Is GNU/Linux just not cool anymore?
February 10, 2012
Software is becoming less and less important. Most people today just don't care about what software they use, what operating system they run, or who is behind the pretty screens they see. What they want, is something that works. Or, better, anything that works. This shift caused a series of changes which shook the whole industry. One of them amongst them: are GNU/Linux and free software in general just not cool anymore? Google Trends gives some interesting answers.
- Book Review: Annie's CS101 by Dmitry Zinoviev (February 10, 2012)
- Archiving emails as text files, with command line help (February 7, 2012)
- MegaGlest: a fantastic, free software strategy 3D game (February 4, 2012)
- Bulk renaming using Thunar (January 27, 2012)
- Free Software Magazine will go blank on the 18th of January (January 15, 2012)
- Interview with Igor Sysoev, author of Apache's competitor NGINX (January 5, 2012)
- The Bizarre Cathedral - 100 (October 13, 2011)
Opinions
Is GNU/Linux just not cool anymore?
February 10, 2012
Software is becoming less and less important. Most people today just don't care about what software they use, what operating system they run, or who is behind the pretty screens they see. What they want, is something that works. Or, better, anything that works. This shift caused a series of changes which shook the whole industry. One of them amongst them: are GNU/Linux and free software in general just not cool anymore? Google Trends gives some interesting answers.
- Download Sites: Rogue Pirate Hangouts or Vogue Free Media Distributors? (February 2, 2012)
- What if Diaspora's pods just cannot challenge Facebook's monolithic structure? (February 1, 2012)
- Apple's iBook EULA exemplifies Everything that's wrong with Proprietary Software (January 31, 2012)
- The real problem with media pirate culture: Punishing artists for making art (January 31, 2012)
End users
Bulk renaming using Thunar
January 27, 2012
Thunar is a lightweight file manager that comes with Xubuntu and other Xfce-based distributions. It has several useful features not found in other popular file managers, like 'Bulk Rename'. To use this feature, select a group of files in the Thunar file pane and hit the F2 key, or choose Rename from the Edit menu. A window appears with 'before and after' views of your file names, and a drop-down list showing the renaming possibilities.
- Object and Camera Path Tracking in Blender - "Monkey See Monkey Do" (January 24, 2012)
- Backup your data in Linux with Deja Dup (January 16, 2012)
- Staying happy with Gnumeric: finding the leading apostrophe (January 15, 2012)
- Staying happy with Gnumeric: text as "text" (instead of "dates") (January 12, 2012)
Hacking
Archiving emails as text files, with command line help
February 7, 2012
Call me old-fashioned, but I like to store emails in text files, one per correspondent. For example, 'Bloggs_Fred.txt' contains all my emails to and from Fred Bloggs, in chronological order with the newest message last. Other people might have the need to periodically store parts of emails in predefined files (for example, when collecting information).
I wrote a very simple script to make this kind of archiving easier. Before I explain the script, I'll show you how it works.
- What to do if your mail server is blacklisted (February 6, 2012)
- At last you can buy a Raspberry Pi! (January 4, 2012)
- Mounting Google Documents in GNU/Linux is just not a (real) option (January 2, 2012)
- Encouraging the next generation of hackers part 2 - Software implementation (December 27, 2011)
Games
MegaGlest: a fantastic, free software strategy 3D game
February 4, 2012
When the Glest team started "Glest" as a college project a few years ago, they probably didn't expect their game to go such a long way. While "Glest" stopped being developed a couple of years ago in 2009, it was forked in two different projects: GAE (Glest Advanced Engine) and MegaGlest (the game I am reviewing in this article). So, how is it? The answer is simple: this game is incredible, polished, enjoyable, addictive, smart, and plain simply fantastic.
- Why games are NOT the key to Linux adoption (January 19, 2009)
- Computer role-playing games for GNU/Linux (November 14, 2007)
- Free software games, the return (March 28, 2007)
- The free Tron Universe—Armagetron (March 26, 2007)
Interviews
Interview with Igor Sysoev, author of Apache's competitor NGINX
January 5, 2012
NGINX is the new start rising in the landscape of web servers. Well, it's hardly "new" -- it will soon turn 10. However, it's definitely rocking the web server world, with Netcraft showing a huge increase in usage in the last few months.
I was fortunate enough to catch up with NGINX's author, Igor Sysoev, who agreed on answering a few questions for us. So, here is a glimpse on their business model, their new 2.0 version, and more.
- Interview with Adam Green and Jonathan Gray, founders of The Public Domain Review (September 6, 2011)
- Interview: Nina Paley (author of "Sita Sings the Blues" and the two "Minute Meme" animations) (March 15, 2010)
- A talk with Brandon Whichard about Zenoss, the cloud, Amazon's EC2 and more (November 27, 2009)
- Interview with Daniel Chalef of KnowledgeTree (July 7, 2009)
Humour
- The Bizarre Cathedral - 99 (May 26, 2011)
- The Bizarre Cathedral - 98 (May 19, 2011)
- The Bizarre Cathedral - 97 (April 14, 2011)
- The Bizarre Cathedral - 96 (April 7, 2011)
Reviews
Book Review: Annie's CS101 by Dmitry Zinoviev
February 10, 2012
The full title is "Annie's CS101, A Charting Approach to Computer Programming." This is an interesting approach to an introductory programming course -- the target is for younger learners (although not children), and it focuses on the thought process behind conceiving of a programming problem and solving it. The language of instruction is Python, although this is not really a Python book.
- Book Review: Machinima by Matt Kelland, Dave Morris, and Dave Lloyd (February 9, 2012)
- Spark: A Tablet Running Open hardware and KDE Plasma Active Pre-installed (February 8, 2012)
- Book review: Open Advice (February 6, 2012)
- Book Review: Animating with Blender by D. Roland Hess (February 6, 2012)
Announcements
Free Software Magazine will go blank on the 18th of January
January 15, 2012
Free Software Magazine will shut down on January 18th to protest against SOPA. We am not sure what we will be putting on the site yet. However, the contents won't be there.
- FOSDEM 2012, Hardware Security and Cryptography, Call for Papers (January 14, 2012)
- Let us Pray: Yea Verily, Filesharing is a Religion. Official. (January 12, 2012)
- Allwinner A10: A GPL-compliant computer for $15 (January 11, 2012)
- Raspbery Pis are in the oven! (January 11, 2012)