Before the Wget 1.12 version, in order to fetch the authenticated http/ftp pages, we had to provide the password in clear text which was quite insecure. Since that version, a new option, --ask-password, has been included which prompts the user to fill the password in a secure manner(hidden like unix passwd).

Because of its being light on resources, I prefer to use Exaile over amarok. The tray icon(top-right corner) works great in making it easily accessible on all workspaces with no need to mark the window "always on visible workspace". Yet, I always wished for a smaller version of the player, as powerful as exaile, but smaller. This is what Exaile's mini-mode aims to do. It bundles the whole full screen music player into a 1-2cm display.

I guess most of us would have tried Ubuntu 10.10 aka Maverick Meerkat by now. This version was no doubt going to bring many new things but the one I was really looking forward to is the netbook edition. We have been looking at Shuttleworth's constant efforts to make the netbook edition more usable - Increasing vertical space by using a global menu, using a single panel instead of one, a whole new unity shell interface and a lot others.

A personal computer doesn't look really personal until it is able to play multimedia content. I started using CentOS to deploy Xen server but still, I need my music. Just like Ubuntu, due to licensing issues, it doesn't come with pre-installed codecs to play proprietary formats. And before installing them on CentOS manually, I thought what if I could use the ones installed on Ubuntu(which is on the same disk) to make it work. And people, it did .

There is always something useful available in the form of gnome-applets. Earlier, I wrote about  Deskbar, that lets you handle almost anything using a single text-box. Now, its this great clipboard manager, glipper, for all of those who(like me) have done the mistakes of overwriting something important they copied and wished for a way to switch to the previous copied text.