Archive

The Fedora Project is perhaps one of the hallmark Linux distributions. Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat, the commercial developer of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Red Hat's investment in the Fedora community is collaborative. As such, Fedora Linux releases often provide RHEL developers with a field...

Blender Master Class is a must-have for anyone who uses or even plans to use the Blender graphics tool. It is a learn-by-doing guidebook that takes all the frustration and guessing out of the Blender equation. Author Ben Simonds does a marvelous job of taking the wonder out of using the powerful Ble...

Fedora 18, dubbed "the Spherical Cow," was finally released on Jan. 15 after seven postponements that stretched two months beyond its scheduled six-month release cycle. Despite some noteworthy improvements overall to the operating system, I found little about Fedora 18 to justify adopting it over ot...

The Book of GIMP: A Complete Guide to Nearly Everything combines a step-by-step approach to learning how to use this epic graphic image-manipulation program with a handy reference manual supplemented with very useful appendices. Whether you are a GIMP beginner or a veteran user, this book will save ...

Subtitle Editor is a capable video editing tool kit to transform, edit, correct, create or refine existing subtitles on GNU/Linux/*BSD. Based on GTK+2, It also shows sound waves, which makes it easier to synchronize subtitles to voices. You will not find too many capable applications in Linux that s...

Some of my earliest memories of smartphones are of the hassles involved with getting bookmarks loaded across devices. Why was it that Web properties thought -- and some still think -- you needed different information at your desk from what you wanted on the road? The issue has never been properly a...

The Internet is a hub for acquiring music, video and a just about any other form of content. Miro is one of the most capable player apps that I have seen for all of this media. Keeping up with the various forms of content the Web has to offer can be a daunting task. The process is similar to what...

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...

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...

We all know that the 20th century predictions of a paperless office were a pipe dream, maybe never to happen now. Digital media appear to have created more paper swirling around us, rather than less. If you've been holding out for the paperless dream, forget it. Give up now, because there's currentl...

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...

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....

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 ...

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...