There are dozens of nice music players around, that’s for sure. You can choose between featur rich killer applications like Rhythmbox or Amarok, use old-school but up to date standards like XMMS or even a console classic like mp3blaster. Most of the standard players have in common, that the interface and the player itself are the same. That’s normal and therefore everything is fine. But maybe you are in a situation where you prefer playing music on a remote machine, only have a console or just don’t want your music player to stay open while playing. Huh?

My granddaughter has been sitting on my lap at the computer since before she could even hold herself up. She was only a few months old when she became interested in the mouse and began learning to place the cursor on the screen. A friend of mine laughed at us and stated that I'd "have her compiling kernels by the time she was three." Well, she's three years old now, and though she's not compiling kernels yet, she is having hours of fun on her own thanks to Tuxpaint.

The object of the game is much the same as with tetris, only the frame and the falling objects are hexagons. You have to slot the coloured pieces together making rows, which disappear once they are complete, the game ends if the stack of pieces reaches the celling.

Ultimate Edition (UE) 1.8 is a remaster of Ubuntu Hardy Heron with custom software repositories and a distinctive theme. Its claim to fame over pure Ubuntu is convenience, due to preloaded updates and software. While the name might suggest that it is a huge upgrade over its progenitor, in reality its developers have not made many improvements besides application install scripts. Due to a distracting theme, a poorly built user interface, and an incredible lack of the convenience it claims to have, Ultimate Edition falls painfully short of ultimate.

Some people imagine that they could write a novel if only they had the right tool. StorYBook aims to be that tool, but falls short. The problem is not that StorYBook is poorly organized, or that its timeline and reports don't come in handy. Rather, the problem is that StorYBook has such a rigid structure that it is likely to fit only a minority of writers' plotting needs. For others, living with the rigidity and searching for ways around it is only likely to distract from planning and make it a chore rather than a creative thrill.

Always wanted to learn using a shell more deeply? Maybe “fish“, the “friendly interactive shell” is the right kickoff for you.

The other week, when representatives from Facebook mentioned that they'd be open-sourcing significant portions of their platform, I hazarded a guess that they would be providing at most a set of APIs. Now that Facebook's actually released some code under the aegis of the Facebook Open Platform, I had a look-see. To my delight, I saw more than just APIs.

Over the past two years, I've reviewed free software first-person shooters including Tremulous, Alien Arena, and Nexuiz -- all top-notch games. Now we can add Urban Terror to that list. While the first three sport other-worldly, sci-fi-style opponents, Urban Terror goes for realistic opponents -- as realistic as today's headlines. You're fighting terrorists in Algiers and other locations around the globe, and you're using realistic weaponry to do it.

I don’t know how your work environment is, but where I work all the engineers spend their entire days with their headphones glued to their heads listening to music. Each one of us must own a couple of thousands music files (all legal copies, I can assure you) in our laptops, and since we all share our collections through the office, one could say that we have a pretty decent online selection of music for all genres and tastes. Still, there are times when you yearn for something new… what to do?

I have been working pretty hard lately, mainly coding some personal projects. I always used to listen to music whilst coding, these days I tend to listen to podcasts. Is that sad? Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I thought I would post a list of Linux and Ubuntu related podcasts which I listen to on a regular basis [the list is presented in no particular order]:

K3b is the KDE CD/DVD burner, capable of burning data CDs/DVDs, as well as CD/DVD ISO images, create audio CDs, rip audio CDs and video DVDs. Statistics show it is the favourite burning application of Linux users.

With a release candidate of Firefox 3 upon us and the final version set to drop sometime in June, I'm finding myself a bit torn: Do I upgrade to FF3 once it's fully baked, or stay with my current browser?  What makes the dilemma all the tougher is that my current browser isn't Firefox 2 -- well, it is, sort of, but not really.  It's Flock, which serves as great proof of how open source can allow the creation of excellent derivative products.

We've always been fond of Amarok. It has some good features, nice add-ons, and felt just a little friendlier than some other Linux media players. We recently discovered a contender to the title of most loved Linux media player, the ominously named Banshee. Fortunately, Banshee doesn't involve listening to shrieking demons, unless that's your genre of choice.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you the brand new shiny Plasma theme that will be used for KDE 4.1. Here you can see the new applet and krunner backgrounds, the new panel, our brand-new carbon fiber clock and some items that once upon a time weren't themed at all, like the pager and the taskbar.

In this final installment to the series I'll double your reading pleasure by presenting two new Linux softsynths. Such a deal, two reviews for the price of one! When I wrote my article on the LinuxSampler Project I noted the distinction between a performance sampler and a studio sampler. It occurs to me now that the same distinction should be made with regards to synthesizers. The synthesizers profiled in this review are best considered as performance synths, so let's see what makes the difference.

I’ve been reading a lot of reviews recently about the upcoming Banshee 1.0.  (Arstechnica and Linux Magazine, for example)  It looks like it’s going to be an awesome release, but I wanted to see where it is now and compare that to Rhythmbox.

Right now, there are three applications proposed for the Gnome desktop which are not out of the running, but definitely aren't near crossing the finish line. They are:

PCMan File Manager (or PCManFM) is a lightweight alternative to GNOME’s Nautilus file manager or Konqueror/Dolphin in KDE. I found it to be an excellent option for more sophisticated GNOME users, as well as those with slower computers.

Some search engine optimization (SEO) experts say sitemaps are important tools for promoting your site, because when a search engine picks up your sitemap, it automatically picks up a link to every page in your site. Not only does the spider crawl those pages, but the sitemap page shows up in search results for keywords on your blog. Sitemaps also make it easier for visitors to your blog to find what they're looking for, faster. Here's a look at three sitemap generators for WordPress and my experience with them.

Some complain OpenOffice.org is slow and bloated. With each release there may be dozens of performance improvements, but there are also new features, some of which may slow things down. This the natural balance in software development, but in the end, what is the net effect on performance from one version to the next?