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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...

The government of Iceland recently launched a one-year migration project for all its public institutions in what appears to be an acceleration of its movement toward free and open source software and away from proprietary systems, according to the European Commission blog Joinup. The project will ap...

We've been seeing applications that allow you to remotely access desktop PCs for years. They have tended to function on a PC-to-PC connection basis over the Internet -- like Symantec's pcAnywhere software, which is often used for remote PC troubleshooting. More recently, we've been seeing tools that...

Developers are losing interest in creating apps for Android because of the continued fragmentation of the operating system, according to a survey conducted jointly by Appcelerator and IDC between January and February. Its results show that interest in Android phone app development fell by nearly fiv...