Ubuntu Trash maintenance

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The functionality of the old Trash folder is something that’s always annoyed me. You either never remember to empty it, and if you do, it’s all or nothing. While playing around with Ubuntu, I noticed this and a lack of a secure delete option. Nor was there any simple way to clear your history of recently opened documents. Missed features like this are fun to script around.

Pretty similar to an OSX script I’ve written to do the roughly the same, Periodic.sh will prune your Trash based on how old it is. Securely deleting it should be a feature of any Trash folder, so that’s in there too (secure-delete toolkit required, apt-get install secure-delete). Clearing your recently opened items is optionally thrown in also, since Ubuntu is missing this as well.

Usage:

Periodic.sh -n [seconds to keep trash] -w [your home directory] -m [maximum entries]  -h [true|false] -s [true|false]

-h = delete history
-s = secure delete, requires srm (secure deletion toolkit)

I don’t have any desktop Linux machines other than Ubuntu, but it’s probably safe to say this wouldn’t work with any other distribution.. at least not without some minor modifications.

GeekTool Network Info Script

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GeekTool, in their words “is an application for Mac OS 10.6+. It lets you display various kinds of information on your desktop via 3 default plug-ins.” With a little bit of scripting ability, you can display all sorts of useful information on your desktop.

GeekTool desktop

Here I have some weather, and whatever network interface my MacBook using along with my current IP address. You can download my network interface script here. To get it running, you’ll need to create an IPAddresses.cfg in the same directory you’ve put the script in (I just use Scripts under my home directory). All it contains is a list of the network interfaces to probe, typically just…

en0
en1

…which should be your ethernet and WiFi ports. You can run “ifconfig -a” from the Terminal app if you’re unsure. Once this is done, you can test this in the Terminal app again by running “./IPAddresses.sh” from the directory you stored the script in. You should see an output similar to the screenshot above.

Once this is all working, you just need to drag a new “Shell” widget from GeekTool onto your desktop, and set the Command field to the script location, “/Users/username/Scripts/IPAddresses.sh -c /Users/username/Scripts/” The -c switch just specifies the location of the configuration file you created, the GeekTool scheduler won’t be able to find it otherwise, even if it’s in the same directory. The refresh field is how often you want the script to rerun, I chose 3,600 seconds, but you can go with either shorter or longer intervals. Everything else is pretty much optional, you can select fonts, colours, position, etc. GeekTool will automatically pick black text, so if you have dark backgrounds like I do and you don’t see anything, check the font colour first!

Five apps I need to see on the BlackBerry PlayBook

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Now that the PlayBook OS2.0 is out, the 10 most desired apps that would genuinely make me a happy user are:

  1. Echofon - With clients for iOS, OSX, Windows, and Firefox, could Android/PlayBook support be far behind? The killer feature of this Twitter app is that it keeps in sync all the unread tweets in your timeline. It was the first dedicated Twitter app I’ve used, and I can’t imagine how I would use Twitter without it.
  2. 1Password - Never forget a password again. Using the same password in this day doesn’t make good sense, 1Password will securely store all your passwords, and other confidential information with one master password (that you shouldn’t use anywhere else!). Dropbox support, plus app versions for OSX, Windows, iOS, and Android, along with browser plugins for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, and your secure passwords are just a couple clicks away.
  3. Dropbox - Cloud storage that lets you store any of your files, making them accessible from nearly anywhere. 2GB of storage is free, with paid accounts going up to 200GB. What’s nice about Dropbox, is that it supports several mobile and desktop platforms, and has a nice API set that makes your files directly accessible to other apps, like 1Password and todo.txt.
  4. Todo.txt - A simple todo manager that stores your todo list in a plain text file. Originally a bash shell script, it’s branched out to mobile with iOS and Android versions available. The mobile versions can use the Dropbox API, and coupled with bash being available for nearly every desktop platform, make this the most versatile todo app ever. Did I mention that if needed, a straight text editor will also do the trick?
  5. Flipboard - This will suck in data from your various social and RSS feeds and deliver them in a customized magazine format.

Alternatives to some of the above do exist, but they’re either missing that one make or break feature for me, doesn’t work with a different platform I’m also using, or uses a different dataset.

Edit: Item 4 has been addressed, Todo.txt Enyo beta is now in App World. Ironically, it’s using the Enyo framework, so it looks like a WebOS app. Even more ironically, I don’t see it available in the HP App Catalog for my HP TouchPad.