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The latest incarnation of the XFCE desktop proves once again that when you delve into the wonders of the Linux OS, something old definitely becomes something new again. The Linux Mint 13 team has released a specially flavored distro built around the latest version of the XFCE interface. This is not...

Instapaper is finally available on the Android platform. If you're unfamiliar with the iPhone-originating app, it's an offline reader with a difference. I've always had a problem with offline readers. Offline readers, like the good-looking Pulse, function by pulling in XML feeds online. They are es...

Dia is an editor for diagrams, graphs and charts. It is the perfect tool to use for explaining a process or procedure in a concise, standardized visual representation. You will find numerous diagramming applications in both the commercial realm for Windows PCs and the free open source marketplace. M...

Netflix on Monday released the source code for its Chaos Monkey tool into the open source jungle. Chaos Monkey is a tool the company built in the Amazon Web Services system. Its job is to randomly kill virtual machines and services within Netflix's architecture. The idea is to test systems in real-w...

It wasn't too long ago that you'd have to pore over shortwave radio schedule listings, cross referencing time of day, with frequency in kilohertz, in order to listen to long range, overseas broadcasts -- picking out the words from the spooky radio harmonics. Then along came the Internet, which allow...

HP brought Enyo -- the open source object-oriented JavaScript framework for webOS -- out of beta this week, six months after the ill-fated operating system was contributed to the open source community. Enyo 2.0 now has a community of developers, a broad set of cross-platform user interface widgets, ...

Converting media files is often one of the messiest chores that audio and video fans must tolerate, but WinFF is one of the simplest methods I have found to convert audio and video file formats to make them compatible on my growing collection of mobile media platforms. Unlike other excellent single-...

"My esteemed colleague, it is with much reverence that I am humbly, yet secretly, contacting you to tell you of great fortune that has come my way. My most honorable relative has kindly left me, in his will, eighty gold bars. Unfortunately, due to circumstances, I have to regretfully sell on the ...

TreeLine is a unique information manager that combines the characteristics of both a traditional outliner and a PIM. Use it to stow away contact information, bookmarks, text snippets, bibliography, task lists, or whatever else you track or catalog. Regardless of what you call it, this application l...

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...

GanttProject is an impressive project management tool that can be a useful alternative to similar applications locked onto other OS platforms. For enterprise and small-business users, GanttProject's cross-platform access and easy data portability make it a winning choice for Linux users. Compared to...

For the last decade, the battle for supremacy in the video game arena has been waged by three players -- Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. These are companies with long track records, numerous successes, some setbacks and failures -- but most importantly, deep pockets and experience in the marketplace.

MeeGo, the ill-fated Nokia mobile operating system project that had the plug pulled on it earlier this year, is being revived. JollaMobile, a company consisting of former Nokia executives and techies, has announced that it will release a new MeeGo smartphone later this year. That goal is reachable, ...

If you've been getting into flashing ROMs on your devices, you're familiar with the palava that goes with it: booting to recovery, swapping cards, adb, fastboot, renaming zip files, and the rest of it. ROM Manager, from ClockworkMod, the recovery software maker, claims to largely alleviate the kerfu...

An international botnet could be using infected Android handsets to send out massive amounts of spam, said Microsoft antispam engineer Terry Zink. He reportedly identified the botnet and its Google Android connection by examining the headers of spam that included the signature "Sent from Yahoo! Mail...