As you might know, Firefox is also highly extensible. It's easy to add some features that were not originally bundled with the browser. Ubiquity is a über-extension, that a makes your daily experience on-line more agile and fun. I say über, because it provides multiple functionalities that are otherwise given by a plethora of other extensions or web applications.

Take maps for example.

There is no need to visit google maps. Tell Ubiquity "map 18 Brooklyn Ave, NY", and it will show you where it is. If you see the address on a page, it suffices selecting it and asking ubiquity to map it.

Plus, you get e-mail. If you're using Gmail type "mail I love you dear! your_spouse@gmail.com" and you're done.

And twitter "twitter Writing a blog post while showing how cool Ubiquity is." I actually did that.

Another remarkable feat you can impress your friends is adding an event to Google Calendar just by typing "Dinner with Katie on Friday". That's right, Ubiquity understands natural language. Check your calendar, someone's getting lucky this Friday night.

Also, select a piece of text on a page written in a incomprehensible (for you) language and type "translate this to English". You start getting all the potential. Additionally you can check the weather for a given location, watch a youtube video, define a word. The options are literally boundless, and Ubiquity can further be extended by developers to include any cool extension you might think of. Play songs using Grooveshark, for instance. All of this neatly integrated with your Ubuntu system, by using its eye-candy alert system.

Watch the intro video, or drop us a line with your personal experience with Ubiquity and with your favorite extensions!

Note: If you don't have an Ubuntu One account already sign up here it's free.

Step 1
Launch Tomboy and open the Preferences under the Edit menu.

Step 2
Navigate to the Synchronisation tab and change the Service to "Tomboy Web" and the server will automatically be set to https://one.ubuntu.com/notes/.

Step 3
Now click Connect to Server, this will launch your web browser and you'll be prompted to log into your Ubuntu One account, do so.

Step 4
Once you've logged in with your Ubuntu One details, you'll be asked to "confirm computer access". What this is basically doing is linking your computer to your Ubuntu One account to sync your notes. Give the computer a name and click "add this computer"

Step 5
You'll be shown the following message:
"Tomboy Web Authorization Successful"..."Please return to the Tomboy Preferences window and press Save to start synchronizing."

Click Save back on the tomboy client and it will start syncing your notes up to the cloud.

Note: You don't need Ubuntu One installed to use the syncing, hence this process works cross-platform.

If you want more details on using Ubuntu Ones web interface for managing your notes, go here.

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Step 1
Navigate to your Dropbox/ folder and create a new folder called Tomboy.

Note: Remember you actually need Dropbox for this to work.

Step 2
Launch the Tomboy application from Applications->Accessories and then right click on the Tomboy icon in the system tray, click on Preferences.

Step 3
Navigate to the Synchronization tab and make the server Local Folder and the folder path the Tomboy folder we created in Step 1.

Step 4
Check the automatically sync box and adjust the time, I've got mine set to 5 mins, save and exit.

Your done! Now you can have access to your tomboy notes on all your systems.

Note: Tomboy is cross-platform as is Dropbox and I've tested this between Windows and Ubuntu and it works great!

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Step 1
Go to www.dropbox.com/downloading and download the appropriate .deb file.

Note: If you don't have a dropbox account sign-up for one here

Note: If you're not sure which one to download, you'll notice just above the download links they recommend which one you should download.

Step 2
Once downloaded, locate the file and double click it. You'll be presented with a package installer, just follow the on screen prompts.

Step 3
Another window will pop up, again just follow the prompts. This will restart nautilus for you.

Step 4
Go to Applications->Internet->Dropbox from your menu. This will start the final stage of this installation, click OK, wait for it to download and install the daemon.

Step 5
All you've got to do now is to put in your Dropbox account details (assuming you have an account) and follow the rest of the prompts and you're done.

Enjoy stupidly easy file syncing, cross-platform!

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Basically a symbolic link will allow a folder to be in two places at once. In my case I'd like to make a symbolic link of my /Documents folder and place it in my /Dropbox folder so it will be synced to my other machines.

Step 1

Open a Terminal and simply run the following command:

ln -s ~/Documents ~/Dropbox

It's that simple! There are many different ways you can use symbolic links, this is just one way I'm using it. Leave a comment below if you're trying/using them in a different way.

Note: The ~ represents the current users home directory.
Note: To remove the symbolic link just delete it the say way you'd delete a normal folder, so in this case you'd just delete the folder in ~/Dropbox/Documents. Don't worry I wont do anything do the actual ~/Documents folder.

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Step 1

Download the source files from here www.getdropbox.com/downloading and unzip it (right click and "Extract Here").

Note: If you don't have a dropbox account sign-up for one here

Step 2

We now need to install the dependencies in order to build our install files from source.
Open up your Terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install libnautilus-extension-dev libnotify-dev python-docutils

Follow the prompts and it should a a few minutes to download and install everything.

Step 3

Navigate to where you created your /nautilus-dropbox folder (it'll probably have a version number after it) in the Terminal, in my case:

cd /Downloads/nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1/

Step 4

Once inside type the following commands into your Terminal:

./configure
make
sudo make install


Run each command one after another, they'll run for just a couple of seconds each.

Step 5

After installing it simply log out and log back into your system, navigate to Applications → Internet → Dropbox, click “OK” and it'll download and install the daemon and then prompt you for your Dropbox details.

As you can see it's a pretty easy install and it's been working great for me!

If you have any questions, comments or tips, please leave a comment below.

Note: I originally posted this guide for the Karmic beta, but seeing as it's release and dropbox have a .deb installer it'll have more use under this post.

Google Chrome OS is an open source operating system for people who spend most of their time on the web built around the core tenets of speed, simplicity and security. http://www.chromium.org

During the Q&A I found that people really didn't understand what ChromOS is and the differences between it and the Chrome Browser. Firstly everything on the system is a web application so you should be able to use the web application from any browser. People just need to think of it as an OS that is just the browser. This means you never install applications, everything is stored remotely and nowadays that's fine seeing as we spend most of our time in a browser connected to the internet.

I'm glad Google behind the rather bold move to really push the envelope of what web applications can do and open new doors for creativity. I do see how this will help them though, but Google are a business and they want to make money, but this is still great news for the opensource community.

I personally would love an eclipse web application as I use that as my primary IDE for programming and if it could automatically save my code in the cloud that would be great! I see there being some problems with the OS like storing music collection and syncing them with a device. Am I going to have to download my whole music library from the internet every time I get a new mp3 player? What about uploading my music library online? Is that going to cause problems with piracy and such? Bandwidth cap? That's just one item that really jumped out at me that had a lot of questions around it.

Overall I'm excited about this new OS and I will test it out and probably do a tutorial on how to build the code yourself over Christmas break, but for as mentioned in the video they don't really see it as being your primary OS so I'll be sticking with the more conventional OS model for now.

Please post a comment on what you think about the OS?, where you'd like to see it go? and whatever else you have on your mind.

Step 1

Go to www.getdropbox.com/downloading and download the appropriate package for your system.

Note: If you don't have a dropbox account sign-up for one here

Step 2

Run the .deb file and follow the install instructions, it'll just take a moment.

Step 3

It'll tell you to logout and log back in, do so. Now run the application from Applications->Internet->Dropbox. It'll take a moment to load up then give you a warning that it's going to download/install a nautilus daemon, allow it to do so. This will just take a minute or so.

Step 4

You'll soon be greeted with a window that'll ask you if you'd like to login or create an account do what's appropriate for you.

Step 5

Once you've gone through the setup stage your Dropbox folder will now be located in your /home directory. You can however pick where you'd like to locate it and you can see that option in the setup, but the default is fine.

Step 6

Simple drag and drop files in and out of the folder and they will sync with the cloud and other machines you have it running on (can be Windows/Mac/Linux)

Congratulates you're all done! The thing I like the most about Dropbox is the fact that it's so easy to use, cross-platform and most of all free!

If you liked this guide or would like to add to it, please post a comment below and don't forget to subscribe (it's free)

UPDATE: I reposted this guide seeing as there's no need for it here: Howto: Compile Dropbox from Source on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

As of yet the dropbox team haven't released a .deb file for Ubuntu 9.10 (32/64 bit), I'm sure they'll release one by the time 9.10 is released, but I can't wait that long. So what we're basically going to do here is compile it from source, it's not all that scary...

Step 1

Download the source files from here www.getdropbox.com/downloading and unzip it (right click and "Extract Here").

Note: If you don't have a dropbox account sign-up for one here

Step 2

We now need to install the dependencies in order to build our install files from source.
Open up your Terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install libnautilus-extension-dev libnotify-dev python-docutils

Follow the prompts and it should a a few minutes to download and install everything.

Step 3

Navigate to where you created your /nautilus-dropbox folder (it'll probably have a version number after it) in the Terminal, in my case:

cd /Downloads/nautilus-dropbox-0.6.1/

Step 4

Once inside type the following commands into your Terminal:

./configure
make
sudo make install


Run each command one after another, they'll run for just a couple of seconds each.

Step 5

After installing it simply log out and log back into your system, navigate to Applications → Internet → Dropbox, click “OK” and it'll download and install the daemon and then prompt you for your dropbox details.

As you can see it's a pretty easy install and it's been working great for me!

If you have any questions, comments or tips, please leave a comment below.

My current method of backup was to forward my college email to my Gmail, but this doesn't help if I can't access the internet and really need to check something. This interruption is the reason I've decided to revisit Google Gears as I've come to a point in my life were email is very important to my academics and I've got important documents I should really have local backups of.

I prefer Google Gears to other email clients such as Thunderbird or Evolution Mail, because I’ve grown accustomed to the Gmail UI and in my mind when I think of email I think, browser.

Ultimately I think the best solution is syncing your local information with the 'cloud' to give both reassurances that your information is backed up, read locally, but also be accessed from other machines via the internet if needed. Programs like Dropbox are a prime example of this unity.

Note: I noticed Gmail went down around 9PM GMT and is still not back up, just logged back on and it's back up.