I've been editing the Philippine Star Trek fans' section of the New Worlds Alliance site for a few months now, and the contributors have been submitting their articles embedded in the email message. I ...
My son's hand-me-down motherboard recently gave up the ghost, and I decided that was a good excuse for an upgrade. Shopping around, I found that multi-core CPUs were finally in my price range, so I de ...
In my recent article on QDVDAuthor, I skipped over the task of making a videoloop for the main DVD menu. Here I'm going to show you how I did it. The goal is a short loop of video that smoothly transi ...
GNU/Linux has never been short of audio and video players, but they live in a world of multiple codecs, chief culprit amongst them being MP3, AAC, WMA and (Adobe) Flash. I say "culprits" because they ...
The Morevna Project aims to create an animated film in a modern anime-style retelling a very old Russian folktale known as "Marya Morevna". It's a free culture production project pushing the envelope ...
There are not a lot of free software options for mastering DVDs. One of the more complete solutions is QDVDAuthor, although it still has a number of rough spots. It's a front-end to a collection of co ...
I love computers and have sat in front of it for hours and probably days at a time forgetting food, bath. Even today I took a bath at 6 PM, its a custom in India that one must take a bath at dawn, wel ...
RepRap (replicating Rapid-prototyper) is a 3D printer and it is impeccably free and open source under both the GPL and the Creative Commons Licence. It's early days but the implications and the promis ...
One of my projects this fall is to take advantage of online "Open Courseware" classes, for personal and professional development. In setting up my own curriculum, I came across a very nice find: a cla ...
While working on my own book for Apress, Free Software for Creative People, I've also been typesetting a 240 page poetry book by Richard McKane using Scribus, for the publisher Hearing Eye. Years ago ...
In the mainstream, free culture is regarded with varying degrees of skepticism, disdain, and dewy-eyed optimism. It violates the rules by which we imagine our world works, and many people react badly ...
Like many people who aren't able to get DSL, I use mobile broadband. Typically, at least in Ireland and the UK, you are forced to purchase a modem with your contract. What if you want other devices in ...
If you are using Ubuntu or any other _modern_ Linux distribution, you are probably running _Mozilla Firefox 3.something_. While those versions are stable, they are getting a little outdated; why not u ...
The project gNewSense started with the goal of creating a GNU/Linux distribution whose first priority is users' freedom - even if this limits user comfort and hardware support. As a starting point Ubu ...
Like anyone else who writes about software I subscribe to the maxim that a picture paints a thousand words. In short, I like to illustrate my text with timely and relevant screenshots; so I'm always o ...
Someone in my LUG posted this last week: http://dnc.digitalunite.com/2009/03/31/shopping-delivered-by-ubuntu-linux/
Setting up an electronic "card catalog" for my books always seemed like a lot of work, so I hadn't really attempted it before; lately, I happened across a KDE program called Tellico that made it so ea ...
You don't have to be an uber system administrator of a network to use Htop. It might have been designed with the masters of the universe in mind but just because you are a mere solitary desktop user i ...
GNU/Linux is blessed with a good choice of file managers. Gnome has Nautilus, KDE has Dolphin and Konqueror and Krusader, which I wrote about some time ago). If you are looking for a minimalist system ...
Everybody needs diagrams. Most users need to create one more often than they think: that flowchart for a presentation, that sketch of the bird feeder to build this weekend, or a time line. Getting mor ...