Andrea Azzarone, who's also behind the menu integrated in the window titlebar Unity mockup we've posted last week has created a patch that provides an option to change the Unity launcher ("dock") icon size.

Check out this video featuring his actual code (not a mockup!):

Displex is an appindicator initially designed to provide similar functionality to the well-known "fusion-icon", but using an Ubuntu Indicator. However, Displex progressed and now provides a lot more features: it can be used to control the window decorations, screen rotation through Xrandr, switch between Metacity or Compiz compositing, provides AcerHK support and more.

To get your USB drives to work with VirtualBox when using Ubuntu as a host, you need to add your user to the vboxusers group. Please note that this doesn't work with VirtualBox OSE, so you'll need to install VirtualBox from its repository.

GParted is a partition manager you can use to resize, copy or move partition without losing your data.

The latest GParted 0.8, released a couple of days ago, adds an option to rescue data from lost partitions:

The Ubuntu devs really like to push updates at night but luckily I'm usually awake when that happens so I can tell you what's new in Unity as soon as the updates are released.

One of the design goals of Unity is to reduce the clutter of the desktop, another is to use space more efficiently.

Earlier this week, the Opera Desktop Team announced Opera 11 "Barracuda" which they say it will bring "another popular Opera feature will be taken to the next level".

Well, the first Opera 11.10 "Barracuda" development snapshot was made available for download on the Opera Desktop Team blog today. [...]

While Firefox 4 is still in beta and even though it seems it will be released in March, it might actually be further delayed, the first Firefox 5 mockups are already starting to emerge.

A new Elementary OS video was posted a few days ago on YouTube, showing off some of the new applications: Slingshot and Plank as well as the already known Wingpanel (but which now is a full panel), Postler, Dexter or Midori:

Guayadeque is starting to become a mature, reliable music player - the latest version 0.2.9, released today brings some very important features to Guayadeque like Ubuntu sound menu support, iPod support with covers and playlist, usb mass storage devices support, support for trueaudio files and wavpack, option to embed album cover to all album tracks, output audio device configuration option in

Jorge Castro announced the release of a Chrome extension called Chromify-OSD that makes the build-in Chrome notifications use NotifyOSD. I'll make this post short because for some reason the extension doesn't work for me in either Google Chrome or Chromium.

Xournal is an application for note taking or sketching and even though its page says it's a tool similar to Microsoft Windows Journal, Jarnal, Gournal, and NoteLab, I'd also add Foxit Reader to the list.

If you like the minimap which shows you an an overview of your files that comes with Sublime Text 2, you'll be glad to know that such a plugin was released for Gedit.

The plugin is called Text Map and displays a navigable thumbnail of the entire file in the side pane

TeamViewer is an application for remote control, desktop sharing and file transfer between computers. It runs on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux (even though it comes in a .deb or .rpm, it uses Wine which comes bundled with it).

Tribler is a decentralized, EU-funded BitTorrent client. That means that you can search for torrents from the peers themselves so you do not have to use external servers.

Videoporama is an application you can use to create video presentations from pictures that runs on Linux and Windows. It comes with various transition effects, option to add sound to the video, many different presets and uses mplayer for previewing the slideshow before processing it.

Evernote is an service/application you can use to store notes, images and all kind of information (like audio, handwritten or video notes) for retrieving later.

There are many ways Grub can get broken: installing Windows, messing around with Grub configuration files or just a faulty update. Luckily, there are also quite a few ways to restore Grub. Such a tool is Rescatux, an really easy to use Live CD that fixes the Grub in seconds.

OpenShot, the application that you've voted as the best Linux video editor a while back reached version 1.3.0 today.

OpenShot 1.3.0 comes with a new user interface called "Fresh" and finally adds something many of you have requested: stock icons support. The new version also lets you easily upload videos to YouTube or Vimeo: