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Google has announced a new offering called the Prior Art Finder, in which it tries to help anyone find prior art on patents. When you view a patent via Google's patent database, there will now be a button you can click, which tries to take terms from the patent, and displays a variety of related info from the date that the patent was filed:

If you’re like me, you have an excessive number of old PCs lying in your basement or in a storage room. Time to throw those old PCs in the recycling bin? But what if you can’t bear the thought of saying goodbye to those machines forever? Fret not: Using a few open-source tools, you can immortalize those retired PCs as virtual machines without having to hold on to the actual hardware. Here's how.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, announced its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class to be held in South Bay, CA from August 28th - August 30th, 2012.

A digital clock is actually nothing special, most distros include one by default. However, in this article, I will show you how to get a continuous digital clock in the terminal. The basic command you can use to display date and time in the terminal is "date". When you open the terminal and run "date", you will have an output of the current date and time. To abbreviate the output to display the time only, you can add a tag (like "+%r" or "+%T") to the "date" command.

The Document Foundation has announced earlier today, August 15th, that the sixth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 3.5 open source office suite software is available for download.

The team behind Calligra, the graphic art and office suite for KDE, created from KOffice, has just announced the release of version 2.5 of its suite. This release has many new and improved features, and may be especially useful for people who want strong graphics and diagramming features in a suite of applications that includes productivity apps such as a word processor and a spreadsheet.

Hey there, Linux gamers! There’s a new Humble Bundle for Android, and Linux, and Mac, and Windows, available for purchase right now, offering five entertaining games for all ages.

Now that the New Zealand courts have the case, it appears as if the Megaupload king might, with luck, escape extradition to the United States. Even so, it’s doubtful his servers and data will ever be returned. Legitimate customers still can’t access their data, which remains in U.S. government hands. Dotcom, however, acts as if he’s holding a winning hand, having recently announced to his Twitter followers that he intends to launch a new service, Megabox, later this year.

Canonical had earlier released Ubuntu with two different Unity shells, a normal default Unity 3D as well as Unity 2D for old low spec computers without 3D acceleration. But from Ubuntu 12.10, the 2d shell will no longer be available.

In this article I argue why Ubuntu 12.04 is the best desktop available on any FLOSS platform.

Committers can submit patches directly to the Apache CloudStack (incubating) repository, but non-committers need to follow a few more steps. Don't worry, it's easy. Here's how.

App.net, a new micro-blogging service launched with a bang last weekend when it blew through its initial fund-raising goal of $500,000. One of the reasons for that success was a pledge to build the site using open APIs. While developers pay a yearly fee, they can build applications on top of the service without being bothered -- in stark contrast to larger social meda companies like Facebook and Twitter.

The Certification Authority Browser Forum's (CA/Browser Forum) new licensing policy has caused a furore within the very organisation meant to be responsible for guidelines and best practices for SSL certification. Prominent member organisations, including cryptography specialists RSA, BlackBerry manufacturer RIM and US carrier Verizon, are missing from the latest member list, updated in August. Entrust, a founder member of the organisation, has loudly expanded on the reasons for its withdrawal, which it explains is due to the organisation allegedly forcing members to make patented technologies available licence-free. In a posting to CA/Browser Forum's public mailing list, certificate provider StartCom has responded by calling the allegation "a lie which I'm sure you are very well aware of".

The latest release earlier this month of the K Desktop Environment, or KDE, is a solid upgrade that could very well win back the hearts and fingers of Linux users who wandered off to other, less powerful desktop shells. I am particularly impressed with its smooth integration into the dedicated KDE distribution in Linux Mint 13.

Gnome3 isn’t working on FreeBSD or in any BSD as Gnome3 uses technologies that are not available to BSDs. I thought Gnome3 to BSD was a dead project till Juanjo Marin (Gnome Dev in Evince and A11y) mentioned a few things about BSD in Gnome’s Marketing ML. It seems that there is a FreeBSD Gnome Project working to port Gnome3 there!

Office 2013 will, after years, finally fully support Open Document Format, Adobe's PDF, and, oh yes, Microsoft's own Open XML document standard.

According to the latest "ubuntu-meta" package update from the Ubuntu Quantal Quetzal repositories, Unity 2D will no longer be installed by default in Ubuntu 12.10, and Unity 2D users are being transitioned to the Unity 3D session, just like it was discussed at UDS-Q.

Force: Leashed is a free and open source first person gravity fiddler puzzle game. To advance, you need to guide rockets to their targets using spherical potential fields.

Arch Linux is the fourth major Linux Distro after Fedora, Mageia and OpenSUSE that migrates to systemd as its Init System Manager. While systemd is not a dependency for Gnome, Gnome uses systemd-logind as a user login service in GDM with a fallback to Console-Kit when systemd is absent. Of course the benefits for Arch from SysV to systemd are much more than a better Gnome support!

...Or not keeping up with the Robinsons, as the case may be. I know what Karlie Robinson is up to, thanks to Facebook. But poor Karlie: Todd has his nose pressed to the monitor all month, walking the walk of the talk he talked last month, when he said he was putting out a distro a day for the month of August. Like clockwork, Todd is putting out a distro each day and has done so, so far this month. Allow me a white-flag, hands-in-the-air moment: I surrender! I give up. I can’t keep up with Todd’s herculean project. Rather than sample each distro every day as I had planned, I am going to go about this as if the 31 Days 31 Distros project is a buffet, taking the ones I think I would like and going back to my table to enjoy them.