Redshift is a small app for your Linux machine that will change the color of your screen as the night falls. This is supposed to have several positive consequences: First of all, it removes the strain for your eyes, eliminating the outlandish white/blue glow from you screen to a light that your eyes can actually bear. Secondly, it will help you sleep at night, preparing your biological clock for nighttime if you ever decide to go to bed.

App and features

What does Redshift actually do? To put simply, Redshift adjusts your screen color temperature to something that is much more acceptable to your eyes. This color changes according to your surroundings so Redshift tweaks the color of your screen according to the position of the sun.

Here’s the explanation from Redshift’s site:

A different color temperature is set during night and daytime. During twilight and early morning, the color temperature transitions smoothly from night to daytime temperature to allow your eyes to slowly adapt. At night the color temperature should be set to match the lamps in your room. This is typically a low temperature at around 3000K-4000K (default is 3700K). During the day, the color temperature should match the light from outside, typically around 5500K-6500K (default is 5500K). The light has a higher temperature on an overcast day.

To know the sun’s position in your location, Redshift uses Gnome Panel’s Clock applet settings, which means it will be able to calculate the change in day lengths, daylight saving times, etc. or any other location that you have specified manually when launching the app.

When used in graphical mode, redshift has an icon that sits in the indicator applet on GNOME. Ubuntu users will be pleased to see that Redshift now used a “mono” icon that integrates well in the new Ubuntu theme.

Features

The feature list for Redshift is small. It’s well integrated to the GNOME (and Ubuntu) desktop, making good use of the new indicator as well as the clock applet, but it does not have many independent features. That’s positive in the sense that it never gets in your way, has a simple on/off switch and that’s it. nonetheless, it would be great to have more control on the app. Redshift’s default setting look a bit extreme. After a while, one gets used to it and it actually helps, but if you’ve just launched it everything seems a tad too red for a while. I recommend you to go on with your daily work untill you forget, but you may want to change the settings. Unfortunately, there’s no graphical tool to do this, and one’s only option is the command line.

Does it work?

Redshift is very efficient. I actually notice sleeping more easily after spending hours in front of my screen. That may be partly due to a psychological effect. What’s for certain is that it does relieve some strain from your eyes. I often got teary eyes when browsing the net for hours on end. Now I find that I can concentrate more on what I’m doing without my eyes feel as if they were burning. Redshift is efficient, and I’m not separating myself from it soon.

Installing and running Redshift

To install Redshift, you need to add the PPA first need to install the PPA to your system then to download the app. Simply copy and paste the two lines below in your terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonls/redshift-ppa

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install redshift

Now that the application is installed, you can launch the it by hitting F2 and typing “redshift.” to add your location manually, type “redshift -l” followed by your latitude and longitude (separated by a colon).

For example, if you live in New York*, type:

redshift -l 40.7:-73.9

There’s also a graphical mode that will add an indicator in your panel. All you need to do is type “gtk-”before the command, like this:

gtk-redshift -l #:#

If you travel a lot or if you just want to change your location without going to the command line, you can ignore the location setting while typing the command. Then, you should set your location the clock applet that’s located on the right of your top panel.

I recommend you to make redshift load on login so you won’t need to think about setting it up anymore. To do this, simply go to System > Preferences > Startup Applications and Add a new app with the same command that you used to launch it. Redshift will launch at next login.

For those who find Redshift a bit extreme, there’s a way to change the screen color temperature easily. The command-line is necessary, but it’s as simple as it can be and works right away. Just copy the code below and replace #night by your desired night-time temperature and #day for the daytime setting:

redshift -l [location] -t #night:#day

By default, the night temperature is set to 3700. You might try to start at 4200 and move up or down depending on what you feel about it. The higher you set it, the cooler it will become (and closer to your normal screen color). You can also adjust the gamma by adding -g #R:#G:#B where #R, #G and #B are the values for red, green and blue respectively. To view all your options, type redshift -h. Don’t forget to tell us what settings you use in the comments!

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*you can find your local coordinates at getlatlon.com

The Linux World is not perfect either. GNOME doesn’t have acceptable window previews, no scale mode either, and is missing a lot in terms of application UI. KDE has a very stupid “K menu” (in my opinion) that looks like the Windows “Start menu” gone wrong. The good thing about Linux desktops is that they are extremely configurable. You can add the Compiz-Fusion window manager and effects to both GNOME and KDE, and switch from these desktops to Xfce or even Enlightenment, FluxBox or others at any given time in the click of a button. You can also configure things withing your desktop. That’s even very easy on some desktops, bot others like GNOME don’t give you access to all your settings.

Outside of the desktop domain, there are a lot of things that are pre-configured in the way that pleases your OS vendor, but it might not be exactly what you need or want. Changing all these settings can be a drag, and are generally much to complicated for the average user. That’s where Ailurus comes in.

A short introduction to Ailurus

According to it’s developers, the first goal of Ailurus is to make Linux easier to use for newcomers, eliminating certain difficulties in finding the right application, configuring their desktop or even cleaning up their system. Ailurus also hopes to promote popular open-source software, including those in official repositories and other which are “elegant” but who haven’t entered the official repository yet.

Ailurus is a cross-Linux-distribution application published under the GPL copyleft license.

Features

Ailurus has a lot of diverse functions. Here’s a short list of the major ones.

• Display Linux skills

Ailurus can teach you how to use Linux. It has a “tip of the day feature” where it teaches you some dbsic commad-line functions of Linux. It also links you to several useful sources such as the Ubuntu/Kubuntu configuration guide.

• Install popular software

Ailurus includes a small Software Center -like interface in which it presents you with popular aps you may want to install.

• Change GNOME settings

GNOME doesn’t seem very configureable as-is, but there are a lot of setting with which you can tinker, and most of them are included in Ailurus’ GUI.

• Display hardware information

You probably already have one pre-installed with your distribution, but it doesn’t hurt to have it here too.

• Enable some third party repositories¹

Adding repositories on your Linux desktop can be hard for newbe users or the non-techies, so a GUI interface that proposes a small list of repositories is not unwelcome.

• Clean apt/yum cache, backup and recover apt/yum status¹

System information

The first button, tagged “System,” provides the user with system information. The interface used is the classical tree-like view that you’ll find on most tools in Linux and even in Windows XP. I’m not going to complain much: it’s simple and gives you all the hardware information you might need and expect (Motherboard, BiOS, CPU, battery, etc.) as well as software information such as uptime and kernel version. I was slightly disapointed not to have a specific, maybe a tad more inovative interface for this feature. When using it, we have the impression that it was added just because the developpers felt it should be, and not because they were making some task simpler for the user. In that sense, they were not completely wrong. I like having this sort of tool next to my other system settings because it really makes system information easier to find.

System settings

Probably the most used feature of Ailurus is the “System Settings” tab, situated second to the left. This tab contains a variety of pages that will help you configure anything from some useful Firefox settings to the position of the title-bar windows. All the user needs to do is to click on the menu enty of his choice and select the settings he wants to change. This is surely my favorite feature in the whole application.

Not only does it feel like you have all the settings you’d like to tinker in the same place, but setting I never new existed become point-and-click. An example that illustrates this well is the “Memory” settings. Or should I say “setting”? This entry has only one setting; the rate at which their computer swaps memory from the RAM to the hard drive’s “swap space.”

This can be useful for people who multi-task between applications a lot (these people would want to lower this setting as loading their unused apps from the SWAP space is more lengthy than fetching it from the RAM) or people who like to have a lot of apps in the background that they use very little (who should set it higher).

Other settings that users might appreciate a lot are the title-bar button positions or the desktop icon settings.

Installing software and repository settings

This includes two sections: “Install Software”and “Fastest Repository”. The first one is rather straight forward. “The Install software” section resembles the Ubuntu Software Center or any other APT/Yum/Pacman GUI. It provides you with a list of applications that are automatically downloaded and installed in a few clicks. Ailurus’s software list is by no means complete. It is, however, a nice list of popular software that the new user should consider downloading. But Ailurus provides even more simplicity for the user: it gives a one-click solution for the user to install useful tools like the Flash plugin, multi-media codecs, hardware drivers and more. All you have to do is click on the “Quickly install popular software” button and then click “OK” when the window pops up.

Ailurus also gives you the option to add several useful repositories–such as Chromium’s beta channel or Cairo-dock’s repository–by a simple point-and-click solution similar to that used to install applications.

The “Fastest Repository” section is exactly the same as another setting that you can find in the default “Software Sources” tool.

Recover APT, Clean Up and Computer Doctor

Ailurus also includes other very handy features. such as Recover APT. Basically, this tool keeps track of software that is added and removed and recovers snapshots you have manually made from any date, using a very basic UI. This is handy if you often try to use new software as you won’t need to worry about messing your system up. Ailurus lacks in this domain, however. The system is not configureable at all and is limited only to applications. You won’t able to use it to back up your documents or settings. If that’s what you want to do, I’d recommend you to try another solution such as Back In Time.

The “Clean Up” section is more complete. It offers options such as reclaiming the disk buffer cache memory as well as the APT (package manager) and thumbnail image cache. There is even a tool to remove the unused software configuration files. All in all, I like this part of Ailurus. I find it handy for quickly cleaning up the computer and getting extra space on the hard drive. However, the multitude of buttons may confuse or scare new users away. This particular part of the app should absolutely be cleaned up and reorganized. Ironic isn’t it?

The “Computer Doctor” is a useful tool too. It automatically detects “errors” in your system and gives you a one-click solution to solve the problem, as well as giving you recommendations such as the option to query you before you delete more than three files in BASH so as to avoid errors.

Learning about Linux

Ailurus is not just a tool to help you with the plethora of settings on your Linux machine. It’s also supposed to help you learn about Linux and improve your “Linux skills”. So as to reach this goal, the program provides you useful command-line tips through a “Tip of the Day” system that can be activated when Ailurus or GNOME starts. What’s more, hovering your mouse pointer above any item shows you the command that is used. This is a very practical no-stress solution to learning how to change your computer’s settings through the CLI.

General overview

Overall, Ailurus is an incredibly handy tool. On the minus side, it often looks inconsistent, if not downright ugly. The user is not always sure where to find every feature, and the organisation seems not very well thought-out, sometimes even random. Nonetheless, it’s very handy tool that doesn’t consider it’s users to be idiots and teaches them to become independent from itself. Whatever your level of geekiness, you’ll be pleased by the tools provided.

Ailurus is aimed at teaching new Linux users (less than a month of experience with Linux) about their system and how to tinker it. In that, it is excellent. But it does much more. Some more experienced Linux users might probably appreciate this tool a lot, and even people who might not absolutely want to learn the interior workings of their computers might love this app.

Installation

On Ubuntu and derivatives, just copy and paste the following lines in your terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ailurus
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ailurus

Alternatively, you can download the source the .deb package from the project’s Google Code page. Other packages for Fedora and other operating systems are available on the same page

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¹ These features are only available to Ubuntu and Fedora users.

Kjots is not the most powerful of applications. To tell you the truth, there isn’t much that you can do on Kjots apart for simple note-taking. In contrast, Tomboy notes lets you link between notes, synchronize them via SSH or WebDAV, and even use plugins. Kjots, on the contrary lacks some very basic features like spell-check, but this lack is actually a feature. Kjots is simply the best application if you want to take notes or write texts that you’re not intending to print.

Taking notes on a computer is so much better than taking them on paper. First of all, they’re all in one place, and they stay the way they are. I don’t know about you, but my notebooks tend to wander around my room and find shelter in improbable places. If you place paper in the econs folder in your “Lectures” drawer, chances are that it will not be there when you want to read your econs notes before a test.

The best way to counter the annoying ability of notebooks to move around is to take them on a computer. Computers tend to stay where you put them last – hopefully – and they don’t move your documents around (well, vista does). However, for a disorganized person this system still has its limits. Should I organize my econs in two folders –one for lectures and one for seminars– or just in one? Where should I save a new econs course?

KJots’ system resolves all these problems at once. In KJots, notes are organized in “books” and “Pages.” You start by creating a new book which will itself have one page to start with. To keep the same example, I would Entitle this first book “Economics” and the first Page “Introductory Course.” As the lecturer progresses into a second course, I would create a second page entitled “Investment on Education” and so on and so forth. But KJots is not only an efficient way of keeping notes, but it is also very usefull for writing blog posts and articles that you’d publish later. I use it to write all my TechHaze articles, each new one in a new page in the TechHaze book. Whether you write poetry, a novel or a dissertation, KJots will probably be the best tool to quickly access, edit and organize your notes.

All your writings are autosaved. This may seem like a relatively unimportant point, but the way it’s implemented makes it a gamechanger. Autosave is so integral to the KJots experience that there isn’t even a save button in the default interface. Basically, you just write what you have to write and quit the program when you’re done. This not only saves you the little time the application uses to save your documents (the autosaving feature works seamlessly) but also spares you the “Are you sure” dialog box. After using KJots for several months, it was the save button on regular word processors that seemed out-of-place.

When you write a blog post or dissertation, your main goal is not to read it yourself but rather to publish it for others to read. For ths task, any word processor is adapted. When you’ve finished writing, you do a final spell-check and then copy the text and paste it into the blog dashboard. There is no need for an alternate method of reading your work. However, If you’re writing a book, or taking notes in class, re-reading your work in an optimized interface can save you more time than you would think. What you need is a complete linear view of all your courses that you can read just by sliding down the page with a table of contents that links you to each particular course. Simply selecting a book in KJots provides you with just that. Not only does it provide you with a complete worry free way of accessing and reading your notes but you’re still one click away from editing them. If you’re using KJots to write a book, you might appreciate the easy way of revising your text and skipping to the chapters that you want while having access to the editor when you see a badly phrased sentence.

KJots is not a text editor. Though it supports rich formatting, its area of strength is in note taking. It feature a clean, simple, distraction-free interface with minimal chrome. Whether you want to take notes during a speech, write a book or simply jot down your thoughts, KJots is for you.

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