Just came across Skype Call Recorder – an awesome in its functionality+simplicity tool to record skype calls. Highly recommended!

It worked immediately for me, and default settings are good enough not to bother tweaking. Well, I know that because I did tweak a few to get more nerdiness, but normal people don’t need that.

SCR download page has packages for Ubuntu, Debian/i386, Xandros, RPM-based distributions, Gentoo – and as its free, you can of course just use the fsource, Luke!

At the time of writing, a package for Debian/amd64 was not available, but it is really easy to build one.
Here’s mine: skype-call-recorder-debian_0.8_amd64.deb

Superimposing gene expression data onto pathways from databases is a common task in the final steps of microarray data analysis – that is, biological interpretation and results discussion.

I have found many tools which claim to facilitate this procedure. Some of them are reviewed below (in no specific order).
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ask.debian.net is a StackOverflow-like Q&A website built with OSS Shapado.

That’s my first encounter of Shapado, so it was interesting to read Shapado authors’ justification and a related question on meta.SO.

In my previous post on CUE sheet support in Linux music players I mentioned DeaDBeeF. Unfortunately, DeaDBeeF is not yet available as a Debian package.

Fortunately, Alexey Smirnov (the author of DeaDBeeF) maintains a github repository deadbeef-debian which has simple instructions on installing DeaDBeeF in Debian (citing with minor edits): Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I finally managed to configure remote (aka off-site) backup for my Debian server. As always, I started with a comparison of existing solutions.

Debian has a number of packages enabling remote (over the network) backup: backupPC, backupninja, backup-manager, dirvish, duplicity, luckybackup, rdiff-backup, and some others.

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Sadly, Xmarks plans to stop providing synchronization services on January 10, 2011.

As a long-time user of Foxmarks – and then Xmarks – I am truly sorry to see Xmarks go prepare to go. That was a wonderfully simple idea, and it was wonderfully implemented.

If you read Founders at Work, you will find familiar names in the calm and fairly detailed history of how Xmarks got from prototype to a startup and then to the end. I recommend reading Xmarks good-bye post even if you never used this time-saving, data-organizing, safety-bringing software-and-service. That post comes right from the heart in its true honesty and let’s make the world better startup spirit.

Thank you, Xmarks. Thanks for the idea, for the software, for the service, for the well-ahead warning, and for the concern about the synchronization needs of your current users. And I still hope there’s a good exit deal waiting for you.

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Just found a really nice, “almost interactive” TED talk about digital/real-world interfaces. The ideas aren’t new – they have been around for quite a while, as exemplified both by Sci-Fi movies and several digital implant enthusiasts – but this time it comes with a seemingly-tested implementation, which is – WOW! – both cheap and working. Moreover, here ideas are taken to a level of example applications with functional prototypes – which gives hope to have at least some of those market-ready within 5-10 years
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