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Still seething over that bad book publishing deal you entered into in 1981? Good news: you might be able to rescue your manuscript and do something lucrative with it, thanks to Creative Commons (CC) and obscure portions of US copyright law. CC is beta testing a Web-based tool on its ccLabs site that helps authors through the tricky legal maze required to terminate a copyright transfer.

Use Linux or Microsoft Windows, the open source sndpeek program, and a simple Perl script to read specific sequences of tonal events -- literally whistling, humming, or singing at your computer -- and run commands based on those tones. Give your computer a short low whistle to check your e-mail or unlock your screensaver with the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

To quote from the book's preface: "Building PCs isn't just for techies any more. It used to be, certainly. Only gamers and other geeks actually built their PCs from the ground up. Everyone else just called the Dell Dude and ordered a system. That started to change a few years ago. The first sign was when general merchandisers like Best Buy started stocking upgrade components." Someone told me years ago that building a PC was like building something with Legos. While I don't think it's a perfect analogy, it comes close. Building a PC or small server is well within the grasp of anyone who can use a screwdriver and likes to tinker. Building the Perfect PC, 2nd Edition makes it a snap.

He was setting up a router for the legal team, so they could get their email there, because the lawyers were struggling with it, and lo and behold, the software that came with the router overrode his preference -- set for Mozilla's Firefox -- and insisted on launching IE instead. Not only that, but although he tried to override it, his system insisted on running IE instead of Firefox henceforth.

The old stable release Debian GNU/Linux (codename 'woody') has been archived. The official source for this distribution is the dedicated archive host called archive.debian.org. It is no longer available on regular Debian mirror servers.

AOL has announced plans to enter the portable media player business with a Haier-manufactured player that looks like it was put together by the company's East German industrial design division, and then forged from plate iron in a Soviet-era smelting factory -- in fact, this product is the fruition of AOL's acquisition of the zany WildSeed guys a while back.

Australia's biggest Linux conference will kick off next week and the organiser has promised that attendees will get a lesson in how to control and monitor everyday objects -- including a toilet flush -- using the open source operating system.

It almost seems like you can't swing a programmer around without hitting another open source project. I spent some time with Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale yesterday morning, and between an extensive Second Life demo and philosophical ruminations on Las Vegas architecture, he said that they would be announcing that the source code to the Second Life client would be released to the public under the GNU General Public License version 2. This is your chance to build that gravity inverter you've been dreaming of.

We can’t all afford four-figure priced twelve megapixel digital cameras with wide angle lenses. We can, however, all use free software to embellish the photographs taken by our modest equipment and belie their resolution and viewing angle. Set the GIMP aside for a moment and launch Hugin, a powerful cross-platform GTK frontend that will help you quickly and easily stitch individual photographs into one, large, seamless panorama.

Scribes is a text editor for GNOME that focuses on usability. After 30 minutes of usage, you will either love it or hate it.

Opera Software may well be putting its browser users at risk by not properly disclosing security vulnerabilities to vulnerable users.

Four vendors are helping change Linux-based phones from voice-focused appliances into multimedia computers, according to Sascha Segan of PC Magazine. OpenMoko, TrollTech, Nokia, and Motorola are each using open source to cut costs, add flexibility, and/or to attract community and commercial developers, writes Segan.

CodeWeavers have released their 6th iteration of their CrossOver application suite. It comes in different flavors, Linux, MacOS and Linux Server edition.

Sydney, AUSTRALIA - 10 January 2007 - Leading Australian based solutions development consultancy, GLiNTECH, has helped revamp the core management system of Nokia Australia’s Care Centres.

THE Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) is beefing up its research and development capabilities with a Linux cluster that will support the weather agency's meteorological, oceanographic and space divisions.

Adrian Bunk posted a list of known regressions in the latest 2.6.20-rc4 Linux kernel compared to the previous 2.6.19 stable release [story]. In two emails, he listed six regressions that don't have fixes yet, and six regressions with fixes that haven't been merged yet.In another email thread, Linux creator Linus Torvalds noted that his goal for 2.6.20 is to focus primarily on stability. He also noted that he intends to release the stable kernel at some point after linux.conf.au which is happening this year in Sydney, Australia between January 15th and 20th.

The Vector development team is proud to announce the release of Vector Linux 5.8 Standard Live CD beta1. This release has everything that is making 5.8 Standard famous, like browser plugins, SeaMonkey, Firefox and Opera, the newest Xfce desktop, the Gimp and Xara LX, AbiWord and Gnumeric, vasm and vl-hot, wireless drivers and configuration tools, support for read and write to NTFS via FUSE and ntfs-3g, and lots of fun games. Then, for your added pleasure, we made a special Beryl edition just for fun. - DistroWatch. Screenshots of VectorLinux 5.8 Live Beta 1 are available at LinuxQuestions.org.

A new project is being launched to create the next generation CD/DVD burning program using the latest available technologies such as libburnia libraries.

This article gives you everything you need to decide which is the right way to encode your data for your Ajax application.

The Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu Ltd. (ELCOT), a government-owned organization that delivers IT services to the southern India state of Tamil Nadu, has decided that its projects will be deployed on open-source software, including Linux.