Create PDF files of man pages in Ubuntu

One of the most important feature of linux is its internal online help called man pages which gives a detailed description of any command, its options and syntax. A help on a command can be obtained by simply typing man followed by the command name. For example,

man ls

will give details on the syntax and options of ls command.

If such a detailed entry is needed to be sent to someone over the net, then you may want to convert it into a pdf file. Here's a simple trick that could do it using two simple tools - man and ps2pdf.


man with -t option gives output in postscript format which is well suited for printing.
ps2pdf does the function of printing to a pdf file. So that's the simple trick here. We're going to pipe the output of man -t to ps2pdf and assign it a filename. And we're done.

For example,

man -t ls | ps2pdf - ~/ls_manpage.pdf

The above example creates a pdf file named ls_manpage.pdf in the user's home directory whose contents is that of the man ls command. 

Blogger in Draft

http://draft.blogger.com

I'm not sure how many of you know about this. I've been using it from quite sometime now.

Blogger in draft not so different from Blogger but with added functionalities. People behind blogger add new features to blogger in draft before releasing them to rest of the world. It has a better editor with some great features. All that you need to do is to log in to draft.blogger.com instead of using blogger.com and you can switch between them anytime.

You can find more FAQs here on their blog.

Using third-party templates has always been an headache in blogger, but not anymore. Use Blogger in Draft's new feature to design your own template, released just today. The best part is, it is highly customizable. You can choose between 4 of the templates (as of now), and you can customize it with hundreds of cool backgrounds and a variety of layout designs in adjustable size. You can change just about everything.

There are some more features that you may like in Blogger in Drafts. The WYSIWYG editor is more powerful and handling pictures and videos is very simple.

Snapshot below can help you find the template design feature.

"Template designer", new option under Layout Tab

Here are a couple of snapshots of what they offer at their template designer.

Basic Screen of Blogger Template Designer(click to expand)

click to enlarge

This is the secret behind my new theme ;). Kewl ain't it?

Inverse Graphing Calculator

This is something I found just now.

http://www.xamuel.com/inverse-graphing-calculator.php?phrase=Racing+Infinity

The above link takes you to Xamuel's latest Inverse Graphing Calculator. It gives you the equation to your desired text. It gives equation which when plotted on a graph will give you the text you entered. Click on the link above. I did not try to prove its genuineness. Try if you want but don't forget to post back your comments here later.

Here is a snapshot of it.

Google Calculator

Google calculator is a hidden feature of Google search. No need of separate URL. Just log in to Google.com and type in whatever you want to calculate. You can type anything like 100+130 or it can even be trigonometry of sin(30) or it can be anything. Operators that can be used are

Operator	Function	Example
+	addition	5+3
-	subtraction	9-4
*	multiplication	8*5
/	division	23/2
^	exponentiation(raise to the power of)	6^4
%	modulo	8%7
choose	X choose Y determines the number of ways of choosing a set of Y elements from a set of X elements	19 choose 3
th root of	calculates the nth root of a number	6th root of 64
% of	X % of Y computes X percent of Y	20% if 150
sqrt	square root	sqrt(25)
sin, cos etc...	Trigonometric function	tan(45)
ln	logarithm to the base e	ln(4)
log	logarithm to the base 10	log(pi)
!	Factorial	8!

 

It also understand the value of 'pi'. Like, you can use sin(pi/3). You can also use parenthesis to make a perfect equation. The equation inside the parenthesis will be evaluated first and then the rest.
You can also use this as converters. If you want to know x kms in terms of miles, then just type in 10kms in miles.
Conversion from decimal to binary is easy. For example, type 54 to binary. You can use hexadecimal, octal and binary numbers. Prefix hexadecimal numbers with 0x, octal numbers with 0o and binary numbers with 0b. For example: 0x7f + 0b10010101.
It also understands when you say speed of light or just c. 
Not all the features of Google Calculator are included here. You can convert decimal to hexadecimal or even roman numerals. Just as described above with binary conversion. Google Calculator also understands some complex statements like this G*(6e24 kg)/(4000 miles)^2. It understands these 'kg', 'miles' and even the constants like 'G'.

Not all the features of Google Calculator is described here. Just get on Google and start experimenting with this. 
Isn't this cool? A search engine not just a search engine.

Google Chat Bots - Language not a barrier anymore!

Here is something, not so new, but so useful. Google Chat bots! Chatting with people who don't know english was always difficult and almost impossible. But Google got a solution to this. Name of the solution is "Google Bots".

Google Bots translate languages. There are more than 50 bots that google has released. Add them as your friend on Google chat and while chatting with an alien who doesn't speak your language, add these bots and make it a conference chat. Thats it! Whenever you enter something, the bot will translate it to what it is supposed to. There are different bots for different languages.

The email addresses of the bots that you should add follows the following pattern.

[from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com

For example, if you want to translate English to Hindi, you add the bot en2hi@bot.talk.google.com as your friend.

Other bots are -

• ar2en (Arabic to English)
• de2en (German to English)
• de2fr (German to French)
• el2en (Greek to English)
• en2ar (English to Arabic)
• en2de (English to German)
• en2el (English to Greek)
• en2es (English to Spanish)
• en2fr (English to French)
• en2it (English to Italian)
• en2ja (English to Japanese)
• en2ko (English to Korean)
• en2nl (English to Dutch)
• en2ru (English to Russian)
• en2zh (English to Chinese)
• es2en (Spanish to English)
• fr2de (French to German)
• fr2en (French to English)
• it2en (Italian to English)
• ja2en (Japanese to English)
• ko2en (Korean to English)
• nl2en (Dutch to English)
• ru2en (Russian to English)
• zh2en (Chinese to English)

Wow! I can speak Spanish now!
Las personas se divierten!

Multiple Logins in Gtalk

 

Ok! Here's something cool now. Suppose you have 2 gmail ids and you want to log into both the accounts using GTalk, how will you do??? You can't open multiple Gtalks  in your computer. Clicking once on the icon will open Gtalk once. You login. And clicking again on GTalk icon brings you back to the logged Gtalk!

But not anymore! Here is a cool trick that allows you to login different Gtalks simultaneously.

Right click on the Gtalk Shorcut icon on your desktop (If you don't have shortcut icon, create one). Then in the Target function of the shorcut Tab, you'll find something like this in quotes.

"C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe"

Now append '/nomutex' to this without quotes. That is, make it

"C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe" /nomutex

And save it by clicking OK. Now you're done! :)
Now open Gtalk login window as many times as you want just by clicking this shortcut icon and login with as many accounts as you want.

Tiny URL - Shortening Long Links for SMS or to use in Twitter

http://www.tinyurl.com

This is a URL suppressor. I mean if you have a URL to some article in some newspaper or in some blog and it has more than 30 or more characters, then you can just use this site www.tinyurl.com to suppress it and make it tiny. Go to the website. Paste the long link that has to be suppressed. And click submit. The site returns you with a link that in this format www.tiny.com/<some code>
where <some code> is a string of random characters and numbers.

With this feature, posting URL in twitter or sending SMS is easy and helps save time. :)

TinyURL needs no registration and its simple and cool. Try out!

Online FLV to Other format converter

In my last post on downloading you tube videos, i gave a small tricky website that does all the job of downloading movies in .flv format. Downloading in .flv format is not always handy. And downloading in .flv and then converting it to other using softwares is lot of work. So here are 3 simple websites for your simple work. Clicks away are your videos in your desired formats.

• http://www.flv2mp3.com/
  Use this site if you only want the audio track from it. Enter the link and the website will give you back another link. Save that link and you will get that particular video's audio track only. That too in a convenient .mp3 format
  
• http://www.videoconvertx.com/
  Enter the link of the video that you want to download. Select the output format of that video. And you'll get that! As easy as that. Takes no time.
  
• http://www.convertdirect.com/
  This site is a combination of www.videoconvertx.com and downloadyoutubevideos.com which i told in my last post. You can either download video directly in .flv format or you can get it converted and download in your desired output. If you are downloading the converted video, then you need to give your email id to which the link will be sent to. Better hang on to the other 2 sites given above.
  

Isn't that easy?

Download Youtube Videos! http://downloadyoutubevideos.com/

Ever felt like downloading a youtube video and wondered how? 

There are lot of software available on the net to download youtube videos. But the simplest and the online way is here :)

Go to 

http://downloadyoutubevideos.com/

Enter the URL to the video that you want to download into the box given and press submit. It gives you the download link in return. As simple as that. No need of third party softwares. No need to register in that site. Works fine. :) Downloaded file will be in FLV format. 

Note: Beware of the adult ads present in that site.

gAlwaysIdle - Be idle on google talk

Google Talk does not allow users to decide when their status changes to 'idle' and back. The result is that others can tell whether or not you're at your computer.

gAlwaysIdle adds two new options to Google Talk, allowing you to change your status to be 'always idle' or 'never idle'. When your status is set to 'always idle', you'll appear idle to your Google Talk buddies, even if you're sitting at your computer typing e-mails and sending IMs.

System Requirements:

• Google Talk Client
• Windows XP/Vista (no 64 bit operating system)

Screenshot:














Download Link:
http://www.4shared.com/file/79037493/5b12cef9/gAlwaysIdleSetup.html

eBoostr - Use Flash drive as RAM - Speed up your PC!

You might have heard of this Readyboost if you are a windows vista user. This is one technique by which you can use your pen drive as an extra random access memory (RAM) for your computer. When you insert a Pen drive into your Vista OS machine, you'll be given an option to boost your computer memory with USB along with other options like "Play media files", "Open folder to view files" and et cetera. This is one real helpful software. But people with windows xp need not worry.
Coz eboostr is here.
Yes, this new software is similar to ReadyBoost in Vista. It works in XP. And now you can boost up your XP OS computer's memory without much work.
You can boost up your computer using memory card reader also. Same application. Eboostr.

Requirements:

• Microsoft Windows XP
• USB 2.0 port version or external card-reader
• USB flash drive or flash card with at least 64 MB free space

Download Link:
http://www.4shared.com/file/79035850/cdbde1a0/eBoostr.html


If you want to buy the full version of eboostr($29) check their site.
Site link: http://www.eboostr.com