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Unless you are an atypical Linux user, you tend to accept the default apps featured in your distro of choice. After all, if what you use works just fine, why scavenge around for a replacement? If saying yes to that question means you miss out on adding the Listen audio player to your desktop tools, ...

Fotoxx sounds more like a medical solution to fix a patient's physical appearance. It applies that concept to injecting tweaks on your photographic images. The results are impressive. This photo editing kit has a look and feel that separates it from the expected approaches taken by the likes of Gim...

FocusWriter uses an intriguing concept that makes you wonder why other word-processing tools do not offer the same hide-away tool panels to eliminate distractions. It offers a set of writing tools with the ease and speed of unencumbered text editors. Focuswriter is a full-screen writing program. It ...

Darhon Finance is a comprehensive personal finance program packed with features to manage finances and bank accounts, track credit cards and investments and plan for expenses. It goes far beyond serving as a typical electronic check or bank book register. That leap to being full financial package pu...

Freeplane is an application for creating mind maps. A mind map is the doodling you draw with shapes and other symbols around words connected with lines to make charts representing your thoughts and ideas on a particular topic or project. It's not often that productivity software makes the task at ha...

The Calligra Suite is an unusual compilation of office tools with much potential -- but it has a good deal of maturing to do before it can advance beyond its mediocre performance following a debut almost three years ago. Calligra is a fork of KDE's KOffice that grew out of unresolved disputes among ...

IP Cam Viewer Pro lets you view and control an Internet protocol camera through Android OS on a phone or tablet. App features include SSL encryption, pan tilt and zoom, relays for lights and garage doors, and recording functions. DVRs and network video recorders also can be controlled. Included are...

Here's a likely familiar summer scenario for many Americans: You've been driving all day, and it's getting late. You're tired. You're ready for a hotel bed in an unknown town coming up ahead. My modus operandi has always been to watch for billboards advertising upcoming motels with rates. Or, I mig...

Plex is a good looking media platform for running media files on Google TV, tablets, phones and so on. Online channels include Hulu, Vimeo and more. On looks and apparent tight integration between my existing Android-based devices, I decided to check out Plex's two Android apps. I was interested in...

HTC is on its fourth incarnation of Sense, and in my opinion, no one has come close. In fact, they've got nowhere near. Muddy teal menus, and crude buttons from Motorola fail to delight; the Honeycomb UI on my Toshiba Thrive tablet with its neon-effect borders looks like it should be part of the UI ...

Few things scare me more than disk partitioning and GRUB configuration software. Both of those chores involve knowledge about hard drive operations and a good slice of luck. And both can render a computer unbootable with one slight user error. So discovering the latest version of Grub Customizer hel...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Canonical expects to start rolling out the first phase of Ubuntu's new heads-up display in the April release of Ubuntu 12.04. But HUD will supplement Unity, Ubuntu's default desktop interface, rather than fully replace it. The move to radically change the desktop's default interface is being made ou...

Has anyone else noticed that you rarely receive a copy of hotel room-service receipts? Why is that? It hadn't really bothered me that much over the years -- despite a niggling feeling it should -- until an incident recently where the dollar amount I had signed for clearly didn't match the checkout b...

Google has brought its Chrome Web browser to the Android Market. A beta edition of the browser is available from the app shop now for free, but since its operation is restricted to the latest version of the mobile operating system, Ice Cream Sandwich, only about 1 percent of Android's millions of us...

It's well known that Android is fragmented or, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt contends, "differentiated." In a bid to codify design principles for the operating system's look and feel, Google unveiled Android Design at CES on Thursday. This website seeks to help appdevs create apps with a more uniform l...

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. Not only does Minitube bet...