Whether you are a professional or amateur scientist, engineer or mathematician, if you need to make numerical calculations and plots quickly and easily, then PDL (Perl Data Language) is certainly one ...
We have come to a cross-roads in the computer world today. Stick with the familiar Microsoft Windows, or try the stable, secure, but unfamiliar GNU/Linux-based operating systems that have recently sta ...
If you’re a GNOME user I expect you’re more than familiar with the panels that come as standard with your desktop; if you use openSUSE you’re probably also familiar with the slab menu that Novell have ...
Debian is well respected as a stable server distribution, and most of the reviews focus on aspects appropriate to server deployments. This article covers Debian on the desktop. It is not a step by ste ...
First of all, apologies for the lateness of this one - mainly due to recovering from birthday celebrations. So here's a present for you - a quick odd one out question. Who's the odd one out from Cliff ...
Despite jeering at Windows for the infamous system freezes and blue screens of death, there are and will be times when your computer just locks up: the cursor is frozen and even invoking a console by ...
Have you ever wanted to configure a personal firewall for your GNU/Linux box, but were scared of the complexity of iptables? Well, I might not be able to make you a security expert, but I can show you ...
Finally, there is a free software package that makes writing screenplays easy.
Well, it's that time again - slightly early this time as I'll be offline tomorrow (you lucky people...). Answers to the first crossword at the end. Most clues should lead you to words somehow associat ...
Tired of reading recipes the usual way? Frankly, I am. I find them more interesting, as well as easier and faster to read, by representing them as mind maps [3, 4]. In this article I have two goals: t ...
In Part One and Part Two of this blog, I looked at Beagle and its alternative interfaces (Peagle, Yabi and Peagle). In this last part, I want to take a look at three other search engines as viable rep ...
Some would say 3D desktops are useless fluff; some swear by them. This article gives you an overview of today’s 3D desktop options, and how they can help you be more productive. Barring that, you can ...
One of the things I hate about Windows is that there is no good way to kill frozen processes. Theoretically, you type Ctrl-Alt-Delete, wait for Task Manager to pop up, and kill the process. But in rea ...
Mail merges are a great way to save time, since they pull information from the same fields, over and over again with each new record in your database. There’s only one problem—all records aren’t creat ...
Here's the first cryptic crossword from Free Software Magazine. Most clues should lead you to words somehow associated with free software, but one or two "everyday" words have been slipped in to act a ...
In part one, I looked at the Beagle search tool on the command line and the graphical user interface and in part two I want to look at alternative front-ends for it. First out of the stable is... # Ya ...
Ever since I first fired up KDE on openSuSE, I’ve been in love. The KDE interface just swept me off my feet. But there’s always been one nagging thing. Firefox and Thunderbird stick out like two sore ...
Don't let the simplicity of use fool you. Both Kivio and Dia, two free software diagramming tools, are very efficient at what they do. If you need to design a complex flow chart or create a no-fuss UM ...
OpenOffice.org is probably the biggest free software project in existence today. It certainly is the biggest single piece of software one can download and compile in one go, with the core package hitt ...
One of the biggest navigational issues with any operating system is using program menus. Windows users have to open the Start Menu, scan for the program, realize that the program is probably in the su ...