Often you will be certain that you have a DVD but cannot remember where you placed it or if you lent it someone. The best way to keep track of your possessions is to catalogue them, allowing you to remind yourself of where they are, but also letting you quickly value them. It may seem [...]

If you are working in a network environment where it is essential to monitor selected computer systems you might want to give VNC Thumbnail Viewer a try. It is a great remote desktop software for teaching environments where it is essential to know what the students – or other users – are doing on their [...]

The eBay auction platform is still the most popular online auction system despite its decline from a friendly neighborhood auction site to a site driven by commercial auctions. If users think online auctions they tend to think eBay. Auctions can be monitored on the eBay website easily with the disadvantage that changes are only reported [...]

Everyone should back their data up in case their computer suddenly fails or is even lost or stolen. Many will back their data up on mediums like external hard drives, but it requires a certain amount of disciple to remember to hook your laptop up to one. Another problem with backing data up on such [...]

Are you looking for a simple backup solution that will work cross platform, with a user-friendly interface, that’s open source, and free? If so, you’ve found it. The fwbackups backup solution is all of that and more. I have tried many other backup solutions on Linux. Some of them are either command-line only, require a [...]

Laptops with integrated graphic accelerators like Intel’s GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) are not capable of providing enough power for state of the art computer games. They do run old school computer games well but fail when it comes to the likes of Crysis or other state of the art computer games that require high end [...]

If you are a teacher or have any need for a classroom-based Wiki project, I have the perfect solution for you. I discovered CourseForum a few years back when I was looking for a web-based software that could help a peer create a web site for her class that could help students stay organized. There [...]

Ebooks are finally taking off and entering the mainstream with devices like the Kindle or Sony’s Ebook Reader. What’s missing is a good software program to manage ebook collections. Calibre is a multi-platform ebook manager that can display, convert, list and sync ebooks. Program versions are available for the Windows, Linux and Mac OS X [...]

iWOW is perhaps my favourite iTunes plug-in. It makes your sound, whether videos, podcasts or music, feel much more vibrant. To dramatically improve sound, the user must simply choose their form of speakers (surround, laptop speakers, headphones etc), the type of sound and if music its genre. This takes no audophile, but advanced options do [...]

Your hard disk space may seem increasingly small but you may not be aware what is taking the space. I, for example, subscribed to dozens of podcasts but naively overlooked them when trying to clear space. In fact, they took up 5GB of space! Whilst disk space is no longer seen as a problem, considering [...]

Sometimes email contains sensitive data which must be encrypted. You can handle this two ways, manually encrypt the data or use an exceptional Thunderbird Extension called Enigmail. This extension uses gpg and makes the encryption/decryption as user-friendly as it gets. With keys installed in Enigmail (either manually or from a keyserver) encrypted email is automatically [...]

gHacks suggested Spotify as an alternative to Pandora last year, and Spotify has recently gained a lot of attention in the British press. I thought it may be wise to discuss Spotify on here. Spotify is a service which allows users to stream many songs online free and legally. The service is ad-supported and currently [...]

Professional PDF documents can make or break a marketing campaign, or advertising promotion, or even seal the deal with a client. For most people this job is done with either QuarkXPress or Adobe Reader. Both outstanding tools with a high price. Did you know, however, there was an open source tool that can do the [...]

WriteRoom is a popular piece of shareware for OS X which provides a minimalist word-processor, which is simply text on a background in full screen. The idea of WriteRoom is that if you cannot instant message or surf the web whilst creating the document, it will be of a higher quality and produced in a [...]

Xmind is a multi-lingual and portable Open Source mind mapping software for various operating systems like Microsoft Windows, Linux and Apple Macintosh. The mind mapping software comes with an impressive set of features that produce professional looking mind maps in short time. Here is a short explanation of the mind mapping concept. A mind map [...]

You have no doubt heard of ‘WYSIWYG’ editors, which show you what you get. The vast majority of HTML editors and word processors operate on a WYSIWYG principle, but another principle is WYSIWYM – ‘what you see is what you mean’. The key idea of WYSIWYM editors is that the users merely have to concentrate [...]

I do a lot with spreadsheets. And when I work in spreadsheets I work in OpenOffice. Most people know the ins and outs of spreadsheets, but many don’t realize just how powerful spreadsheets can be. Openoffice Calc holds a lot more bang for the users’ buck than you might think. For instance, did you know [...]

If your company uses Exchange you might have noticed the license for Exchange now requires a CAL for each user who accesses the Exchange server. In a large enterprise this can become quite costly. Fortunately there is an alternative. The eGroupware suite is a free, open source groupware suite that allows users to manage contacts, [...]

For many the idea of Linux accounting and financial software falls squarely in the lap of either Quicken or Microsoft Money. But did you know there was one particular open source alternative that offered nearly all of the features of both heavy hitters and was available for Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS X, and Windows? That [...]

Torrents are a regular part of a geeks life. Whether it is downloading ISO images, your favorite non-licensed anime, or large-scale backups, torrents are a simple way to manage massive downloads. But how do you manage torrents in Linux? There are a number of possible clients, some command-line and some full-on graphical clients. The torrent [...]

For many people, the biggest hurdle to using The GIMP is the user interface. When The GIMP began it started out with a very different UI than any other application. That UI was sustained, pretty much as-is, until The GIMP 2.6. With the adoption of 2.6 the user interface took a turn towards being more [...]

I almost hesitate to offer up any sort of review for the Linux version of Photoshop. Why? I’ve been using it for so long it almost seems unfair to “review” something so familiar. But then I have to step back and remember that not everyone has given The Gimp a go and most probably don’t [...]

Some would say the fact that Linux can even communicate with an iPod is remarkable. And the way Apple keeps everything secreted away, I could easily buy that sentiment where it not for an intimate understanding of the resolve of the typical developer. Although not open source, Floola typifies this resolve, and then some. At [...]

If you do any collaborative work you know how difficult some collaboration tools can be. With both MS Office and OpenOffice you can collaborate with notes and track changes. But what about collaborating in real time? What if you are wanting to quickly collaborate on a simple text document with multiple editors? Fortunately there is [...]

Dreamweaver and Frontpage are no doubt the most popular WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) HTML editors but carry a pretty large pricetag, with Dreamweaver costing about £500! Naturally, neither work under Linux either! KompoZer is a free, open-source and cross-platform WYSIWYG editor which should fill the needs of any home user. Whilst KompoZer has not been updated since [...]

Fourteenth day of the Ghacks Christmas Giveaway. Mainly software programs for Windows were handed out in the last two weeks. This changes today as we managed to get our hands on 10 licenses for Crossover Linux Pro and 10 licenses for Crossover Mac Pro. This was one of the products that some of you recommended [...]

It is halftime at Ghacks Christmas Giveaway. Today is the twelfth day of the giveaway and we got 12 more to go. We made lots of Ghacks visitors happy by sending them licenses to great commercial software products such as Kaspersky Internet Security 2009, Cyberlink PowerDVD08 or Bitdefender Total Security. TuneUp is a plugin (some [...]

AutoLyrix is a small cross-plattform software program that can automatically identify the song that is playing in a media player to display the lyrics and album art of it. Compatibility seems to have been of utmost importance to the developers of the software. AutoLyrix is able to detect songs in dozen of music players including [...]