Posts Tagged ‘Software’

Collection Mania – GCstar on openSuse

Friday, December 28th, 2007

GCstar

I’ve been wanting to catalog my entire book collection for quite some time now. I wanted to use something more than a spreadsheet for keeping track of my books. Somewhere down the line I had the grandiose idea of actually writing my own little catalog software, but all that went out of the window once I saw Delicious Library, the library cataloging software of the mac. Unfortunately, no amount of searching found me a good enough clone for the windows desktop (yes I still run a windows desktop). Sometime back, once I got openSUSE up and running, I began hunting for similar applications for openSUSE. After much hunting, I narrowed down on Tellico.Tellico is a fabulous application, however for some reason I couldn’t manage to get it running behind a proxy server. ( I suspect that my limited intelligence and the fact that I am running a gnome desktop had something to do with it.) Anyway, while searching I came across this application called GCstar, and thats when the search ended :-) .

In the words of the GCStar site:

GCstar is a free open source application for managing your collections. Detailed information on each item can be automatically retrieved from the internet and you can store additional data, such as the location or who you’ve lent it to. You may also search and filter your collection by many criteria.

It’s actually much more than that. It’s got a neat skinnable look. The application lets manage Movies,Video games, Books, Music, Numismatic, Wines, Board games and User defined collections. The book collection lets you search several online services like Amazon in order to fetch book data. You can either do this or enter the data by hand. It’s also got various export features. In fact apparently some user has also rigged up a script that lets you scan your books bar code using a web cam and fetch book information based on that (just like delicious). On the negative side the search and fetch seems a tad slow (maybe coz I’m behind a proxy and firewall) and some of the book covers fetched are inconsistent with their titles. Besides these minor teething problems, GCstar seems to be a great application to have. So if you like collecting stuff and want to be an organized pack rat, I suggest you give this application a try. (Did I mention that it works on windows too ? :-) )

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GDesklets for openSUSE

Friday, August 3rd, 2007

gDeskletsSometime back I was hunting for a How To on installing gDesklets on openSUSE. For the uninitiated, gDesklets is a widget program for Linux that let’s you run small applications on your desktop. It’s similar to Dashboard for Mac and Gadgets for Vista. In short, it adds eye candy to your Linux desktop :-) .

Well to help other Linux newbies wanting to get widgets on to the desktop, here is how I went about getting gDesklets:

First up, you need to fetch the RPM for the gDesklet package. I found the package in Guru’s RPM repository. For information on how to add a repository and on how to add Guru’s RPM repository you can refer to the official openSUSE site. Once the package is installed, you can find the gDesklet application under Utilities.

Next, you would need to get some widgets. Head over to the official site for some of the more stable widgets or if you are comfortable with you can try your luck at the unofficial widget repository.

Once you have downloaded a widget you can install it through the widget manager. You can access the widget manager by right clicking on the system tray icon and choosing manage widgets. After this installing is as simple as using the File -> Install Package option and navigating to place where you downloaded the widget package. Running the widget is again accomplished by the File menu.

Once a widget is running, you can position it by dragging it around on the desktop. To move a desklet, right click on it and choose the Move Desklet option. Most desklets can be similarly configured through the Configure Desklet option.

With this you should be up and running with geDesklets on openSUSE 10.2. Hope this post is helpful for those wanting to get gDesklets working with openSUSE.

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Disaster strikes

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

I was clicking snaps of the beautiful sunset today, when my camera started behaving quite weirdly. At first it gave a card full error, when there was enough space for 45 high resolution pictures on the card. Next, when I switched to a lower resolution and tried to click a picture, the camera kind of just hung while saving the picture to the card. Then when I switched on the camera again, it asked me to format the card, indicating a corrupt card. I was horrified, because it meant losing all the Karnala snaps I had clicked on yesterday’s trek.

After much googling, I managed to get this free software called Digital Photo Recovery from Art Plus. It worked like a charm, and I was able to recover all my pictures from the card. Don’t know what I would have done without this software, thanks Art plus for making great software.

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