HowTo Copy a Folder in Linux/Unix

Posted on by Sharninder

So, I got this question recently from a new Linux user, but I’m pretty sure even people who’ve been using Linux for some time will have a question or two regarding copying files on the command line.

Happy penguins

Unix, and by extension, Linux isn’t known to be very chatty. Most commands are two or at the most three characters long with a hundred options, so a lot of people who’ve come to Linux by way of easy to use distributions such as Ubuntu or Mint have never really used the command line to get done work. I, on the other hand, am an old Linux hand and, frankly, am the most comfortable on the command line.

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How To Convert Text To Audio Using Automator On OS X

Posted on by Sharninder

If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you’d know we’re big fans using tools that’ll save us time or effort, however small it may be. After all, computers are the best at doing manual, repetitive work and doing it much better than humans would do.

OS X has a lot of little tools and utilities to help us save time and one of my favorite tools for automating any kind of workflow is Automator. We’ve written about this earlier and we’re back with another nifty trick up Automator’s sleeves.

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How To Reindex Your Folders Or Rebuild The Spotlight Index

Posted on by Sharninder

Spotlight is without a doubt, one of my favorite technologies in Mac OS X. I’ve been a fan every since it was first introduced with Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”. Spotlight, at it’s core, is essentially a database or an index of all the files on your hard drive.

The user facing part of spotlight lets a user query this index and get results almost instantaneously. In fact, I’ve gotten so used to spotlight, I’ve almost forgotten those days when we used to meticulously keep our important files in various folders and maintain the folder structures religiously, lest we save a file in some folder and can’t find it later. With spotlight, I never have to worry about folders. I just type a few letters of the filename or even it’s content, and spotlight will invariably get me the correct file.

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Stream The Latest BlockBusters For Free Using Popcorn Time

Posted on by Sharninder

Hollywood has a pretty tight grip on the business of streaming movies and if you’re someone who’d like to watch the latest blockbusters from the comfort of your own couch, you basically have no option but to wait for the theatrical release, even if you’re willing to pay money to companies such as Netflix. If you are unwilling, there are always the free movie apps.

In my opinion, this is the only reason for the massive popularity of mediums such as bittorrent for pirating movies and music. Downloading a good quality print of a movie from a torrent search engine isn’t rocket science but it’s still something that a lot of non-techies don’t know how to do, and they’d be more than willing to pay a fee to the hollywood studios if they’d let them download and see the movies at home. In the absence of any such option, it is natural for people to resort to piracy.

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How To Enable php On Apache With OS X Mavericks

Posted on by Sharninder

phpIf you’re an OS X user developing php based application, you’d have realised that the apache configuration shipped with OS X doesn’t have php enabled out of the box. If you try to open a php script using your browser, you’ll just see the php code as text and not the rendered HTML you’re expecting.

But, don’t fret. It’s actually pretty simple to enable php on OS X. Here is what you should do.

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How To Start Apache Server In OS X Mavericks

Posted on by Sharninder

ApacheMac OS X used to be the one of the easiest operating systems around to get a basic web development setup. For anyone interested in learning HTML/CSS/JS etc, all they had to do was open the sharing pane from system preferences and enable the web sharing option. On OS X 10.9, web sharing has been removed.

That doesn’t mean apache isn’t installed, by default. It is, its just hidden away waiting to be manually invoked using a Terminal command.

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How to view HTML source in Safari And Firefox

Posted on by Sharninder

If you’re a Linux and a Mac OS X user, like I am, chances are that you tend to stick to the same browser in both the operating systems, maybe because you’re familiar with it or maybe because you just like that one browser. In my case, that’s usually the Mozilla Firefox browser. While I have both Chrome and Firefox installed on both my machines, I still tend to come back to Firefox always. Anyway, I digress.

I’ve been using Firefox to debug and display a ruby on rails app that I’m working on and it was going fine till I decided to use Safari for the same work, because I thought I should test in both the browsers.

Now, if you’ve developed any HTML based app before, you’d know how important and useful the “view source” function is, that any modern browser incorporates. HTML is a simple markup language and mostly you can just debug your markup by just looking at the browser UI, but sometimes, especially when you’re dynamically generating content and pages, as in case of Ruby on rails, you need to view the source to figure out what’s happening.

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Top 5 Sites To Watch Movies And Documentaries Online For Free

Posted on by Sharninder

If one goes by the available statistics alone, TV viewership is declining across the world, especially in countries where fast and reliable Internet is available and cheap enough for everyone to afford. While that does spell doom for TV companies, trends also reveal that movie and documentary film makers are doing alright and in-fact, viewership seems to be increasing for them with the only difference being that most viewers these days prefer to get their fix at home instead of at the movie theaters.

For all you cord cutters out there, we have compiled of a list of the Top 5 sites to view movies and documentaries online for free. Read on for the full list.

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Why Should You Switch From Qwerty To Colemak Keyboard Layout

Posted on by Gourav

If you’ve been using a computer for some time, you’d be familiar with the term ‘qwerty’ –  That’s the first six letters on the most popular format of the keyboard layout in use.

The qwerty keyboard layout was introduced more than a century ago and while almost all other forms of technology have improved drastically since then, the same can’t be said for the keyboard arrangement we use.

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The Curious Case Of The iPad Mini

Posted on by Sharninder

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few days, you’d probably know that Apple plans to release a new 7″ (or 7.8″) iPad sometime this month. Well, actually, Apple hasn’t confirmed anything except sent out an invite to the tech press which seems to all but confirm the existence of the said device. There has been speculation about the device’s size, price and the ability to conjure up the Patronus Charm and blow the competition away.

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