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I was looking for a complete solution to keep the office PC with my laptop in sync: SugarSync does more: it offers a free 2.5Gb storage space to synchronize an unlimited number of folders between two computers; in addiction, they gives you a mobile application – available for Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile and Blackberry – to access your file also in mobility.

You’ve only to select the directories you want to keep in sync (tipically the “documents” folder, and maybe your music or pictures archive), the SugarSync client will run in background, automatically monitoring every change. If the other computer is switched off, it will be synchronized the next time you will power it up.

It is a direct competitor of the famous (and good) Dropbox (2Gb for free), but it offers several addictional features: Dropbox syncronizes a single folder and it gives a mobile app only for iPhone, even if the free accounts are elegible to be linked to an unlimited number of computers, while SugarSync free supports only two (plus a phone). SugarSync is available for Windows and Mac OS X (Dropbox has also a Linux client).

You can expand the space limitations of your free account referring your friends: SugarSync offers you 250Mb of addictional space for every new user you refer (and your friend will get the same, starting with 2.75 Gb of free storage space!); if someone you referred will upgrade to a paid plan – starting from $4.99 per month for 30Gb – you’ll get an addictional 5Gb for free.

Go to SugarSync website

The Aspire One is a netbook from Acer, very similar to the Asus Eee PC. It’s sold at about EUR 200 in Italy, and it offers an 8.9″ display (1024×600), a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom CPU, a 8Gb SSD drive, with integrated Wifi, Mic and webcam.
It’s a nice product, but the Linux operating system with it is shipped is not so good (it’s a personalized and branded version of Linpus – a Taiwanese distribution for low-resources PCs).

I tried a couple of alternative OS (for example Ubuntu Netbook Remix), but none of them fully fit on it: too weight, drivers problems, etc. leggi tutto »

Notice: This little tutorial assumes that you have some basic Linux knowledge, and that you know what SSH is.

Christmas is coming, and I’ll be out of office for a while.

I was a little worried because I could need some data from my main desktop PC… I’ll copy the most important documents on the laptop, but if I’ll forget something? I don’t want to leave my desktop turned on, nor to be obliged to pass the evening of 24th of December in my car to come back to the office.

So it’s time to activate Wake On LAN

Wake On LAN (aka WOL) is a feature of many PCs. It leaves the network port in standby mode, without turning off it completely. It requires very little power, and it allows you to activate a PC from your LAN. leggi tutto »

Today I upgraded to Ubuntu Intrepid, and suddenly… my Samsung SCX-4200 printer stopped working
I recovered my notes from Ubuntu Hardy, where I wrote some operation to make the printer (and the embedded scanner) work. Unfortunately, the “trick” I took from the official Ubuntu forum (see “Samsung SCX-4200 scanner does not work on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron“) didn’t work anymore, so I spend some time to search for an alternative. And I found it! leggi tutto »