Reviews

OK, Greenpeace, arrest me now as an eco-criminal. I must have single-handedly deforested a good tract of the Amazon rain forest over the last few days. In mitigation, I plead that this was because of the requirements of my job. I was testing the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. The device is sleek and sexy, ha...

Many Android devices ship with stripped-down office suite apps that offer limited functionality loosely based on the kind you'd get with Microsoft Office on your desktop. Having had a discussion recently with someone who now regularly travels without a laptop, depending solely on his Apple iPad for ...

Asking a seasoned Linux user what music player you should use is akin to bringing up questions about religion or politics with your drinking buddies. A much safer strategy is, don't ask and don't tell. But if you insist, let me throw a suggestion into the fray. Uncage Songbird. You might be pleasant...

I've always been a fan of antivirus maker AVG. That's primarily because of the intense pain I felt when renewing staple Norton Symantec AntiVirus subscriptions back in the day, when the PC was our sole method of connectivity and Norton was our sole method of antivirus protection. AVG came along in d...

YouTube is a great source for watching an eclectic collection of videos on music, human stupidity and worldly comedy. But I find it much too easy to go far afield as I click on "also watched" videos when viewing a particular topic line. Minitube solves that problem for me. Not only does Minitube bet...

Backing up data and restoring a crashed computer are two of those "I wish I hadda" moments in the life of every computer user. When you maintain a collection of computers for your job or organization, those tasks can be critical. One of the fastest and most reliable ways to restore an afflicted comp...

My interest in desktop eye candy vacillates with the seasons. The added productivity it brings to a particular desktop design is also a factor. Now that GNOME 3 forces a desktop without icons, I took a look at how useful the gDesklets Project might be. When it comes to little desktop applets or widg...

Text editors are usually replacements for full-fledged word processing suites. They can offer very simple one-trick functionality such as Leafpad or multi-functional tabbed writing tools with even some semblance of character enhancements like Gedit. Or they can offer something completely different a...

Small packages can be deceptive, especially when it comes to evaluating desktop note-taking systems. Tomboy Notes can easily fool you into thinking you need a bigger, more powerful note-taking app. But the latest stable version 1.8.3 released on Nov. 14 offers enough heavy-duty features that you wi...

Believe it or not, antivirus software makers are now pitching solutions for our smartphones. Do you believe the hype? Statistics floating around the sea of press releases from antivirus merchants proclaim the end of innocence for our lovable little Android. He's grown up. The amount of malware aimed...

A little Wine with your Linux computing session can keep you using your favorite Microsoft Windows programs. What is Wine? Wine is a compatibility layer that's sometimes referred to as an emulator, though it's not "that kind" of emulator, according to the project's wiki. Wine doesn't do any CPU emul...

The Linux community and Linux users are at odds over the transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 as the backbone desktop environment for the OS. Ubuntu's developers muddied the situation with its newcomer Unity desktop alternative. Given the situation, Linux Mint may offer the best solution if you need t...

A slew of free texting apps are out there right now, and they have the potential to cut your phone bill by enabling you to bypass your phone carrier's SMS functions. These third-party solutions take advantage of data networks, including the Internet, to send and receive texts, and they let you text ...

Using a fully functional digital audio workstation, or DAW, is a computing necessity only for hard-core audiophiles, musicians and those who package audio and video content. If you fit one of those categories and do not know about Ardour, you could be pleasantly surprised at its power and relative e...

Of Facebook's 800 million active users, more than 350 million of them currently access Facebook through mobile devices, according to the company. October saw Facebook's updated Messenger app, labeled 1.5, rolling out to iOS, Android and BlackBerry with updated features, including the ability to see ...