It’s Spring Time and after a long Winter surfing the web and testing new programs, it’s time to give a short rest to your computer, delete old files and scan the OS looking for possible rootkits or viruses. I usually use Ubuntu and the possibility of viruses is not high but… why I shouldn’t double-check to avoid viruses or rootkits?

Sometimes, if you use Fedora 18 – Spherical Cow, the Software Upgrade program couldn’t work properly. Software Upgrade shows you all the available upgrades but it is not able to install them. The download process starts but it will never finish and you wait for hours with no results. When and if you have this problem you can easily solve it launching a Terminal and typing the command:

The pdf format is the most versatile standard to share documents with a fixed layout. Everyday we share, read and create a lot of pdf files but sometimes we would like to modify them to create “new” personalized version more suitable to our needs.

Everyday we improve the OS we usually use adapting it to our specific needs. Consequently, we are worried about major OS upgrades between one version to another because we know that bugs could affect our installation and indirectly corrupt our saved data. Usually backup software are the right solution for data but, if something goes wrong, we have to reinstall all our OS and reconfigure it. Better, we have to spend many hours to download and configure all the single software we had installed into our original OS.

Today we will not discuss about the old and new malware that are able to influence the GRUB but we will focus our attention on how repairing your computer when you see grub rescue> on your black screen…

Starting from Ubuntu 12.04 we observed different graphics problems with “old” computers. When I say “old” I don’t mean obsolete hardware but PC with not more than three years of usage.

you want to improve your Google searches you can find many useful queries on internet and, if have time, you can also attend a specific Google free course. But just few people know that there are specific queries available for Gmail. I found some of them casually when I need to search some specific, old emails into my accounts some days ago. Then I discovered that Google itself published a complete list of all the possible queries accepted by Gmail. I warmly suggest you to spend some minutes reading and exploring all the queries because they are really useful when you use Gmail in a professional way. Here, I just want to sum-up some of them that, in my experience, are the most common you can use when you are becoming crazy looking for a specific email you sent or received. The powerful feature is represented by the possibility to mix the different queries to create super-queries that can intercept the “wanted” email or documents in a less than a second.....

Today opportunities During the last two years the number of free online University courses exploded on the web. Today it is possible to attend prestigious courses by important USA and UK Universities and receive a final certification without spending a cent.

In few words I wasn’t able to install Ubuntu 12.04 because the kernel on Ubuntu 12.04 was not supporting my CPU and I was really upset because I have always promoted Linux distributions as the most versatile and appropriate OS to keep using “old” hardware.

...I use Pogoplug as cloud server for my external hard disks because it is really simple to configure and trustful. Unfortunately the Linux version of the Pogoplug management software is not so simple to configure and has fewer features than the Windows and MAC versions.