Archive

Instagram, the popular photography and social networking app for the iPhone, with a whopping 27 million iOS users, recently became available for Android. Around 5 million Android users reportedly signed up for the app in the first few days of the Android release. Then social network Facebook offered...

Sometimes too much of a good thing in free software can create bad impressions. For instance, some of the free stuff so easily available in Linux distro package managers is so archaic that newcomers to the OS might understandably shriek in horror. Don't get me wrong. I absolutely am a big fan of FOS...

Linux Administration: A Beginner's Guide by Wale Soyinka is a hands-on manual for IT staff members who must work with both Windows and Linux. It is a practical guide for network administrators who deploy and maintain Linux and other free and open-source software.

The 5-year-old subscription streaming video service known as "Hulu Plus" has doubled its subscriber numbers in the last seven months to more than 2 million, according to numbers bandied about by the company. Hulu is a joint venture between investors and television operators: Comcast's NBCUniversal, ...

Regardless of how good they are, some Linux applications have very little appeal to all but users with specialized needs. That is not the case with Xournal. Even if you do not use a tablet for inputing notes, this app still lets you create with style. If you are looking for a very handy note-taking ...

The recently released Who Writes Linux kernel contributor list reveals that some of the usual supporters of Linux -- Red Hat, SUSE, IBM, Intel, Oracle -- remain firmly behind the open source OS. There has also been a lot of attention on the other contributors, which now include Microsoft. What I fin...

If there's been a common thread to some of the recent "How To" articles I've written for Technewsworld and my Android app reviews for LinuxInsider, it might be the taming of the ever-proliferating devices that are taking over my living space. I seem to be collecting things at an alarming rate -- so ...

One of my biggest problems in managing appointments, to-do tasks, notes and reminders is that I work on a variety of desktop and laptop computers in multiple locations. To bridge the access gaps, I rely on a tablet computer and a smartphone tapped into cloud storage. When I find a really good PIM ap...

Canonical, the commercial developer of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, seems at times to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. Some testers and industry watchers alike have praised the company's innovative Unity desktop shell and the Heads Up Display (HUD) bolted on top of it in this month's ...

The much talked about demise of the laptop in favor of tablet device, it could be argued, will be dependent on the tablet offering much of the functionality of the laptop. Gaping holes in tablet function will likely perpetuate the laptop as a tool. A number of work-type Android applications have suc...

Not all search tools are the same. Just like users have a variety of Linux distros that appeal to a wide range of needs, search apps do different tasks for different users. One of the best search tools I have found is a clever app called "Recoll." I have an extensive collection of research and publi...

Yahoo has offered its Mojito application framework to the open source community under the BSD license. Mojito is an MVC JavaScript Web application framework built on release 3 of Yahoo's open source JavaScript Yahoo User Interface Library. MVC is a software architecture that isolates the domain logi...

I've been looking at ways to optimize the time I spend sitting in traffic. The old days when listening to the radio constituted the sum extent of productivity achieved while staring at someone else's tailgate are long gone, thanks to the smartphone. I've already written about in-car Internet, includ...

I thought I had found image-manipulating Nirvana with GimpShop. But the wide world of open source software and the Linux community failed me this week. My quest for a better GIMP tool to give me a Photoshop-like Windows experience turned into a fool's folly. Actually, my faith in the Linux OS is sti...

Amazon Web Services has teamed up with private cloud infrastructure provider Eucalyptus in a move that could enable the deployment of hybrid clouds. Hybrid clouds are a combination of internal private clouds and external public clouds. Under the agreement, AWS will support the integration of privat...