GNU Grammar and Writing Style checking tools

Historically, there have not been too many free software tools for even the basic spelling & grammar checking. I found the combination of free GNU tools: aspell, diction, and style to work well, on the command line (on Unix as well as Windows) or inside Emacs.

Here is a good article about these tools. http://www.linux.com/archive/article

Magic Jack error 9 no internet connection

I was struggling to be the tech-support for my mother back home and getting her to talk to me over magic jack. It kept saying, Error 9: no internet connection.

And yet at the same time she could hear me properly on Skype but I was not able to hear her at all. Video was working both ways.

I asked her to unplug the magic jack ("Safely remove hardware" and all), and viola, the skype audio started working! :)

I haven't ascertained yet, but I am pretty sure the solution to the magic jack also lies somewhere there - some other device must be using the network itself.

Minitube: native client for Youtube

Even though the support for Adobe Flash is getting better on *nix systems, it is far from what it should be. Youtube especially seems to have problems interfering with audio settings, not running fullscreen properly on multiscreen displays to name a few.

Solution: use Minitube, a Flash-less native Youtube client for Linux & other Unix-like systems.
http://flavio.tordini.org/minitube

Ubuntu eclipse no java perspective

For those of you installing eclipse for the first time on Ubuntu (using the System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package manager), the Window -> Open Perspective -> Java might not appear (even under Other).

Here is what you need to do:
1. Close eclipse if you are already running it.
2. Open the Synaptic Package Manager (as above) and select the eclipse-jdt package as well.
3. Install (basically, Apply)

That'll do it! :) Start up eclipse again!

Google Doc Viewer

Google Docs has the functionality to render PDF/PPT documents into HTML webpages on the fly. If you have attachments in GMail, you might have seen this already. Now, Google has opened this for any document on the web.

Just add your document URL after "http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=",

for e.g. http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf.

Having http://, www prefixes before the URL doesn't hurt.

The Greasemonkey addon for Firefox & its equivalents for other browsers go one step ahead. This script modifies each document link automatically with the viewer prefix.

Firefox crashing with Adobe PDF plugin

I had struggled for quite a while with the way Mozilla Firefox would crash each time I tried to open a PDF document - I always had to save the link independently and then open the doc. The default behavior of in-browser opening of the document was the problem, it seemed. So here is how you solve it.

From the Firefox menu, go to Tools->Options. There, on the Applications tab, you will find a long list of applications/document types and what is supposed to be used to open each of those. It would look like this:

In there, like I've shown here, find the Adobe Acrobat documents and instead of "Adobe Acrobat (in Firefox)", select "Adobe Acrobat Reader", i.e. the program itself. If that does not show up by default, select "Other", and browse to find Adobe Acrobat Reader.

There you go - no more crashes! :)

Suspend/Hibernate from command line

On a *NIX system, there are two main message buses: a system-wide one and one for each user session. The "dbus-send" command can send messages to either of the buses with --system or --session options along with a variety of options. Long story short, if you want to suspend or hibernate your machine, you need to send messages to org.gnome.PowerManager, not sure how it is for KDE systems. This is what your respective GUI options do internally.

To suspend, say:

$ dbus-send --session --dest=org.gnome.PowerManager --type=method_call --print-reply --reply-timeout=2000 /org/gnome/PowerManager org.gnome.PowerManager.Suspend

To hibernate, say:

$ dbus-send --session --dest=org.gnome.PowerManager --type=method_call --print-reply --reply-timeout=2000 /org/gnome/PowerManager org.gnome.PowerManager.Hibernate