Ubuntu Musings

My preferred tool for managing tasks is a text file. Not just any text file, but todo.txt. OK, it’s more than a text tile. It’s also a powerful shell script that does the heavy lifting for you. What I like about todo.txt is that it’s simple and, because it’s plain text, it’s portable.

That said, there’s one aspect of todo.txt that puts some people off: it’s a command line tool. Yes, it’s true. There are Linux users who aren’t huge fans of the command line. Sure, there’s a solid graphical interface to todo.txt for Android devices. But what if someone wants to get the full todo.txt experience on your desktop without cracking open a terminal window?

They can turn to DoStuff. DoStuff is a plain, but nicely effective, graphical face for todo.txt.

Let’s take a look at it.

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I do a majority of my writing (and that includes all of my blogging) in Markdown. What’s Markdown? It’s what’s called a lightweight markup language and it allows me to write and format what I’m writing using keyboard symbols. You can learn more about Markdown here.

There are a number of reasons I use Markdown, but essentially it has to do with my love of working in plain text and the need for flow.

Over the years, I’ve used a number of online, desktop, and mobile editors to work with Markdown. Many of them had features that I liked but none really had everything I was looking for.

That was until I ran into UberWriter. For me, it’s almost the perfect Markdown editor. Read on to find out why.

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So much music, so many desktop music players, and so little time.

I’m sure that most Linux users can rattle off the names of a few music players. We’ve all tried a few (sometimes more than a few), in the hopes of finding the right one. I know I have. The closest I came to finding that music player was one called Songbird. Until it stopped working and the developers stopped showing the Linux version any love.

While I still haven’t found that music player that’s perfect for me, one that I stumbled across a while ago has made an impression. It’s called Clementine and while it’s simple, it does quite a good job.

Let’s take a look at it.

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No matter what your reasons are for keeping a journal or a diary, there are any number of ways in which to keep that journal. You could go old school and use a paper notebook. You could use a web-based applications. Or you could take advantage of the humble text file.

Another option is to use a dedicated journaling application. There are several very flexible and very useful journaling tools for the Linux desktop.

Let’s take a look at three of them.

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A few months ago, I wrote a post in this space about NixNote, a desktop Evernote client for the Linux desktop (and other desktops, too). While I like NixNote, its major problem is that it’s written in Java. Which makes it big and bulky and slow. While I’ve never found it unusable and while I liked it, NixNote wasn’t quite the solution I was looking for.

Shortly after publishing that post about NixNote, I stumbled across another Evernote client for the Linux desktop. Called Everpad, it’s lighter than NixNote and has better integration with the desktop.

Let’s take a peek at it.

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I don’t know about you, but there are a number of simple tasks that I find tedious. One of them is doing some basic work with photos. That includes tasks like resizing and changing the brightness of photos to adding simple effects.

Take, for example, the photos I including at the top of blog posts. Like the one to the left. When I’m queuing up posts, I usually have a bunch of such photos, and I need them in a uniform size. Pulling them individually into an application like The GIMP and editing them is a tedious process.

Instead, I turn to a useful utility called Phatch. It’s a fast, easy to use batch photo processor that can save you a lot of time if you have a number of repetitive, simple photo editing tasks.

Let’s walk through the basics of using Phatch.

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