Reviews

I was horrified by the prospect of Google's Listen podcast manager app for Android being discontinued when I first heard the news some months ago. The idea of having to find again, pay for and then configure an alternative podcast app was annoying. I could really think of better things to do with a ...

The ZE Rescue Disk is a very handy rescue tool to fix damaged or missing hard drive sectors that prevent a computer from booting into its operating system. It runs automatically as a boot-repair rescue tool at startup from the optical drive. ZE Rescue Disk provides what was a missing link in permane...

Wink, a software package for creating tutorial and presentation screen shots, works reasonably well when it works at all. However, getting it to run may not be worth the bother, given the better alternatives available. Wink's premise is a good one for anyone who needs to create a show-and-explain pr...

Gregstoll's FlightPredictor app takes FlightCaster.com's powerful flight prediction data and wraps it into a mobile app, in this case, for Android -- and what a great job Gregstoll, FlightCaster and its data supplier FlightStats have done. FlightPredictor for Android uses historical flight data goin...

Are you looking for a reliable virtualization package to run multiple virtual machines that handle unmodified Linux or Windows images? Then look no further than your existing Linux configuration. It already has the underpinnings to support Kernel-based Virtual Machine. You need look no further than ...

Some of my earliest memories are of high school commuting days standing on railway platforms in biting cold weather, day after day, leather-soled shoes absorbing any body heat like an air-chilling coil in an air conditioner. I commuted to high school -- some years ago now -- back in the old country...

Normally, I shy away from reviewing elementary-stage distros. Alpha releases are often too nonfunctional to offer any real work usability. They are simply proof-of-concept versions. This is not the case with the openArtist distro, however. After hearing a few colleagues rave about openArtist, I th...

Keeping track of airport information can be a challenge even for a nonstop, there-and-back trip. Multiple legs increase the number of things that can go wrong geometrically, but I recently took the risk, in a week-long loop from Los Angeles to Los Cabos, Mexico, then to New York City (Newark, to be ...

Xvidcap is a small tool to capture whatever goes on within the borders of an X-Windows display. It lets you capture what you do either as individual frames or as an MPEG video. Recording your computing activity keystroke by keystroke is not a need every computer user has. However, this is an ideal t...

The Book of GIMP: A Complete Guide to Nearly Everything combines a step-by-step approach to learning how to use this epic graphic image-manipulation program with a handy reference manual supplemented with very useful appendices. Whether you are a GIMP beginner or a veteran user, this book will save ...

Linux Mint 14, released in December and dubbed the "Nadia" version, is loaded with a horde of improvements to all four of its desktop environments. It is not usually necessary to grab every new release to a distro, but Nadia is a significant upgrade to an evolving Linux OS. This one is a keeper. The...

Subtitle Editor is a capable video editing tool kit to transform, edit, correct, create or refine existing subtitles on GNU/Linux/*BSD. Based on GTK+2, It also shows sound waves, which makes it easier to synchronize subtitles to voices. You will not find too many capable applications in Linux that s...

Falcon Pro (for Twitter) pitches itself as "the ultimate Twitter experience on Android," and while one can usually take these app-store hyperbole laden statements with an idiom-laden statement -- in this case a grain of salt -- there is one thing that I'm looking for in a Twitter client that Falcon ...

With its brand-new, tablet-friendly version, Flipboard takes online news reading to a sybaritic new level -- the bigger screen, along with Flipboard's elegance, surpasses poky smartphone screen real estate, and anything that has come before. Flipboard pulls together social media, news, and website ...

Unless you are an atypical Linux user, you tend to accept the default apps featured in your distro of choice. After all, if what you use works just fine, why scavenge around for a replacement? If saying yes to that question means you miss out on adding the Listen audio player to your desktop tools, ...