Mobility
Improve iPhone battery life and performance
Is your iPhone 3GS's battery draining out even when it's lying idle? And are you also witnessing a sudden performance dip wherein all apps are taking longer to load, etc? Then it's time to do a bit of tweaking. First, turn off all services you don't use frequently, e.g. 3G, Bluetooth, Location Services, WiFi, etc. These are all battery guzzlers, so keep them turned off until you really need to use them. Second, turn off all applications that are running in the background. Typically, when you run an application and press the home button after you're done with it, the application gets minimized, but continues to run in the background, thereby chewing up battery power. If you want to shut down apps completely, then double click on the Home button. This will open a bar at the bottom showing all applications that are running in the background. Press one of the app icons for a few seconds, and you'll see the “-” sign appear on the top left of each app's icon. Simply tap this icon for all apps you want to close. We saw significant improvements after following these two steps. You can also use the double press functionality to switch quickly between different running apps.
Social Networking
Manage Twitter accounts from Thunderbird
Are you tired of running different apps to check updates on your Twitter account? Then, the freely available Thunderbird email client can make your life easier. There's a free extension available for it called TweeQuilla--Twitter for Thunderbird. To get it, simply go to Tools>Add-ons, and search for TweeQuilla. Click install when you see the extension, and you're ready to go. Then just go to Tools>Account Settings, and choose Account Actions from the menu that pops up, and select "Add Twitter Account". Provide your client details, and you'll start getting your tweets as shown in this screenshot.
Cloud Computing
Access files from anywhere, any device
Managing files can be a major challenge if you have to access them from multiple devices, like a notebook, smartphone, tablet, your home or office PC, etc. That's where an application like Dropbox can come in handy. It's available for multiple platforms, which include Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, and Android. Simply install it on all the computing devices you own, and you can seamlessly share/access your files from anywhere!
Linux
Query Wikipedia from Linux CLI
Wikipedia has become the mother of all encylopedias. But if you want to search for something on it, you'll have to fire up a web browser, type in the term either on the Wikipedia site itself or in a search engine, and then get the result. But if you use Linux, then here's a quick way to search for a term on Wikipedia without doing any of this. If for instance, you want to look up PCQuest, then from the Linux command line, enter the following command:
dig +short txt pcquest.wp.dg.cx
In the above, replace 'pcquest' with any other keyword you want to search for.
Linux
Extract a tarball file while it downloads
Typically, you would download a compressed file from the Internet, save it to your local system, and then extract it. This wastes a lot of disk space. In Linux, you can download a tar.gz file, but instead of saving the file, you can just save its extracted version. To do that, simply run this command:
wget -qO - “http://www.site.com/path/to/archive.gz” | tar zxvf -