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I’ve recently received a fitbit flex as gift, and I love it, this personal device tracks steps, distance, and calories burned. At night, it tracks your sleep quality and wakes you silently in the morning. Just check out the lights to see how you stack up against your personal goal. Flex allows you to set a goal and uses LED lights to show how you’re stacking up. Each light represents 20% of your goal. You choose which one — steps, calories, or distance. It lights up like a scoreboard, challenging you to be more active day after day.

Flex automatically syncs your data to PCs and Macs with Fitbit’s wireless sync dongle (included), many iOS devices and select Android phones without plugging in or pushing buttons. Now all this sound fantastic and really funny if you like to take your stats and see nice graphs, but there is a small (big) problem about fitbit, it doesn’t support officially Linux.

Sure, you can use a compatible smartphone, but in general I like to use the idea of using my Linux computers for anything and with some research and some tests I’ve been able to sync successfully my flex with my Linux Mint 16.

Following up on the recent review of the Maker's Manifesto, I ran across the book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson. Anderson is a former Editor in Chief of Wired and no stranger to the economic paradoxes of peer-production and open source. He has written about both in previous books The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More and Free: The Future of a Radical Price. In his most recent book, Anderson examines the historical parallels between the Maker movement and the second Industrial Revolution,

One of the most important tasks in Linux administration is to check the integrity of the filesystem. The Linux filesystem can be damaged under various circumstances, e.g., system crash, power loss, disconnected disk, accidentally overwritten i-node, etc. Thus it is a good idea to check the integrity of the filesystem regularly to minimize the risk of filesystem corruption. When it comes to checking and repairing Linux filesystem, fsck is a useful tool. In this tutorial, I am going to describe how to set up automatic filesystem checks with fsck tool.

When you think about automobile assembly, usually it's giant factories, robotic arms, and showers of sparks from welding machines that come to mind. But Carlo De Micheli describes his first experience at the OSVehicle project, when three of their Tabby prototype cars were put together by hand during the span of a lunch break. Today OSVehicle is establishing relations with partners, designers, makers, and manufacturers in 70+ countries and on six continents to bring open source development to the automotive industry.

Hyper Light Drifter is the fantastic looking 2D action RPG that got funded via Kickstarter, in the announcement of it coming to Playstation devices as well as Linux there is some great new footage.

Lots of operating systems run on the OpenStack cloud, but Ubuntu Linux is most users' favorite.

Last week I sent an email to Jerry Bezencon (founder of the Linux Lite project) a series of questions designed to get into the mindset of a distro developer.

The response from Jerry was excellent and I couldn't have expected such a quick and well thought through response.

Python 3.4.0 is now available as the latest major update to the popular programming language...

Joomla! has been known for Joomla! Platform and Joomla! Content Managment System (CMS). The newest addition to the mix late last year was Joomla! Framework. Many say it's an exciting project with innovative development, so we interviewed our own Don Gilbert, who has been coordinating the project's efforts, to find out how it's going and what's new with the project.

AT&T offers their basic DSL service starting at $14.95 a month. People might ask themselves why it’s so inexpensive when compared to Time Warner Roadrunner service. If they had a chance to run each service side by side the answer would be obvious. But it’s not all bad. The AT&T customer gains the opportunity to learn a new technological term — buffering.

Jugaad Innovation: Entrepreneurs in the developing world use ingenious workarounds to innovate amid scarcity, like the $25 fridge made of clay that needs no electricity. Author Navi Radjou argues this "jugaad" innovation can teach western business a thing or two.

Connecting the World: What's the best way to get Silicon Valley engineers to design for the developing world? Make them use the same patchy networks and basic devices their customers use. Journalist Mat Honan explains how low end tools are helping connect the world.

In continuation of my OS X Is No Longer On My Main System, But I Already Have Regrets article from earlier in the week, I have now found more comfort in using Unity 7 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for the ASUS Zenbook Haswell ultrabook, but the HiDPI experience with Ubuntu's Unity is still far from perfect.

Over the years, Kate received a lot of new features and many improvements, turning it into a feature-complete editor with support for a huge number of languages.

A Cyberpunk FPS with strong RPG elements, how can you not love Black Ice? It looks fantastic.

SolidFire is adding new features to its all-flash enterprise storage solution for the cloud and Big Data.

This week, we look at the open source OwnCloud enterprise product, the link between cloud and big data and how VMware beat AWS to the Desktop as a Service punch.

I recently wrote about how the Birdie project, a lightweight and attractive Twitter client for Linux, was being rewritten and reborn as Birdie 2.0, an entirely new codebase. The Birdie Development team were kind enough to provide The Linux Rain with a private preview build of the new upcoming Birdie 2.0.

Since Steam was ported to Linux, which really is very beneficial for the Linux in general and for the Linux gamers in particular, games like Half-Life 2 or Counter-Strike found their way natively on the Linux platform. There are also the well-known shooters actively developed like Alien Arena, Xonotic, UrbanTerror or AssaultCube.

Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax created by John Gruber in 2004. It is designed to be easy-to-read and easy-to-write. Readability is at the very heart of Markdown. It offers the advantages of plain text, provides a convenient format for writing for the web, but it is not intended to be a replacement for HTML. Markdown is a writing format, not a publishing format.

If you do a Web search for 'linux delete blank lines' you'll find lots of command-line advice. Some of the advice, though, only applies to special cases. Here I explain two elegant and general methods for finding and deleting any blank lines in a text file.