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In this series, we look at a range of home activities where Linux can play its part, making the most of our time at home, keeping active and engaged. The change of lifestyle enforced by Covid-19 is an opportunity to expand our horizons, and spend more time on activities we have neglected in the past.

This week, I’m examining software that lets you turn a Raspberry Pi 4 into a low power writing machine. There’s a ton of open source notes software available for Linux. Tons and tons in fact.

This is a crash course in data science designed for the absolute beginner. Get up to speed in 20 minutes.

With so many young children currently unable to follow their usual routine of going to school, playing with friends, and undertaking many hobbies, it’s vital to keep them happy and learning. There are many ways of advancing a child’s education and well-being including online lessons, video calls with family and friends, combined with parental guidance.

Where does beets step in? If your music collection is in a sorry state of affairs with missing or incomplete track details, metadata, duplicate tracks, missing tracks, then beets might just fit the bill.

This week I’m examining photo viewer software on the RPI4. There’s lots of open source photo viewers, so I focus on gThumb, feh, GPicView, and QuickViewer.

Steam Locomotive is a tiny C program, written in 295 lines of code. It’s just a harmless bit of fun.

Podcasts are big business. We see celebrities, influencers, journalists, academics, one man and his dog owning a microphone and mixing desk produce regular podcast shows. The quality is variable. Some are truly awesome, others are strictly an acquired taste. Podcasts are a great way of keeping up to date with the latest news, reviews, banter, gossip, to deepen your understanding of the world we live in, and much more.

It has often been said that information confers power, and that the most important currency in our culture today is information. Keeping track of bits and pieces of information is a minefield. There is a wide range of competent note taking software for Linux, and this article seeks to cover the finest open source solutions.

One area I’ve not covered to date is utility software. Nestling in the Raspbian repositories are a ton of utilities from the essential to the wacky. File management is definitely a routine but important activity for any desktop user. Recognizing that file management software is deeply personal (causing almost as many conflicts as text editors), I’ve looked at a good spectrum of file managers this week.

A common complaint about YouTube is that to watch the material you need to use a web browser. Fortunately, some funky developers have created applications that allow you to bypass the web-only barrier of YouTube.

In the field of open source video recording, my preferred application is OBS Studio. It’s definitely a wondrous class cross-platform application that’s proficient for both video recording and live streaming. Open source at its very finest. Here's my verdict of running OBS Studio on the Raspberry Pi 4.

You-Get is a small command-line utility to download media contents (videos, audios, images) from the web. This software lets you access material from YouTube, Youku, Niconico and a whole of other sites without ever leaving the console.

A news aggregator is software which collect news, weblog posts, and other information from the web so that they can be read in a single location for easy viewing. With the range of news sources available on the internet, news aggregators play an essential role in helping users to quickly locate breaking news.

There’s lots of fun in the terminal. How about a classic iconic tile-matching puzzle video game? Step forward tetris, a terminal interface for Tetris with the main file coded in a mere 333 lines of Haskell.

Raspbian's repositories now ship version 68.5.0 ESR of Firefox. This version was released in February 2020. As it's the latest Extended Support Release, I've revisited Firefox to see if it's a viable alternative to Chromium or Vivaldi on the RPI4.

In a single sentence, nnn can be probably best summarized as software seeking to bridge the gap between the terminal and the desktop environment.

For this week, I’m going to look at a few retro games, all nestling in Raspbian’s repositories. While its quad-core BCM2711 system-on-chip has more powerful processing cores, and the first upgrade to the graphics processor in the project’s history, it’s important to be realistic with expectations about the RPI4’s gaming potential.

For this article, we’re looking at a different take on cowsay. It goes by the name xcowsay. This program displays a cute graphical cow and speech bubble. The program was first started over 12 years ago, but it’s still under active development, with a new release published only last week.

For this week’s blog, I turn to a desktop activity that I use fairly frequently. It’s screen capturing – offering the ability to share images on my computer screen with a colleague or friend. Recording a video or screencast might be snazzier, but a still-image screen capture, known as a screenshot, is often all I need to get the message across.