshd.

After reading this article at HappyLinuxGuy’s Happy Linux Thoughts page, I thought I might share with you a way to recover password on a *nix system. The commands and screenshots here will be Ubuntu oriented, but this basic process should work for any distro.

When you create an account on a Linux system, the password isn’t stored. Instead, the hash of the password is stored in /etc/shadow. Here is a portion of my shadow file. The password hash field begins with $1$.
test123:$1$UvnJA$5PxY8jbKrQdRePqywAzmW1:13817:0:99999:7:::
testrnd:$1$mPo0o$mZSYvKEgrLN9WPFnVk2xT/:13817:0:99999:7:::

Now, if I want to discover the passwords for those accounts, I need to enlist the help of John the Ripper. You can install it on Ubuntu with this command:

After a friend gave me a new laptop, I quickly installed Ubuntu on it, and though I knew it was pretty good about hardware detection, I expected to have to fight to get WiFi and Bluetooth to work, but since it detected everything at install, I decided to try to use it to manage the info on my LG VX8300 wireless phone over Bluetooth. Come to find out, as with most things in Ubuntu, it’s not that hard!

Here’s how to do it.

Firefox can be setup to highlight the entire address bar. Here’s how:
Open Firefox and type this in the address bar: about:config
Use the filter to find: browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll
Set the value to True or Enabled.
Once you restart Firefox, you’re ready to go.

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