Lightning fast search on KDE Plasma 5.25

I moved from Kubuntu 20.04 to KDE Neon a few months ago. I was missing out on all the latest and greatest developments in the KDE Plasma Desktop, since Kubuntu LTS was slow to roll them out. What I am sharing here is a serendipitous discovery of a basic KDE Plasma feature pertaining to KRunner!…

Tabula – Software to extract tables from PDFs

What is it? Tabula is a Free and Open Source Software that is Java-based and works on GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac. It works completely offline and does not need any cloud accounts or sign-in. What does it do? Tabula extracts tables out of PDF files and converts them to Comma Separated Values (CSV) files or…

‘Working with Data’ – 1

In the Non-profit sector, where I work, handling data is a task routinely done by many. The main constraint still remains the person actually confronted with the data and their capacity to work with it. Newer and more sophisticated tools still demand from us a good understanding of the basic principles of handling data, that were needed when we were using older technology.

Thunar, my default File Manager

For a long time I was using Nautilus, the default file manager in Ubuntu. When I switched to Linux Mint KDE, Dolphin became the default. I installed Nautilus and its new avatar, Files and used them instead. Nautilus was erratic in accessing samba shares at my workplace. Switching to Dolphin provided a better experience for…

Libreoffice – Free your documents (and spreadsheets and presentations)

In an age where half baked alternatives like the various online productivity suites such a Google Docs are being promoted for enterprise use, switching to LO with its rich feature set, active development community and unmatchable FOSS philosophy should be a no-brainer.

2 years – many changes

It's been a long gap since my last post. I was using Ubuntu then, until unity pushed me away to look for alternatives. In the interim I switched to Linux Mint KDE and really enjoyed the experience. I would recommend it to anyone without hesitation.

Android and FOSS

Over the last couple of years, it is interesting to see the amount of android related content in the press and how much share it has in the Open Source related news. In Linux For You magazine, which I have been folowing since its first issue, the gadgets page happily lists dozens of android smart…

Make the news follow you!

We all like to keep track of news in certain topics. With the advent of google news, it has become quite common to setup alerts for our favourite search strings (E.g. Forest+Rights+act), so that we get an email everday with links to news articles as they appear. If we have a lot of such search…

Back after a break

I am blogging again after a few months' break. My daughter is now ten months old. I am blogging again with the hope that when she grows up she will be living in a world that would have embraced the open source philosophy in a big way in all walks of life. I am sending…

Managing Personal Financial Information

These days its not uncommon to have more than one bank account in different locations and regularly accessing them online. Add to this credit cards, investment accounts, insurance policies etc. and you have a lot of people scrambling to make spreadsheets to put all the figures in to get a full picture. Yesterday, Mathew my…