Free software is about freedom from control. This article discusses how the free software ideals should be applied to hosted personal health record software and how Microsoft's newest PHR, HealthVault ...
While Writer allows you to create an advanced book template that consists of a master document and a number of subdocuments, there are situations where using a simpler, one-file template makes more se ...
There are few certainties in life. Death, taxes and Microsoft FUD are three of them—and the fact that, sooner or later, upgrading Firefox is going to break one or more of your killer extensions. Inter ...
Quentin Crisp, the infamous, bohemian Englishman, said that he never cared much for dusting. “Why bother”, he observed, “after four years, it doesn’t get any worse”. If only the accumulated detritus o ...
Today, everyone uses a different instant messenger. Your boss may use Lotus Sametime, your colleague AIM, your friend Google Talk, and your kid Yahoo! Messenger. However, these all take up hard drive ...
There is always a time when your GNU/Linux machine's screen output stops working. Maybe it's displaying garbage to your monitor instead of Gnome or KDE. Or maybe it's displaying 640x480 resolution wit ...
If you’re serious about music or DVDs, at some point you cross the threshold of having more than you can keep track of easily. The box full of index cards has served its purpose; it’s time to move on ...
The 3D world just got a lot brighter with the birth of Compiz Fusion, a powerful compositing window manager for GNU/Linux operating systems. Originally there was one project, Compiz, but the project f ...
Downloading—no matter what operating system you are using—is ubiquitous. If you’ve been on the internet you will have downloaded something at some point: PDFs, pictures, ISOs, movies, music files, str ...
I recently went looking for a way to rotate JPG images from within Nautilus, and found a nice way to do this and more. It’s not difficult to customize the right-click popup menu in Nautilus to perform ...
Well, it’s been a while—“cough!”—the set’s all dusty since my previous post about 3D cards... One thing that isn’t quite dusty though, is the state of free software drivers! I will sum up the differen ...
I’m over the moon. So far over, that I’m somewhere out near Neptune at the moment. You see, I love books. Long ago I picked out PDFs as the best digital equivalent and I’ve collected tens of thousands ...
Apparently I’ve been living under a rock, because I only recently found out about the Blender project’s free and open source short movie, Elephants Dream, when I happened across Terry Hancock’s review ...
Today, everyone uses a different instant messenger. Your boss may use Lotus Sametime, your colleague AIM, your friend Google Talk, and your kid Yahoo! Messenger. However, these all take up hard drive ...
Screenshots. Where would the internet be without them? They are ubiquitous and when you are researching that latest piece of cool software or the latest ISO of your favourite GNU/Linux distro they are ...
Most modern GNU/Linux distributions are secure with their default minimal installs, whether desktop or server, while some distributions are designed specifically with security in mind. However, any GN ...
Last year, while running Ubuntu, I decided I wanted to watch a video, so I opened it up in the built-in Totem player. What happened next took me back to the dark era of codecs and computing. The XviD ...
It’s been said that for a free software desktop to succeed it needs to address the needs of the average home user. Managing digital photographs is just one of those needs. Let’s see how one of the mor ...
We know all about how powerful the GNU/Linux terminal is. However, it’s a pain to have to fire up a terminal emulator like Konsole or gnome-terminal, wait for a few seconds for it load, and then have ...
One popular screensaver in Ubuntu is “Floating Ubuntu”, which displays a number of Ubuntu logos floating around the screen. This screensaver exists in many different flavours; for example in Ubuntu yo ...