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In the week ending 3 November - Anroid 4.2 and new Nexus devices, the ext4 filesystem bug was fixed, and Ubuntu drops alpha releases. Also, a look at why the ext4 bug wasn't actually so bad and an interview with the Enlightenment project leader

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.

AutoMySQLBackup is a clever script that takes the pain out of setting up automated incremental daily, weekly, and monthly backups of MySQL databases. Its only dependency is the mysqldumpcommand, which comes with mysql-client. AutoMySQLBackup dumps your databases at whatever intervals you desire, and rolls them up into compressed tarballs. Then you can copy the tarballs to other media, and encrypt them if you wish.

I am, of course, referring to the overlay or Ayatana scrollbar. It is one of those “innovation” that nobody that I know want on their desktops, but which Mark Shuttleworth keeps trying to push. According to the project’s official page on Launchpad.net, the overlay scrollbar:

It's not about the language, it's about the tools Build 2012 Microsoft may have a poor track record for web standards compliance, but if the capacity crowd at Microsoft Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg's Build conference session on TypeScript was any indication, Redmond's JavaScript alternative has struck a nerve with coders who have grown frustrated with the web's de facto applications language.…

Not just for Windows developers, either Build 2012 Microsoft has announced general availability of Team Foundation Service (TFS), its new, cloud-based portal for code hosting and software development project management, along with a free subscription plan for small teams.…

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?

Following word that the state of the Fedora 18 release is looking poor and the F18 Beta saw its sixth delay, there's now talk of turning Fedora into a rolling-release Linux distribution...

LibreOffice only knows how to spell a few scientific names, and the more scientific names you use in a Writer document, the more your pages fill up with squiggly red underlining – indicating misspelled or unrecognised words (see main image). You can add scientific names to LibreOffice's spell checker using the application's spelling dialog box, but only one word at a time.

Is there an easier way? Yes. This article explains how you can save a lot of time and effort by adding hundreds of scientific names to the spell checker all at once.

Android dominates the worldwide smartphone market, running on 75 percent of all smartphones shipped throughout the globe in the third quarter, IDC reported. Samsung continued to hold sway over the Android market, but its market share slipped because of competition from a multitude of smaller vendors. Apple's iOS came in a poor second, shipping on 26.9 million smartphones in Q3 2012.

Patents threaten every software developer, and the patent wars we have long feared have broken out. Software developers and software users – which in our society, is most people – need software to be free of patents.

The patents that threaten us are often called “software patents,” but that term is misleading. Such patents are not about any specific program. Rather, each patent describes some practical idea, and says that anyone carrying out the idea can be sued. So it’s clearer to call them “computational idea patents.”

According to Surden, big data networks persistently chip away at privacy interests and expand the surveillance society’s reach — and we’re about to see a lot more of it. Surden argues that privacy is safeguarded by barriers that make it hard for others to thwart our interest in limiting access to information. Bring down these walls — which Surden calls constraints — and prying eyes can capitalize on newfound vulnerability. Accordingly, we need to reassess how we think about our privacy rights, and what personal information should be included in that class.

Word processors are a general application software that are perfect for constructing business documents, letters, batch mailings using templates, etc. However, many word processors are too obtrusive and distracting for writers. What is needed is software that helps concentrate on the content of the novel, sketch out the chapters and scenes, work out the best structure, import research, add locations, characters and objects.

In a decisive twist to the sprawling smartphone wars, it appears the government intends to sue some of the participants over their use of patents. The first targets won't be the companies that initiated the battles, though—companies like Apple, Kodak, and Microsoft that have gone on the offensive. Instead, it looks like Google and possibly Samsung could be the targets of government lawsuits. Staffers at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have formally recommended the government bring an antitrust lawsuit against Google, according to sources cited by Bloomberg. Now FTC commissioners will have to decide whether to whether to act on that recommendation. A decision will likely come after the presidential election on November 6.

The problem is Google's use of so-called standards-essential patents. Those are patents it has already disclosed to a standards-setting body as being important to the functioning of some type of technology standard.

How to use mencoder to add subtitles to videos

I will say that it is extremely irresponsible of Phoronix to make a big deal about this this before giving anyone knowledgeable (which unfortunately does not include any Ubuntu kernel engineers, since as far as I know they don't have any file system specialists on staff) to comment on the bug.

The Ubuntu Shopping Alternate Lens is an unofficial alternative to the default Ubuntu Shopping Lens announced by Canonical for the Ubuntu 12.10 operating system.

This week we look at Sandy's impact on data centers, why one writer doesn't care about "Agile" and securing applications while using Platform as a Service.

Tiny Core Project lead Robert Shingledecker has released version 4.7 of his minimal desktop Linux distribution. Shingledecker says that the major theme for the new version is improvements to its bundled GUI programs. The OnDemand system has been overhauled to add support for Self Contained Mountable (SCM) applications OnDemand menus and icons.