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ZK spreadsheet is an online spreadsheet which enables users to import and export excel files and edit excel files within the browser. This can be thought to be similar to Google Spreadsheet. Only that it is open source and can be installed on your own server. Another very similar open source product which I came across was Sheetster but the setup was not very straight forward and also I was not really impressed with the UI and functionality.

All-In-One Tools

Hardware Lister:

Hardware Lister can be used for getting all the hardware information of a system. Some example usage are given below:

# apt-get install lshw lshw-gtk
# lshw (Displays detailed hardware information)
# lshw-gtk (Gives a nice graphical view of the hardware information) 
# lshw -short (Lists hardware in a compact format)
# lshw -class disk -class storage (Lists all disks and storage controllers in the system)
# lshw -html -class network (Lists all network interfaces in HTML)

After spending almost a day in trying to configuring my dd-wrt router as an OpenVPN client and reading many complicated guides, I found a really simple way to configure OpenVPN. It is necessary that you have optware set up on your router. For setting up Optware, kindly read Optware, The Right Way.

Long back, when I was in IIIT, I used a small player known as Nitin's online radio player (runs only on Windows) which used to sit in the system tray and play online streaming radio channels. It had a small pop-up to switch between radio channels and was one of my favourite sources for listening to music. Six years later, I again wanted to have a similar radio but something which runs in Linux. My search revealed several players which supported this.

There is one feature I often missed in linux console - deleting to Trash. I often do a 'rm -rf' and then suddenly realize that I have accidentally deleted something which I shouldn't have. From now on, I needn't worry because I have started using trash-cli, a command line interface to the freedesktop.org trashcan. This small utility provides commands to delete and restore files from the console. The version shipped with Debian is really old and has a serious bug which could destroy data.

This tutorial covers the necessary steps to get BackupPC up and running on any device (such as the Linksys router WRT 610N) which has DD-WRT firmware installed on it.

In case there are any steps which I have missed, kindly mention them in the comments section, and I will update the main article accordingly.

Installing DD-WRT Firmware

I often find it difficult to use 'scp' program because I don't know the exact path to the directory in the destination server and I do not find 'sftp' program very useful because it does not support recursive downloads. Here are two programs which offer recursive downloads over sftp protocol:

1. psftp provided by package putty-tools

# psftp user@server
psftp> get -r directory_to_download
psftp> put -r directory_to_upload

From: Rahul
To: Sunil Mohan
Subject: Debian or Ubuntu

Some applications which I had backported while using debian etch along with the backporting difficulty level:

alltray (simple)
ekiga (medium - the etch version was giving problems for IP-to-IP direct calling)
ffmpeg / mplayer / avidemux (quite a nightmare ... I was trying to backport the testing version from debian-multimedia.org)
gwenview (simple - etch version had some bugs)
pidgin (difficult - because it was using libnss .. actually i installed libnss from mepis :D)

Pidgin stores the passwords of the accounts in plain text in a xml file (i.e. if you have enabled the "save password" option for the accounts). Anyone who can get read access to this xml file (accounts.xml) will know the passwords of all the accounts for which you have chosen to save the password.

File encryption is a useful feature. Especially if you want to store some sensitive information in a file on your PC or mail someone a file with sensitive data. GPG allows us to encrypt files using either a password or public-private-key pair. Further, a vim plugin is available which allows you to edit the gpg file directly. Though vim by default provides encryption support for files (using the -x option), the encryption algorithm is weak. GPG provides a great alternative for strongly encrypting files.