Showing headlines posted by scrubs

Node.js is the software that allows you to run Javascript to create amazingly powerful server-side applications by using Google's V8 Javascript Engine. As a Node developer myself, I have always felt frustrated by seeing that Joyent, the company behind Node.s, was extremely conservative in terms of upgrading node to use the latest V8 version; the project was also struggling to get developers to actually contribute to code. This is why Fedor Indutny did the unthinkable: forked node and created IO.js. Today, the two projects are uniting possibly offering developers the best of both worlds

Governments around the world are hacking into any computer that they can find. They are not just targeting large companies, but any computer that has information that they can sell. Is there anything on your computer that some hacker could sell for money? When was the last time you looked at your /var/log/auth.log file?

Bitcoin is the most established digital currency available today. It provides a safe, anonymous way to send and receive a virtual currency everybody trusts. However, managing bitcoins is not quite as simple as managing a bank account. In this article I will explain how to manage your bitcoins using Electrum. Please note that in this article I will provide working knowledge of how to use Electrum, without entering the mysterious land of cryptography and technical details of Bitcoin.

For those people who grew up on the "classic", 2D version of Super Mario, and -- why not -- those who like simple, but very refined games, Secret Maryo Chronicles is not to be missed. Mind you, it's not Mario, but Maryo; however, it's just as much fun.

In my previous article about creating a "mountable" disk image in GNU/Linux, I explained how to create a file that effectively mimics the functionality of a disk: I explained how to create a file which will then be used, in turn, to contain directories and files. In this article I will explain how to make the next natural step: encrypt that file.

One (sic) upon a time, movies were released in different countries at different times. This could be done because there was no easy way to copy and store away a movie. If you lived in Italy, you could wait up to two years before you saw a popular movie. Then two things happened: it became easy to copy and store movies; and everybody in the world suddenly became interconnected. The regional segregation ended: the only ones to believe that it's still there are the dinosaurs from a past era.

I was recently given an ebook by a friend. It was a photography book, with tons of hi-res images and very little text. When I opened it with Ubuntu, Evince (the default PDF viewer that comes with Ubuntu) gave in: after a few pages, it slowed to a crawl. I did a bit of research, and found the program that rescued my viewing needs: MuPDF. The good news was that I could finally read my book. The bad news was that I found out that the company behind it has in the past misunderstood the terms of the GPL and started a (later dismissed) litigation against Palm.

In this article I will explain how to create a file that works like a USB drive -- without the "physical" side of a USB disk. The advantage of making such a file is that you can make it encrypted; as a result, nobody will ever be able to see what's in it unless they know the passphrase.

I have been watching the evolution of the Ubuntu Software Center for quite a while now. I had doubts about its interface and its speed, but I liked the fact that it offered an easy, down-to-earth interface that allowed users to install software easily. However, I have to say that the way the Ubuntu Software Center has evolved is worrying me -- a lot.

Nowadays, the Internet is all about the Web. Users seem to have forgotten that it's possible to receive updates about anything that is posted on multiple web sites in seconds: this non secret is called RSS. Liferea is a neat, great piece of software that allows you to read RSS feeds and more.

Some services line Netflix have an annoying geolocation restriction that made them unavailable outside the United States. In case of Netflix, this is due to licensing issues. In case of Netflix, it's not a slim difference: do you want to be able to access just over one thousand movies, or would you prefer to have access to over thirteen thousand movies?

Image manipulation in GNU/Linux has always been associated with The Gimp. However, most users will find Gimp vastly oversized for their needs. Fotoxx is a neat, simple and yet very advanced photo manipulation software that is definitely worth installing and playing with.

About 6 years ago, I wrote an article about why I felt that installing software in GNU/Linux was broken. It pains me to say that the situation is, sadly, exactly the same:GNU/Linux never made it to personal computers, really, and at this point it looks like it never will. If GNU/Linux had managed to establish itself in the desktop PC market, today we would live in a world where:

When I wrote an article for FSM a few years ago about 3D printing it was a big topic in the open-source community but it had not yet gone fully mainstream. If there was one thing guaranteed to make 3D printing explode onto the mainstream news media it was an item about someone "printing" a gun. That got your attention, didn't it? Mine too. It's controversial of course but it might just be the beginning of a rerun of the Napster/Piratebay episodes in the 21st century - with the inevitable debate between patent-free, non-hierarchical open-source models and patent-encumbered proprietary software and hardware. Napster was a ripple. 3D printing will be a tsunami.

Google has recently announced that they will take Google Reader offline. "I won't miss it. Never used the damn thing. Didn't trust the idea of a big company like Google's interests being so aligned with mine that I could trust them to get all my news." said one the inventors of RSS but to feel the pain online of those will miss it is to see that many do not agree. I'm not one of them.

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

Some webpages contain email links. If you right-click on the link in most Web browsers, a menu appears that lets you copy the email address to the clipboard (first screenshot). You can then paste the address into the To field of a new email message.

In recent versions of Mozilla's Firefox browser, you can also left-click on the link and get some action. If Mozilla's Thunderbird is your default mail program, a Thunderbird 'compose' window may appear with the To field automatically filled in. This article explains how you can get the same automatic result under Linux with the excellent open-source mail programs Sylpheed and Claws Mail. The method also works with Iceweasel, which is the rebranded Firefox packaged with Debian GNU/Linux.

Backing up all your precious data and settings is a given. However, when it comes to e-mail we tend to develop amnesia. It's the ghost at the banquet, yet losing your e-mails, your address book and contacts (especially if you run a business) would be a catastrophe. Fail to backup at your peril. Of course, if you use a desktop client like Evolution of Thunderbird, configuring either of them with IMAP will do the trick for you but if you prefer the traditional web interface for Gmail, then you need a different solution. GMVault may be that solution.

In a previous article on syncing and restoring your GMail account with the excellent GMVault I voiced one minor and perhaps unfair criticism. Namely, that as backed up e-mails had no recognizable titles, it was virtually impossible to identify specific messages. But, of course, that was never the intended purpose of GMVault. It would have been the icing on the cake if it was. With Thunderbird configured with IMAP, GMVault backing up and restoring GMail it may seem that the belt and braces approach is complete--but there is one thing more we can do to make our e-mails fully accessible offline without an e-mail client. It doesn't require concatenated commands in a terminal or a free-standing piece of GUI software with possible dependencies. What is it? A simple Addon for Thunderbird called ImportExportTools.

Yes, you read that correctly. If you've ever wanted to put together a bespoke PDF document and then edit it to add or delete features, you don't really need to hunt for some specialist software to get the job done. Wikipedia is only a URL away and LibreOffice comes bundled with all the major distros--and if not it can usually be installed from the repositories.

Read the howto at Freesoftware Magazine.

I just checked, and my State government's website here in Australia has 43 pages with the message that Adobe Acrobat Reader is needed if I want to view the page's downloadable PDFs. One variant of the message is This a Portable Document Format (PDF) file and requires the use of Adobe Acrobat Reader. The Reader is easy to download and is free of charge. The link takes you to a download page at adobe.com. Another variant is To view these forms you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader. There are a lot of PDF viewers other than Acrobat Reader, and they're just as free. Safari and Google Chrome browsers even have built-in PDF viewers. So why is my government telling fibs? Does it create its PDFs with Adobe Acrobat software, and does its product licence require it to recommend Acrobat Reader when making those PDFs publicly available? Or is my government just software-stupid?