The right mouse button—beloved by geeks for its power, theoretically unnecessary on a Mac, and generally under-utilized on the average desktop. Right-clicking can be a powerful tool for automating file actions and saving yourself time and arm effort, but only if you've put your own stamp on the offerings of that secondary button.

I recently came across expect (the expect package in Debian and Ubuntu): a powerful utility that can script interactive operations. If you're not familiar with TCL syntax, you can get autoexpect from Wi-Fizzle.com. This spawns a shell, and then records everything you do in that shell.

Expect is a venerable tool for scripting interactive command-line tools. One normally sees expect coupled with the TCL programming language -- for example, in the DejaGNU test environment.

The official stable release of Ubuntu 10.04 is only days away.  That means we can finally list all of the new features to expect in the next longterm-support version of Ubuntu, without having the developers change them every other day.  With that in mind, here's a look at what to expect when you upgrade to Lucid Lynx on Thursday.

The ssh command line utility is a staple for people who work on remote systems. ssh stands for "secure shell," so as you may expect one of its most common uses is as a remote shell. While that is perhaps its most common use, it isn't the only, or most interesting, thing you can do with ssh.

Over the next few weeks, Microsoft will begin offering a “Web browser choice screen” to Internet Explorer users in Europe, as required by the European Commission. Internal testing of the choice screen is underway now. We’ll begin a limited roll-out externally next week, and expect that a full scale roll-out will begin around March 1, a couple of weeks ahead of schedule.

If you're using TiddlyWiki as your note-taking tool, you ought to give TiddlySnip a try. The idea behind this Firefox extension is simple: it allows you to add the currently viewed Web page or selected text snippet to your TiddlyWiki as a new tiddler. But TiddlySnip adds a few clever twists to this basic idea, which turn the Firefox/TiddlyWiki combo into a powerful and extremely useful tool.

Lacking of good GUI tool, it is often a headache for newbies to setup the FTP service to transfer files among windows/linux/mac machines. Here we introduce a new powerful GUI server/client tool for you to easily solve this problem. You can use it on Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X, the same approach.

Running a Web-based task manager on your own server makes a lot of sense, but what application should you choose? If you are looking for a lightweight, user-friendly task management tool, you might want to give myTinyTodo a try.