Archive

We all back up our PCs, right? Okay, well, we should back up our PCs, right? Well, smartphones and tablets have become so ubiquitous that we need to back them up now too. It's time. Important photos, videos, contacts and music are now strewn across small, easy-to-lose, easy-to-break, highly pilferab...

One of the big attractions behind the growing popularity of open source software is the ability to get it and use it for free. In a world of ever-rising costs in pretty much every other aspect of business and life, "free" is an offer that's increasingly difficult to refuse. Support is one area, howe...

I know, from correspondence that I receive, that readers of this column are pretty global, spread all over the world and in some pretty distant places. That's why I was intrigued when I came across VoIP Android app Yuilop. Here's an app that promises to provide the hitherto unknown Holy Grail of int...

The trick to designing an all-purpose music player is to make it work the way you want. The Tomahawk Music Player performs that trick very well. It could well be a better listening choice than any other cross-platform music player application. It runs on a variety of Linux distros, Microsoft Windows...

Discuss the merits of the many competing desktop Linux distributions out there, and you could fill several hours with heated debate. Turn the conversation to enterprise server distros, however, and the room can become quiet very quickly. The fact is, those on the hunt for the best or easiest or chea...

Fire season is upon us here in Southern California, and due to the lack of rain earlier in the year, we're seeing critically low live fuel moisture. The amount of residual moisture in grasses and brush is at levels lower than we've seen in years. This means that those inhabiting the wildland-urban i...

In a computing world distracted by distro overload, Linux Lite is a lightweight Linux OS that has no trouble handling a heavy workload. Long gone are the days when it took hours to install and set up Linux on a computer, but most Linux distros still need a bit of configuration to adjust the massive ...

The maker mentality has no starting point in modern history. People have always honed their creative skills to make things, and societies have always had visionaries who turned their garage hobbies and kitchen table inventiveness into industrial breakthroughs. Today, the maker mentality is essential...

Here's a novel way to find out if you do indeed need a new phone. It's a benchmarking app that will test components and provide a comparison with crowdsourced benchmarks from other common devices out there. If your 2-year-old, or so, phone or tablet seems a bit sluggish compared with the speed at wh...

Here's a novel way to find out if you do indeed need a new phone. It's a benchmarking app that will test components and provide a comparison with crowdsourced benchmarks from other common devices out there. If your 2-year-old, or so, phone or tablet seems a bit sluggish compared with the speed at wh...

Xnoise is a new Linux Media Player for GTK+ environments that just keeps getting better. Perhaps the last thing that the Linux world needs is yet another media player, but Xnoise bridges the gap in this overcrowded software category. It has an intuitive user interface, speed and essential features. ...

Close to a third of all websites use Linux, according to W3Techs, and Linux system users are arguably second only to Mac users in their devotion to their platform of choice, yet Linux gamers have traditionally been the red-headed stepchildren of the gaming community. Xbox 360 was the top-selling con...

Security and privacy concerns may be far outweighed for many users by the convenience and appeal of the cloud, but users need to view cloud access as more than just another storage utility on the desktop. That's according to Derek Labian, CEO of cloud storage service MediaFire. Instead, cloud users ...

I recently took a look at MeteoEarth, a rather spectacular Google Earth-like animated weather app. This visual, 3D globe-spinning weather app for Android provides zoom-in weather visualizations of the kind seen on television -- and indeed, the publisher is a provider of weather-in-motion graphics to...

The Chromium OS Vanilla Build by Hexxeh is a no-frills approach to trying out the concept of a browser-based Linux operating system without buying a branded Google Chromebook. It boots from a USB drive on any compatible computer. Unlike CR OS, Chromium OS boots into the Chrome browser environment. I...