How would you feel if all the food in your child’s school canteen were provided by one manufacturer of packaged snacks and soft drinks? How would you feel if your child’s diet were limited to crisps, cheese-flavoured tortilla chips, and sugary, carbonated beverages, with no chance of a healthier alternative?
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When you switch to LibreOffice, you can usually assume that all the features available in other office suites are available. They might have a slightly different name, or be placed in another menu, but the basic functionality should be the same in both. If you make a note of the features you use most often,…
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My recent review of Opera 12 was received with mixed feelings. Some people criticized me for using the highly outdated version available in Ubuntu/Mint repositories, while others used it as an opportunity to affirm their belief that this was the last true Opera.
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Several months ago, I decided to explore a somewhat obscure topic of outbound per-application firewall control in Linux. A concept that Windows users are well familiar with, it’s been around for ages, providing Windows folks with a heightened sense of – if not practical factual – protection against rogues residing in their system and trying…
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One of the most exciting things in the Linux world is discovering cool new things, especially when you do not expect them. For me, one such moment happened while testing the MX distro a while back, and finding out about the namesake toolbox of goodies packaged with the distro. And then again, recently, after my…
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So here’s the news: Microsoft is forcing game developers and game developing companies through the hoop of their app store, encroaching on their revenue and putting itself in the way of dealing directly with the customers. Why am I not in the least bit surprised?
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From dual-booting to WINE, free software has always struggled to provide a solution for running Windows applications. However, few of these efforts have been more ambitious than ReactOS, a free-licensed implementation of Windows. The project has been at work since 2006 and, in February 2016, ReactOS finally released its first alpha version, after a decade…
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Our colleague Bruce has a book coming out! It’s called Designing with LibreOffice. It tackles the subject of how to make documents look good and professional, while taking advantage of all the design features LibreOffice has to offer. So I got together with Bruce and we talked about his book, LibreOffice, design, and the eternal…
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Inkscape has a secret, something that is literally hidden away. There is no icon for it in the toolbar and no option in the menus. You have to dig it out from the list of keyboard shortcuts. But, yes, Inkscape does have a meshed gradient tool… And it’s awesome.
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Six years ago, I reviewed Stellarium for the first time, and I was quite impressed with the program. This educational piece of software is a free, cross-platform planetarium, offering fans of science and the Universe the unique ability to explore the sky without buying expensive equipment or lurking in and around observatories through long, cold,…
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Reddit is full of YouTube drama these days: users are accusing each other of plagiarism, and things have even moved beyond legal sabre-rattling and videos and accounts are getting nuked by DMCA take-down notices. This ridiculous state of affairs got me thinking on how long it would take me to set up a YouTube-like site…
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That the UEFI firmware should die in a fire and that its instigators for its adoption should hang their collective heads in shame at the abomination they have created has been confirmed yet again with the news that, on some brands of computers, it can be destroyed with a regular rm -Rf /, bricking the…
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