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In my last article on Chromium I explained how to add a command switch to the desktop icon's launcher tab to add a Purge Memory button to the task Manager. Browsers need memory, like memory and in fact love it. They don't give it up without a fight. I'm not belligerent by nature but it's my memory, I paid for it and I want it back. So, here's another trick in a similar vein to force Chromium to relinquish some more.

You've probably heard of this intriguing new crowd-funding service called Kickstarter, right? (If not, how are you getting this website from that cave of yours?). A lot of people are using it to fund all kinds of exciting new things, and it's obviously useful option for free software projects. Properly used, it can allow us to close the gap against proprietary applications that still have more polish or exist in niches that require more capitalization. But the idea that it is somehow immoral to ask for money to work on free software has got to go.

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

Not long ago, after giving a speech about free software I was asked by an audience member whether the free software community had come up with free (as in freedom) gambling software. I answered "no", and... I was wrong. A bit of research told me that there us such a platform: that's Cubeia's Firebase. Yes, it's fully free software/open source, the real deal. I couldn't resist: I asked its founder (and software engineer) for an interview. So, here we go!

Read the interview at Free Software Magazine.

In Part One about Gedit I covered three neat plugins to make it more productive and user friendly. More recently, I discovered another plugin that I simply couldn't ignore. The good news is that it really is cool; the not so good news is that the plugin is not available from the repositories, there is no PPA and no third-party stand-alone binary (yet). Bummer--but it can be installed from a source tarball. Easily. So, what is Dashboard and how do you install it?

Read the howto at Free Software Magazine

So, you just got back from a trip, and you have tons of photos you want to share with the world. While there are dozens of photo sharing services to choose from, uploading megabytes of photos doesn't sound like a fun pastime. And why bother with a third-party service if you already have a Linux-based server? In this case, consider using Bizou.

Read the howto at Free Software Magazine.

The first thing you should always do after installing software (apart from viewing the manpages) is to check and see if it supports plugins. If you are not a programmer or hacker it really is the easiest way to extend capabilities. The Gnome text editor supports this feature out of the box. Here's three of the best.

Read the howto at Free Software Magazine.

Nowadays, we mostly interact with our computers using a Graphical User Interface. The operating system as a whole uses several elements of the GUI to make the user experience more human-like. Can users get to unleash some of the GUI's power? The answer is yes: welcome to Zenity, a GTK+ application that works in GNU/Linux, BSD and Windows. In this short article I will show you how to create a simple script that interacts with the user using the GUI.

Read the tutorial at Free Software Magazine.

Editors, like file managers and browsers, are legion. To carve out a niche for itself an editor needs to have some compelling or unique feature(s). QuiEdit is unique. No, really. It is. If you want to write, unplugged from the distractions of the digital world, it has to be a contender. How?

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

Two of the most useful free (as in beer) software applications from Google are Google Earth, which runs on your computer, and Google Maps, which runs as a Web service. You can use both Google Earth and Google Maps to plot your own points, lines or shapes on an interactive map. You can also annotate these things with informative details. Unfortunately, the user interfaces provided by Google for doing this kind of DIY mapping are... well, clunky. They're slow, especially if you have a lot of items to add to a map.

The good news is that both Google Earth and Google Maps use the KML file format for their map-plotting. As this article shows, KML (Keyhole Markup Language) is simple. You can easily design your own maps offline, then display or share them as KML files.

Read the howto at Free Software Magazine.

When Opera invented "speed dials", they quickly became an important wish list item in all other browsers. Speed dials allow you to visually "see" (via screenshots) a list of most recently visited web sites when you open a new tab. Several Forefox plugins tried to fill this important niche, but none of them really stood out -- until now. This great plugin also allows you to back your Speed Dials up.

Read the howto at Free Software Magazine.

DRM turned a 10 minute purchase into a 2 and a half nightmare (and counting). I wanted to buy a book: I ended up in a journey which made it dead clear that in a sane world, there is absolutely no space for DRM-protected contents. The only real warning I have about this article is that it may make you feel sick.

Read the story at Free Software Magazine.

File Thingie is not the sleekest or feature-richest web-based file manager out there, but it's a perfect fit for those who need a no-frills solution that is easy to deploy and use. This is not to say that File Thingie skimps on features. All the essential functionality is there, including the ability to upload multiple files in one go, support for users and groups, file access control based on black and white lists, and more.

Read the howto at Free Software Magazine.

Since its launch, Google's Chromium browser has proved to be immensely popular. Chromium introduced many new and innovative features but it also brought along with it a familiar problem. Memory hogging. However, as Google released subsequent versions they addressed it. This short article will show you how to gain some traction over Chromium when, after prolonged browsing, it starts to seriously hog that resource.

Read the howto at Free Software Magazine.

If you hated Ubuntu's Unity desktop then the shock of your first encounter with the Gnome-shell likely caused your entire digital weltanschauung to implode. Make no mistake about it, it takes you right out of your comfort zone to a strange and unfamiliar place even if you've already tried Unity and decided to throw it back or put it in the keep net. Be shocked, very shocked.

Read the article at Free Software Magazine

The last week has been terrific for "Lunatics". We've cleared the licenses on almost all of the music -- and certainly the most important pieces. However, for a moment, I want to focus on the little problem with the one minute of music we probably won't get to use, and the right and wrong way to relicense your art if you are ever in that situation.

Today is the Free Software Foundation's "Day Against DRM" and it seems like an auspicious time to launch a Kickstarter campaign to support the completion of the Lib-Ray standard for publishing high-definition videos on fixed media. I've been posting my progress on the prototypes here in Free Software Magazine, and it's clear to me that this is now just a matter of being able to dedicate the time and resources to finish the job.

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

In my previous installments, I described the success I've been having with compressing "Sita Sings the Blues" with the VP8 video codec, and at the end I had a video file. Then I converted the audio to get a FLAC copy of the soundtrack (opting to retain this rather than compress into Vorbis format). Now in this installment, I'll show how I used mkvtoolnix-gtk to build a complete MKV file with VP8 video, FLAC audio, and named chapters. The result is the complete "main feature" multimedia file that will form the core of the Lib-Ray prototype.

In my previous column, I described the success I've had with using VP8 for compressing the video for the Lib-Ray main feature multimedia file. At the end of that process, though, I still have a silent film. We also need to get the audio, and make a decision about the format. WebM calls for Vorbis sound, which probably makes sense for internet downloads, but this is where we part ways -- for my application, bit-perfect audio with FLAC seems to make more sense, at least for the main audio tracks (Vorbis is still in the picture for things like commentaries).

News about the lawsuit between Oracle (which owns Java) and Google (which uses aspects of Java in Android) are resonating far and loud at the moment. At this point in the article, I should summarise the story: the trouble is that a summary at this point is impossible. The main problem is with Oracle, and their inability to understand free software.

Tethering your DSLR camera to a computer opens a whole new world of possibilities: you can instantly view your shots on a large screen, trigger your camera remotely, practice the art of time-lapse photography, and perform other clever tricks. While commercial tethering software for Windows and Mac OS X often costs serious money, you can enjoy all the advantages of tethered shooting on Linux free of charge courtesy of Entangle. This tethering software lets you control practically all camera settings, trigger the shutter from the computer, view a live preview of a scene, and automatically download captured images to the computer.