Archive

Here's an app that should bring peace of mind to any late-night solo worker, exerciser or neighborhood watch patroller. It's an ingenious combination of personal alarm, tracker and alert creator that uses sensor and other components included in the average smartphone, such as the speaker, to sound a...

We may not see or hear much about open source in the latest cloud or Big Data offerings, but it's playing a significant role in the most disruptive trends in enterprise IT. Just as we've seen with open source in cloud computing, it is an integral part of trends that currently are disrupting consumer...

The Cr OS Linux distribution is an interesting blend of the Cinnamon desktop with a special edition of the Chromium Web browser. The approach Cr OS Linux takes gives you a taste of Linux Mint with a chaser of a not-quick pure Google Chrome OS. Cr OS is a fully functional Linux distro. It has its own...

Businesses and government agencies are in a race to gather, quantify and clarify an ever-increasing stream of data. Housing the bits and pieces of their digital treasures can be just as much of a problem as deciding whether to trust traditional relational platforms or adopt more flexible databases d...

Having recently had my bicycle stolen -- after having a set of wheels pilfered in a previous year -- I was getting mad and, to quote the 1976 movie Network, I was not going to be taking it anymore. I decided to beef up my security both in general and on the replacement bike in particular. I was goin...

Aiming to capture a piece of the market that has given the Raspberry Pi such a warm reception, SolidRun on Wednesday announced a new tiny computer of its own dubbed the "CuBox-i." Available in four models with prices starting at $45, the tiny computer includes an OpenGL|ES 2.0 GPU with OpenCL 1.1 em...

Keeping track of my bits and pieces of information across several computers running Linux and Microsoft Windows has long been a problem. CherryTree is a sweet solution that keeps my information local and cloud-free. CherryTree is an outliner-style hierarchical note-taking application that features r...

For years, manners have been defined and documented in easy-to-learn rules classed by geography and culture. For example, in some countries it's acceptable to make abundant noises when eating, whereas in others, eating is a matter to be taken with the utmost seriousness and is performed in stony sil...

Open source software may hold considerable appeal for software developers around the world, but that doesn't mean it's without its aggravations. While no one aspect qualifies as the ultimate reason to oppose writing or using open source code, a significant number of programmers report that poor docu...

With countless high school and college students heading back to school at roughly this time of year, now is a good time to get acquainted with Zotero, a great cross-platform tool for collecting, organizing, citing and sharing research sources. I have spent considerable time working in academic setti...

In the cloud storage competition for customers, a battle is raging over innovative software-only storage systems and wannabe innovators still hawking yesteryear's legacy hardware solutions. Dollars and performance are the battlefield stakes. Nexenta, an open source provider of software-defined stora...

There's no denying the growing impact of open source software in today's business landscape, but for those who want additional proof of the open approach's viability, there's OpenStax College. Since 2012, the initiative has been producing peer-reviewed open source textbooks under a Creative Commons ...

When I absolutely must cross the Great Divide separating the Windows partition from Linuxland on a computer in the workplace, Paragon's Universal File System Driver in ExtFS comes to my rescue.

Voxer Pro Business turns your smartphone into a walkie-talkie. Smartphone walkie-talkies are not new, of course -- Nextel, which got swallowed by Sprint, used to offer a unique push-to-talk, or PTT, walkie-talkie cellphone feature called "Direct Connect." Nextel's simulated half-duplexing service mi...

Server-side Linux has been pushing into the enterprise for some years now, and 42 percent of respondents to a survey conducted on behalf of Linux vendor SUSE said it was either their primary server OS or one of their top server platforms. Perhaps more importantly, Linux is extending its reach beyond...