Franco Pasut Blog

Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Previous article: brief comparison between robocopy and rsync 3. Slow rsync with WebDAV 4. Installing Rclone on Linux: repository or official website? 5. Configuring Rclone 1. Introduction Robocopy: The "Robust File Copy" is a built-in powerhouse for Windows users. It’s the native way to handle massive local transfers or network shares (SMB) while perfectly preserving NTFS permissions. Rsync: The de facto standard for the Unix world (Linux and macOS). It’s famous for its efficiency—instead of re-copying everything, it only syncs the specific parts of a file that have changed. Rclone: Think of Rclone as "Rsync for the Cloud." While the tools above were born for physical disks and local servers, Rclone was built for the API era. It is a true multi-platform "Swiss Army knife" that runs seamlessly on Windows, Linux, macOS, and even FreeBSD. What sets it apart is its incredible versatility: it ...

Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. What is the "Super" Key? 3. What is the Taskbar? 4. The Core Concept: Super + Number 5. To Pin or Not to Pin? That is the Question. 6. More Than Just Windows: The "Super + Number" Shortcut on Linux 7. Beyond the OS: Browsers and Outlook 8. The Bottom Line 1. Introduction In modern desktop environments, from Windows to mainstream GNU/Linux distributions, Alt+Tab remains the go-to shortcut for window switching. While seamless for light multitasking, this method hits a wall as your workflow grows. Once you have dozens of active windows, what was once a quick "flip" becomes a tedious cycle of repetitive keystrokes. Even Alt+Esc fails to address the root of the problem, as it still forces you to manually scan through an endless stack of applications to find the one you need. There is, however, a faster and more surgical approach: the Super + Number combination. In this article, I will e...

Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Managing operations with PDF Arranger 3. Managing the same operations with PDFtk. 4. In summary 1. Introduction The “PDF” is the essentially static document format par excellence. However, even PDF documents can be modified, especially with operations such as deleting, adding, reversing pages, inserting text, and more. There are various applications, including free ones, for performing these operations. In this article, I will report some parallel observations between two systems for page manipulation: one graphical, PDF Arranger, and one command line, PDFtk. PDF Arranger is a free and open source application (a fork of PDF-Shuffler) ideal for merging, splitting, rotating, and cropping PDF files in an intuitive way. PDFtk is one of the most powerful tools for manipulating PDFs in command line mode. I would like to point out that this article does not claim to be exhaustive on the two systems mentioned, but is onl...