Roughly a month ago, I reviewed Spotify here on OCS-Mag, testing the recently revived Ubuntu version. My experience was mixed. While the media player sported good looks and a sleek interface, the overall behavior was slightly erratic, culminating in crashes when trying to play local files. Since, I have spent more time exploring Spotify, not necessarily…
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Following on from our prior article and one more step in my lifelong (?) quest to rectify all the sillines that goes into teaching computing to kids, comes BLOCK PROGRAMMING II – EVEN BLOCKIER. Or how Snap! is a must-use tool now Scratch isn’t.
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The people who make Scratch have migrated it to Flash. This is the most bonkers, hare-brained, backward idea they could have had. Migrating to a proprietary, platform-dependent, insecure, soon-to-be-extinct framework dooms Scratch to oblivion. Not to worry: we know of several excellent alternatives.
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Storytelling is the cultural cornerstone of human civilization. If I were even more pedantic than I already am, I would tell you about cave paintings, the epics of Gilgamesh, or the minstrels that travelled through medieval Europe. Instead let me tell you about teenage angst and manga comics.
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One of the things about Linux is it’s super-customisable. If you would like to go deeper than picking your desktop and the colour scheme of your icons, consider SUSE Studio, the online service that allows you to build a whole distro from the ground up, tailored to your specific needs.
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How does one go about taming Plasma? Well, that seems to be a recurring question I get asked in the emails. People are really interested to know about theme, font, icon, and window decoration management in Plasma, and how it compares to the good ole KDE4. A valid question.
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Ignore the actual time count. Answer me this: When would you feel more secure, knowing that your favorite distribution has been attacked and is now under scrutiny, or thinking — or rather not thinking — that your Linux may have been a target of a dedicated attack? In other words, if there’s a security problem,…
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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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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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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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