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Google has added an experimental branch to the VP8 code tree, encouraging developers to begin work on the next incarnation of its newly open sourced video codec. Mountain View open sourced its $124.6 million VP8 codec less than a month ago in an effort to create a royalty free standard for web video, rolling it into a larger media format known as WebM, and WebM has already turned up in developer-build and beta browsers from Mozilla, Opera, and Google itself.

I recently came across Zorin, an Ubuntu based distro that focuses on easing a Windows user's transition to Linux by theming it's interface to look like Microsoft's operating system. Zorin 3 is built on top of the recently released Ubuntu 10.04 and by default it looks very close to Windows 7.

Moonlight, the de facto open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight platform for Linux that leverages Mono, is nearing its 3.0 release. Moonlight 2.0 was just released a half-year ago, but Moonlight 3.0 Preview 7 was just released and it's offering up more features.

GoogleCL is a command line tool to manage all the Google services: you can upload photos to your PicasaWeb albums, post to your Blogger blog, modify Google Calendar events, add contacts, manage your Google Docs (upload, delete, and so on) and even upload videos to YouTube. Unfortunately it doesn't come with support for Gmail.

The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have released HTTPS Everywhere, a Firefox extension that activates SSL/TSL encryption on sites that support the security setting, but don't feature it as a default when visiting because of partial support, unsecured trackback links or other issues. To alleviate this problem, HTTPS Everywhere writes all requests in HTTPS.

I'm calling this the tip of the year because it's easy to do and dramatically improves the Web-browsing experience in Firefox for users of Fedora, Red Hat and CentOS. I wish I had figured it out years ago because it's a simple way to increase your scrolling speed in the browser.

Bluecherry released an open source driver for version 2 of its Linux-based compression card for MPEG-4 digital video recording. Redesigned around the Linux kernel's API for Video (Video4Linux) and Audio (ALSA), the GPL-licensed driver primarily targets the Bluecherry compression cards and related Ubuntu-based video surveillance software, but can be used for a variety of video applications.

If you believe that corporations would be willing to make a little less money in order not to put the nation -- their nation -- at risk, you should read Richard Clarke's excellent, just-issued book, Cyber War.

Creating good user passwords is your first line of security for a Linux server. This important task has several principles that you need to follow to create passwords. This article will demonstrate the five rules for creating good passwords.

Ubuntu 10.04 is an easy-to-use Linux operating system that "just works." Have you been thinking about upgrading your computer to Ubuntu 10.04? I recently made the leap, at the prompting of my Update Manager. The process went fairly smoothly, but I did have to deal with a couple of minor annoyances. Since you never know exactly what may happen when you decide to upgrade, here are a few tips to get you started.

Every six months Ubuntu releases a new version. October's proposed release includes a few key changes. Ubuntu Lucid was released in April and the next release of the popular Linux operating system is now looming large. Planned for final release in October this year, Ubuntu 10.10, otherwise known as Maverick Meerkat, is already available as an alpha release.

I consistently find myself looking up statistics for OS market share around this time every year. Every year numbers change. Every website reports different numbers from the last, and the only thing that one can assuredly deduce is that it is impossible to accurately gauge how many systems are running a specific OS. With that said, market share does matter.

I don't know how vital is Wine software for you anymore. I mean, I haven't used it for ages. May be because I am not a gamer of sorts and I don't use iPod. In case of applications, I have good alternatives for most of the windows specific applications. But for those who still can't live without Wine, here is the good news. Wine 1.2 RC3 is released with a lot of major bug fixes and improvements.

Android on desktop video terminals, a great idea especially when they are extendable with apps and widgets. This looks like a very nice video terminal to have on your desktop. I can think of lots of possibilities, for instance installing the openremote home automation app.

"What's curious to me is why Apple didn't announce they were making this update in the release notes or security advisory that came with Mac OS X 10.6.4. It's almost as if they don't want to acknowledge that there could be a malware threat on Mac OS X"

Some rumours have emerged that IBM is considering an OS/2 comeback and I'm filled with the same mixed feelings that always emerge whenever the subject is raised. Would I want OS/2 back on my desktop now? Not really. Have these rumours got me a bit excited? Absolutely. In fact, I'm willing to take a guess about what the new OS/2 might be.

digiKam offers several features that can improve photos containing under- or overexposed areas. For example, the Exposure Blending tool lets you merge multiple shots with different exposures into one perfectly exposed photo. But what if you have just a single image?

These are exciting times for Falcon’s language development. New and interesting features are being implemented, tested and rolled out at break neck speeds! Not only are core language features being released, but so are a multitude of feathers (Falcon libraries/modules). One such module release is V1.0 Web Oriented Programming Interface (WOPI). It is the intent of this article to cover the basic features/functionalities of WOPI through common web oriented functional examples. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

Making an image copy of your system disk is a great way to create a backup. With the cost of portable USB drives at all time lows, you could keep a couple around for rotation purposes. If your main drive does crash, you could be back up and running in a matter of minutes. Now all that's left is making the actual image copy. There are lots of ways to accomplish this task, and we'll spell a few of them out to help you along.

This tutorial explains how you can integrate ClamAV into PureFTPd for virus scanning on a CentOS 5.4 system. In the end, whenever a file gets uploaded through PureFTPd, ClamAV will check the file and delete it if it is malware.