Over new year, I've been playing around with Strigi and Nepomuk, which are the two technologies around desktop search and "making sense of your data". Strigi is the underlying library that is used to analyze all sorts of files and index those results. Nepomuk provides a semantic layer on top of this information, and a nice KDE API for easy integration in applications.

Beagle is a free desktop search tool which is gaining popularity with several applications. You can search your desktop just as you search with google. It is possible to use beagle as a standalone search tool or integrate with applications such as firefox for easy desktop search. In fact, it is one application that any serious Linux user can not ignore

Big graphs are not the only way to visualize data in a text document. Using a couple of tricks, you can spice up your OpenOffice.org Writer documents with sparklines – word-sized graphs embedded into text. Developed by infographic guru Edward Tufte, sparklines provide a simple yet effective way of visualizing data directly in the text body of the document.

The awk utility provides a powerful way to search for text strings using regex. This great tool will help you solve many Bash shell script needs.

This tutorial explains how to install and use luckyBackup on an Ubuntu 9.04 desktop. luckyBackup is an application for data back-up and synchronization powered by the rsync tool.

A really simple little trick to adding normal text to an image and making it look interesting! This technique can be used for nearly any photograph, however it is a lot easier to see the text with less detailed and contrasty photographs.

Google has finally released a long-awaited native Linux application: Google Desktop for Linux. As with the already shipping OS X and Windows versions, Google Desktop enables Linux users to search for text inside documents, local email messages, their Web history, and their Gmail accounts. [...] Google Desktop for Linux is based on Google's own desktop search algorithms.

Here is a script takes an Opendocument template and fills it with data from a plain text file (which could be generated on the fly by querying a database or in many other ways), creating an OpenDocument invoice ready to be printed or sent via email.

Being able to search your desktop is important. I frequently need to find that file that I know I have somewhere, but have no idea where I put it. Desktop search is a really neat solution, because it means you just start typing and it does the hard work of searching for you.