Well, I have finally decided to open this tool up to the world. I have been using and casually improving this for the past six months or so and I think it is ready for others to try out.

Portable GTD is a to-do list manager that runs from inside a web browser. It is a single HTML file that is composed of HTML, CSS and Javascript. The idea is that you can open it in a browser and add, organize, complete and delete tasks as you wish and then when you are done you can use the browser to save the file and take it with you. It goes really well saved on a Jumpdrive (or other portable media) so you use it on any computer whenever you think of something you need to do.

The features and interface are still pretty basic but I am working to improve it. I could really use some feedback and ideas about this application, so if you have any thoughts please contact me.

You can try it out by clicking here.

One important limitation of this version is that the saving mechanism only works in Gecko-based browsers, like Firefox and its derivatives (Flock, SeaMonkey, etc). This is something I will remedy in future releases.

For now the home for the Portable GTD application will be here, but I will post on this blog any updates related to it.

I am releasing this the GNU GPL version 2 license and if you enjoy the application, I encourage you to share it with others and distribute it freely.

If you ever see a flag you don’t recognize and want to know where it is from, this site has a really good flag searching tool. The look of the site is a bit out of date, but I was really impressed with how useful their flag search was.

http://www.flags.net

I came across this website today while researching online graphical tools. It is a site that allows you to upload and then resize and modify a graphic, much in the way you would with a desktop application like GIMP or Photoshop. Although this web application is not quite advanced as something like GIMP, it does allow you to resize, apply filters and touch up photos and such.

I like these types of sites because I think it is really cool to see more and more highly functional applications work from the web browser, rather than having to download and install them.

http://gui.picresize.com/picresize2/

They also provide an API so you can use this type of functionality on your own website. You can submit pictures to their server for resizing and modification.

http://gui.picresize.com/api/

However they do impose some limits on usage. So if you are going to be doing a large amount dynamic graphic modification for a website, it might be best for you to just install a graphics library yourself. GD is a popular (and Open Source) graphical development toolkit and has implementations in most of the popular web languages, including PHP, Python, Perl and Ruby.

http://www.libgd.org

Grep is a tool for searching through the contents of files on the command line. It can be very useful for activities like finding records in log files or searching a directory of files for specific content. Anyway, it is a very powerful tool that has many options which can make it quite complex to construct a useful command.

Typically when I use it always takes me a few tries to get the syntax right because I forget how the basic options go. So I figure I would record it here for future reference; so a basic search goes like this:

grep -rni searchterm /path/to/directory/or/file

The basic form of the command is the command followed by options followed by the search term and then where in the file system to look.

The options are as follows:

• r is for recursive, this way if you are trying to search a folder it will search all files in the folder and everything in all sub-folders too.
• n means it will show you what line of the file the the match was found. this can be useful to know if you are looking through files to find and change something.
• i means that the search will be case-insensitive. Which means that it doesn’t care whether or not the match is made up of uppercase or lowercase letters. So if your search term is foo; Foo, FOo and FOO will all be a positive match.

There are many more options but these are the most useful typical options.

The search term cannot have any spaces in it unless you put quotes (or something) around it. You could also use basic regex (i.e. ?+.).

The path is the last argument and it can be a folder or a single file. If you specify a folder it will search the whole folder and all of its sub-folders, you can also use an asterisk to specify a range of files and folders.

Came across this website today. It allows you to customize and build a Linux install disc with your choice of applications, desktop background and various other settings. Your customized Linux install disc is based on NimbleX (which is based on Slackware). The process is somewhat limited in what options you can choose, but it is super fast at building your image once you are done customizing.

http://custom.nimblex.net/

Since I am talking about building your custom Linux distributions I will also mention a resource to truly build your own custom Linux distribution from source. This site is dedicated to producing guides that allow someone to gather software from around the Open Source world and create a Linux distribution package by package.

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

This is a clever concept for a website (however I am not sure how often I am going to com to rely on it). It allows you to create a note that will be destroyed upon its first viewing. Once you write a note; it will give you a special link to that note, but once it is viewed for the first time (by anyone who knows the link) the link will cease to exist.

https://privnote.com

This is a website that uses a Java applet to generate rather artistic word clouds with ease. You can either type/copy and paste text or pull text from a website to give the generator a word set. Then it will take that word set and create a random word cloud, which you can customize by changing colors, fonts and layout. The best way to understand what it does is to try it for yourself.

Here is a link to one that I generated from the text on this blog.

Try it out for yourself at the link below.

http://wordle.net