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Cleaning up the cable mess behind your computer.

One of the controversial decisions made by the Gnome 3 developers was to do away with applets. For the most part I agree that applets were not very useful, but one applet I did use was the system monitor. To be able to see at a glance if the cpu or memory was being overloaded was a great convenience, and one that is sorely missed in Gnome 3. The good news is that this new system monitor extension from paradoxxxzero brings back most of the functionality of the old Gnome 2 system monitor applet.

Thomas Thwaite, designer and technologist, will be a featured keynote speaker at this summer's Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin. Thomas is perhaps best known through his Toaster Project. The Toaster Project was an attempt to build a toaster from raw, self-mined materials. The project exposed the complexity of seemingly simple and everyday technology. It leaves us to wonder how technology will change our lives in the future, and shows how we all need others to get even simple products. William Carlson contacted Thomas to ask him about his projects, his views on technology and what makes him tick. Read the full interview on the Desktop Summit website.

I guess this has been around for some time, however I was not aware of it. I bumped into it in a thread on UbuntuForums, and decided to give it a try. From the add-on page description, Flash-Aid is a Firefox 4 and 3.5 (and maybe 5 Beta too) add-on which was built to “Remove conflicting flash plugins from Ubuntu/Debian Linux systems, install the appropriate version according to system architecture and apply some tweaks to improve performance and fix common issues.”

The Debian Project is so non-commercial, they don't sell T-shirts, although some are available ... in Europe ... at conferences. But true to the Debian way, the art needed to make your own shirt is open source and generally available. So I decided to make my own Debian Squeeze Space Fun (the theme for this release) T-shirt.

Looks like Ubuntu 11.04 has its share of fans as well. We featured Natty Narwhal inspired Android skins few days ago. Now, here is another theme, this time for Nokia smartphones, again inspired by Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. Theme is called Natty Ubuntu.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop reminds of a modern day Don Quixote taking on giants like Google and Apple while trying to keep his company relevant before he releases phones running Windows Phone 7 later this year.

Gmediafinder is a GTK application that lets you search, view and download videos from sites like YouTube. Gmediafinder is a very good alternative to Minitube in Ubuntu. Gmediafinder PPA for Ubuntu is also available which makes its installation even easier.

A Just-in-Time compiler promises to provide fast network packet filtering. The Wi-Fi stack now supports the Wake-on-Wireless-LAN standard, and unprivileged users are allowed to "ping". New and improved drivers enhance the kernel's support of network components by Ralink and Realtek.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp suffered a defeat on Thursday when the Supreme Court upheld a record $290 million jury verdict against the software giant for infringing a small Canadian company's patent. The justices unanimously agreed with a U.S. appeals court ruling that went against the world's largest software company in its legal battle with Toronto-based i4i.

The United States Supreme Court has ruled against Microsoft in a $290 million patent infringement case related to Microsoft Word.

In this tutorial I'll explain two different methods of installing the latest version of Flash Player in Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. The first one is the manual way, which means we will have to download the Flash plugin from the Adobe website and copy it manually in the ~/.mozilla directory. The second way is straightforward by using Ubuntu's multiverse repositories. This tutorial applies for the 32-bit version.

Like most Linux fans, Slashdot blogger and Windows fan hairyfeet didn't care about the kernel's numbering -- but for different reasons. "Frankly I don't care if he calls it Shaka Zulu; I'll just be ever so happy when Torvalds retires or is fired," he said. "Here it is 2011 and you still have a mess thanks to Torvalds treating the kernel like his personal play toy."

As you all probably know already, the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system will have a new default display manager, called LightDM.

Giovanni Campagna, a GNOME Shell developer has reported a bug and already submitted 3 patches for including libappindicator + dbusmenu support in GNOME Shell as a part of the core, not as an extension (because it can't be implemented as an extension).

Fabrice Bellard, creator of the multiple architecture emulator QEMU and FFmpeg, amongst other open source projects, has unleashed his Javascript powered PC emulator. In its current state, it boots a stripped down, text mode Linux implementation and runs within a modern browser. Interesting curio or a potentially useful tool?

This guide explains how to set up software RAID1 on an already running Debian Squeeze system. The GRUB2 bootloader will be configured in such a way that the system will still be able to boot if one of the hard drives fails (no matter which one).

There are various ways to encrypt some private files in your Dropbox folder: you can use Truecript, EncFS, SecretSync (now available for Linux too) etc. but I find EncFS to be the best/easiest solution. Read on.

Cloud computing is all the rage today, with everyone from the U.S. Federal government to Apple herding us into a brave new world of remotely hosted data and services. As usual, we're rushing down a road before thinking about where it may lead.

If you happen to use the Chrome or Chromium browser and you are looking for an easy way to spice up your photos with vintage effects, the Lomo+ web app is right up your alley.