Free Software

If you are like me, you have a love/hate relationship with Google Docs. You love that you can access your documents from anywhere and love that it auto-saves and is easy to use. You might hate, however, how it sometimes disconnects in the middle of the sentence you are typing or how you have to [...]

As news of Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype begins to surface, I cannot help but ask the question.  What does this mean for Linux users of Skype?  In the past, Microsoft has gone out of its way to make sure its software was not compatible with Linux, and Steve Ballmer has thrown his fair [...]

Currently, I do not actually have a home media center, so that title might be a little confusing. I have an old HTPC that is so ancient, it cannot even handle Boxee (which actually has pretty low system requirements). I also don’t have the money to run out and get a Boxee box or upgrade [...]

From the sexy tech department comes VideoJS, a nice little drop-in embedded video player that uses HTML5 technology.  The default player looks fantastic, and they also include look-alike player skins for YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu, and more. It is lightweight, open source, easy to use, supports fullscreen playing, and even has addons for WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, [...]

Lately, I have encountered a strange problem with Google Chrome that rendered the history inoperable.  The problem began when I cleared the browsing history one day and expected it to return to normal use. Instead, Chrome stopped recording the history altogether, and the “most visited” screenshots on the new tab layout would not refresh, displaying [...]

Linux has quietly inserted itself into the hands of millions of people without them evening knowing it.  Linux and free software supporters have long dreamed of the day when people would readily adopt Linux on their desktops and laptops, but it has been in the mobile and embeded markets that Linux has taken hold.  Anyway, [...]

One of the unique features of the Asus Eee PC is a function called Super Hybrid Engine (or what I like to call SHE) , which I’m told has nothing to do with the hybrid engine pictured above. On a Windows-powered machine, simply press Fn+Space to send your Eee PC into super speed (High Performance) [...]

The Boxee Box is making big news, but for those of us who are not rushing out to spend $200 on a new device for our TVs, Boxee is free to download and install on any computer.  I have it installed on my Asus EeePC 1201n running Kubuntu, which has an HDMI output, along with [...]

Reading a book on a website is a bit like holding a book upside down and turning pages with your nose. Because most websites are designed with standard HTML, there is no easy way to give a user true page-by-page performance. The result is the incessant scrolling and clicking that you do with normal web [...]

The beauty of an open development platform is that anyone can take a stab at creating an application. KDE, which is built upon the Qt application and UI framework, is a shining example of this. A quick look at KDE-Apps.org reveals that new apps are added daily. I periodically browse through the latest KDE apps to [...]