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.

So here are the instructions on how to use the ‘cp’ command to copy a file or a folder from one location to another.

Copying a file

user$ cp file1 /path/for/file2

This command will copy the file named file1 with a new name, file2, to the folder at /path/for.

Copying a directory

Not surprisingly, the same cp command in Unix can also be used to copy directories from one location to another.

user$ cp -r directory1 /path/for

Notice the ‘-r‘ ? That’s the option for recursive copying. So, everything in the folder directory1 is copied to /path/for and the directory structure is kept intact.

Copying over a network

user$ scp filename root@remoteserver.com:/tmp

This command uses the SSH protocol to copy a file name filename securely from your local machine to the remote server named remoteserver.com. It uses the root user account to copy files to the /tmp directory of the remote server. Of course, you will be prompted to enter a password for the root user.

Did this article clarify things for you ? Or are the terse Unix commands still a mystery?

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.

Have you ever wanted to, say, create an audiobook out of a PDF ? Or maybe just have some text converted into an audio file that you can then listen to leisurely during your morning walk ? If the answer is yes, read on!

The first step is to launch Automator. It’s usually present in the Applications folder but I prefer launching it using spotlight so I don’t have to bother with mundane details like the location of the application. How 80’s is that?

When you launch Automator, you’ll be presented with a dialogue box where you have to select the type of Automator workflow you want create. For our purpose, select Service and click on Choose to proceed.

The next window is where you define your actual workflow.

Automator comes bundled with a lot of actions out of the box that can be used in your workflow. Take a look at the left sidebar. For this tutorial, we need to use the Text to Audio File action. Search for it using the search bar.

Now drag and drop the action to the workflow window on the right. Also, make sure the workflow’s input section says “Service receives selected text in any application”. The two drop-downs should have “text” and “any application” selected. This will make sure our service works in any application where text can be selected.

The default values of the action should be fine for you but you can change the voice that OS X will use to narrate the text and the place where the audio files are stored by default. I personally like the defaults.

That’s it!

Save the action and give it a nice descriptive name that you can identify later. Something like “Convert Text to Audio” should be good.

Now, open the file that has the text that you want to convert and select the text. Click on the Application menu and from the Services sub menu select the service that you just created.

OS X will now create a file named audio text.aiff in the directory that you’d chosen earlier.

Go ahead, make your own Audiobook now and let us know how it goes.

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.

This is amazing, when it works. But, sometimes, as with all software, spotlight gets a bit iffy and bugs show up which prevent spotlight from indexing files properly in a particular folder or on the complete drive. If you’re facing such an issue, This post today will help you fix spotlight easily.

First of all, launch the Spotlight pane from System Preferences.

Click on the Privacy tab. This is the place where you add folders or volumes that you don’t want spotlight to index. We’re going to use this feature of Spotlight to delete the existing index.

Click the ‘+’ button and add the folder or complete volume to the list. OS X will give a warning which says that your existing index will be deleted. Press Confirm.

Deleting the index, doesn’t take long but wait for 30 seconds or so and then select the volume or folder that you just added, and click the ‘-‘ button to remove your selection from the list.

What this will do is that Spotlight will now start re-indexing the volume or folder that it earlier deleted, and hopefully that will fix any problem that you were having with the index. It has definitely fixed all my problems so far.

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.

Note: Depending on where you live, downloading movies via bittorrent may or may not be legal in your country. I don’t claim any responsibility for any trouble you may or may not get into by following the methods outlined in this article. This post is for educational purposes only and you should check your local laws to confirm the legality of watching movies over bittorrent.

With that out of the way, allow me to introduce Popcorn Time, or PT for short. PT is a new open source media player application that uses the bittorrent protocol to seamlessly stream movies to you – almost as easy as streaming a movie from Netflix, as someone put it.

Uses the bittorrent protocol, you say? So, how is it different from downloading a movie and playing it in your favorite media player?

Well, the difference is that the bittorrent protocol, in general, isn’t really designed for streaming so when you’re downloading a file over bittorrent, you will not be able to start playing it immediately. You’ll have to wait till you have the complete file to be able to play it.

Popcorn Time, on the other hand, uses some nifty technology and a bunch of free APIs, to let you start watching movies almost as soon as you hit play. In the background, Popcorn Time downloads the media you’re playing just as you’d if you were downloading it manually, and as soon as the user finishes watching the video, it deletes the file. For the user, this process is seamless.

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

Use your favorite editor to open the apache configuration file – /etc/apache2/httpd.conf. Since this file is owned by the root user, you’ll have to drop down to the terminal and use sudo to open it with root privileges.

sudo will prompt you for your password and then open the editor command, vim in my case. If you’re not familiar with vim, just take a look at this cheat sheet for a few basic commands or use a simpler editor such as nano – sudo nano /etc/apache/httpd.conf.

Now, scroll down a bit and find the line that looks something like this

#LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

See the ‘#’ in front of the line. This means that the line has been commented out and apache doesn’t execute this line when it’s reading the configuration file.

Now, all you have to do is uncomment the line, i.e. remove the ‘#’ in front of it and save the file (Tip: Place your cursor on the ‘#’ and use the ‘x’ command to delete it. Now press the escape key and type ‘:wq’ to save the file and quit the editor).

At this point, you should’ve changed the apache configuration file but the apache instance already running doesn’t know that and it’s still running with the old configuration. To change that, you’ll have to restart apache.

sudo apachectl restart

That’s it! Now when you browse over to your php script, you should be able to see it in all it’s HTML rendered glory.

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.

To start apache, fire up the Terminal and use the following command

sudo apachectl start

To stop apache, this is what you need to do

sudo apachectl stop

You can of course, replace start/stop with restart. sudo apachectl restartThis is useful if you’ve changed some configuration parameter in Apache’s configuration file, httpd.conf, and have to restart apache for it to take effect.

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.

On Firefox, you can view the source of the current page but clicking on Tools->Web Developer->Page Source.

when I moved to Safari, though, I couldn’t find a developer menu at all. In fact, I couldn’t find any way at all to view the page source. Now I like Safari as a browser and Mac OS X is really a wonderful operating system, but Apple sometimes really does take things too far when it comes to making their products user friendly. Sure, regular users don’t like the view the source of their web pages but what’s the harm in having an option to do that.

Anyway, the way to view the HTML source of pages on Safari is to enable the developer menu.

Click on the Safari menu and select Preferences. Go to the Advanced tab. Now, check “Show Develop menu in menu bar” and close Safari’s preferences. At this point, you will have a new menubar item, named “Develop“.

Click on Develop and select “Show Page Source” to view the source code of the current page.

Have anymore Safari tips to share ? Share with me through the Contact form or in the comments below.

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.

Vimeo

Vimeo is, in my opinion, YouTube’s cooler bro. While YouTube is known for silly and/or fun videos, Vimeo is for the serious artists and film makers. Start by exploring the various categories and you will be surprised by the excellent content they have on offer.

BBC Film Network

The BBC is very rightly known for excellent programming but did you know that a section of their website is dedicated to promoting documentaries and shorts (short films) from independent up and coming British film makers. The collection is really quite good. Just browse on a lazy Sunday afternoon and you are sure to catch something of your interest.

The Internet Archive

This list would have been incomplete with a link from the Internet Archive. Their goal is to have a copy of the Internet, for keep sakes, you know. And that means that they have an excellent movies section too. Head over to their movies archive, which is very well organised, if I may add and have fun.

Classic Cinema Online

If you’re a Classic movies buff, look no further than Classic Cinema Online. Whatever your preferred genre, they’ll have something for your interest.

YouTube Movies

Forget what I said about YouTube’s silly pet videos. Over the last couple of years, the YouTube team has been hard at work building a formidable collection of documentaries, movies and TV serials, all in full HD glory, so that, well, if you’re bored of all the pet videos there is something more interesting for you to watch.

These were just some of the places you can head to and find some nice movies to watch for free. Of course, there are sites such as Hulu and the like that don’t work outside the US, but if you really want you can watch movies on Hulu from anywhere in the world, so that’s one more excellent resource to add to the list.

Are you a cord cutter ? Do you like to watch movies and documentaries online ?

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.

Introduction of Qwerty

Contrary to popular belief, the Qwerty layout was NOT introduced for either typing efficiency or comfort. In the early days of typewriters, typing very fast would jam the keys. So, the Qwerty form was used to reduce the typing speed and hence prevent the typewriter from getting jammed. Unfortunately, the convention has continued till date and we still follow the age old layout on our computers and touch screens in spite of the presence of newer and better keyboard layouts.

Why is Qwerty Inefficient?

If you are a qwerty user and very satisfied with your keyboard format, consider this fact. Ideally, when we rest our hands on our keyboard, our fingers are placed on the a,s,d,f and j,k,l,; keys. Now take a look at the chart (source: Wikipedia) below which shows the alphabets most frequently used in the English language.

Comparing this chart with the home row of a qwerty layout, one can easily observe that only 2 alphabets – a and s, are the most frequently used on the home row while the rest of the keys do not function as much. It is quite evident that finger movement is more while using other alphabets on the top and bottom rows and more the finger movement; less is the speed and typing efficiency.

The above may seem only good for theory purposes, but tools such as keyboard layout analyzer can give you detailed statistics and a practical insight about keyboard layouts and their efficiency. To compare, all you need to do is enter the text which you want to compare against various keyboard layouts. Text can either be entered by you or chosen from pre-defined options like Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland, Most Common English Words or Most Common SAT Words. Then various factors such as the distance travelled by our fingers while typing, use of a particular finger and the how often we switch our fingers and hands are taken into consideration to generate an overall score.

We performed several test including the text of this post and in almost all the cases the Qwerty layout scored the least. Another interesting aspect of the test was that the Colemak and Dvorak keyboard layouts performed much better and were pretty close in terms of performance.

Given the choice between Colemak and Dvorak, either of them can be an efficient alternative to Qwerty. However, we recommend using the Colemak layout particularly because of its easy to adapt nature along with many others.

Are you satisfied with the current layout of your keyboard ? Would you like to switch if that’d lead to greater efficiency and faster typing speed, not to mentioned, increased productivity?

There has also been talk among the wildlings, aka Android and other operating systems we don’t take the name of users, that the iPad mini is just a reaction to Amazon’s wildly successful (?) Kindle Fire and Google’s Nexus 7. Some of these user’s just can’t think of any good reasons so just keep blurting out, WELL STEVE JOBS SAID APPLE WOULDN’T MAKE A 7″ TABLET.

Well, guess what, Steve doesn’t run the company anymore. God bless his soul.

All speculations aside, I think the biggest reason Apple is going to release an iPad mini is because Steve said they won’t.

Confused? Don’t be.

If you’ve been following Apple’s growth path for the last few years, specifically how Apple has handled the iPod lineup over the years, the answer would be clear. Apple doesn’t go after market share. Period. Not in the initial years at least.

Apple released the iconic iPod and no one thought it’d be such a big hit. This was a comparatively expensive product that people really didn’t think they’d need. Well, guess what. Everyone bought it regardless. It was a massive success and sure enough, Apple released an updated version and by the time the original iPod was in it’s third year, Apple released the iPod mini and then the nano and then the shuffle and so on.

The point I’m trying to make is that this is how Apple has always worked. Release a ground breaking product, reap profits for a few years. Make another model, catering to a different segment and reap more profits. Unlike competition, Apple leaves a lot of holes in the market initially and then fills them up one by one depending on the market’s reaction.

Now, take the case of the iPhone. Apple released the iPhone with 2G first, then 3G and then gave it a speed boost with the 3GS and moved on to the iPhone 4. Now, with the 3GS and iPhone 4, Apple finally had two models that could run their current version of iOS without getting bogged down. iPhone 4 became the flagship model and the 3GS was sold at a reduced price.

Now, Samsung’s strategy in selling their Galaxy tabs is on somewhat similar lines. They probably have a Galaxy Tab model all the way from 4″ to 10″ and will probably have launched a few more in between by the time you read this. And the strategy seems to be working for them so far. But it really hasn’t dented the iPad’s sales.

I don’t think Apple’s decision to release the iPad mini has anything to do with the perceived success of the Kindle Fire or the Nexus 7. Apple probably is in a much better position than any of us to find out just how many of these other tablets have really been sold.

I think the iPad mini always figured in the broad plan and the reason it’s being released right now is because it’s elder sibling has pretty much cornered it’s market and this just happens to be a good time to get the fence sitters into the ecosystem, just like the iPod mini and the shuffle did.