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Radio Tray: Tiny Web Radio Player Is Handy but Picks Up Some Static February 08, 2012
If you spend a lot of time at your keyboard, no doubt you dabble a lot in listening to Internet radio. Radio Tray is a relatively new Linux app that can make tuning in to your favorite radio stations a new experience. Radio Tray is a streaming player for online radio that sits on the Linux desktop panel. Think of this app as a shortcut that hides the browser interface.
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SMPlayer: A Flexible, Feature-Filled Media Player With a Frustrating Flaw February 01, 2012
When it comes to playing audio and video files in Linux, media players pretty much all work the same way and have a very similar user interface. It usually all comes down to features. With SMPlayer it depends on what you want to play. Unfortunately, this bug of sorts is something its developer Ricardo Villalba has yet to resolve in the latest release, version 0.7.0.
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Vignette Lets Android Photogs Get Their Art On January 27, 2012
Vignette differentiates itself from other Android-based camera apps by adding cross-process, tilt-shift, double exposure and other sophisticated effects like infrared, as opposed to the general toy camera and retro effects commonly found. The paid version of Vignette adds full resolution to the mix.
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Fotowall Has a Sharp Eye for Sweet Collages January 25, 2012
Eye candy can be a great user experience sweetener, but tastes vary widely as to how much is just enough, and it's one differentiator among Linux desktops. Fotowall is a handy app that can spice up your desktop as well as create personalized print and wallpaper displays. Fotowall is a really clever collage-making tool of sorts.
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LiVES: A Rich Video Editor With Layer Upon Layer of Features January 18, 2012
LiVES is an advanced video editor that can double as a video jockey tool. It is surprisingly powerful. But its interface makes it rather simple to learn. In fact, it has so many feature levels that this app would be right at home as the video editor of choice in any professional film editing studio.
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Galaxy Nexus: A Dazzling Phone With an Enormous Appetite January 17, 2012
OK, Greenpeace, arrest me now as an eco-criminal. I must have single-handedly deforested a good tract of the Amazon rain forest over the last few days. In mitigation, I plead that this was because of the requirements of my job. I was testing the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. The device is sleek and sexy, has a great UI and nice features, but its appetite for power is incredible.
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Quickoffice Pro: Strong Cloud Connections, Dreary Look January 13, 2012
Many Android devices ship with stripped-down office suite apps that offer limited functionality loosely based on the kind you'd get with Microsoft Office on your desktop. Having had a discussion recently with someone who now regularly travels without a laptop, depending solely on his Apple iPad for office functions, I was keen to see just how far these Office-like tools could go.
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Music Management Takes Flight With Songbird January 11, 2012
Asking a seasoned Linux user what music player you should use is akin to bringing up questions about religion or politics with your drinking buddies. A much safer strategy is, don't ask and don't tell. But if you insist, let me throw a suggestion into the fray. Uncage Songbird. You might be pleasantly surprised at the melodious results.
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AVG Anti-Virus Pro Rolls Heavy Artillery Onto Deserted Battlefield January 06, 2012
I've always been a fan of antivirus maker AVG. That's primarily because of the intense pain I felt when renewing staple Norton Symantec AntiVirus subscriptions back in the day, when the PC was our sole method of connectivity and Norton was our sole method of antivirus protection. AVG came along in due course, and provided a free, PC-based solution that seemed to work just as well as Norton.
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Minitube Puts More You in YouTube January 04, 2012
YouTube is a great source for watching an eclectic collection of videos on music, human stupidity and worldly comedy. But I find it much too easy to go far afield as I click on "also watched" videos when viewing a particular topic line. Minitube solves that problem for me.
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Clonezilla: A Drive-Duping Monster With a Fearsome Face December 28, 2011
Backing up data and restoring a crashed computer are two of those "I wish I hadda" moments in the life of every computer user. When you maintain a collection of computers for your job or organization, those tasks can be critical. One of the fastest and most reliable ways to restore an afflicted computer is to copy its previously saved image onto the hard drive.
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gDesklets: Semi-Sweet Eye Candy December 21, 2011
My interest in desktop eye candy vacillates with the seasons. The added productivity it brings to a particular desktop design is also a factor. Now that GNOME 3 forces a desktop without icons, I took a look at how useful the gDesklets Project might be.
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Scribes: A Sturdy Reinvention of the Text Editor December 14, 2011
Text editors are usually replacements for full-fledged word processing suites. They can offer very simple one-trick functionality such as Leafpad or multi-functional tabbed writing tools with even some semblance of character enhancements like Gedit.
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Tomboy's Got Some Major Note-Taking Muscle December 07, 2011
Small packages can be deceptive, especially when it comes to evaluating desktop note-taking systems. Tomboy Notes can easily fool you into thinking you need a bigger, more powerful note-taking app. But the latest stable version 1.8.3 released on Nov. 14 offers enough heavy-duty features that you will not need to look elsewhere to organize your notes and track your daily activities.
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Norton Anti-Theft Plugin: Major Letdown December 02, 2011
Believe it or not, antivirus software makers are now pitching solutions for our smartphones. Do you believe the hype? Statistics floating around the sea of press releases from antivirus merchants proclaim the end of innocence for our lovable little Android. He's grown up.
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Sometimes Wine Relaxes Linux, Sometimes It Just Causes Headaches November 30, 2011
A little Wine with your Linux computing session can keep you using your favorite Microsoft Windows programs. What is Wine? Wine is a compatibility layer that's sometimes referred to as an emulator, though it's not "that kind" of emulator, according to the project's wiki. Wine doesn't do any CPU emulation, hence the acronym "Wine Is Not an Emulator."
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