Something is absurd about the idea that free and open source software (FOSS) is apolitical. How could a movement that changes the way software is produced and alters conventional notions about the rights of users not be political in the broadest sense? Admittedly, though, FOSS in 2019 seems less political than it used to be.…
Continue reading →LibreOffice may seem like just another word processor, but looks can deceive. A case in point is the ability to single-source, using features that go under the deceptively simple description of Hide. Single-sourcing is the maintenance of multiple versions of a document within the same file. For example, you might three versions of a software…
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If the Bibliography Database in LibreOffice were not so cumbersome and restrictive, then connections to an application like Zotero would be unnecessary. As things are, anyone writing scholarly or academic articles should find Zortero a refreshing ascent into sanity. The trouble with the Bibliography Database is that it is early 1990s software that was never…
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I’ve used Calibre to organize my ebooks for years. Despite an awkward and eccentric interface, it’s a comprehensive tool, which has every feature I could imagine for working with my online library. However, it’s only in the last few months, as I prepare to write a book about creating ebooks that I’ve come to appreciate…
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Renaming files in batches is a rare task. Probably, that is why, with the exception of Xfce’s Thunar, desktop file managers can only rename files one at a time. However, when I digitize music, I am dealing with ten or more files per albums, and I need a bulk renamer. Of course, I could use…
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Richard M. Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, is famously fond of distinguishing between “free as in freedom” and “free as in beer.” Free software, he is pointing out, is a matter of philosophy and politics, not price, and the implication is that “free as in freedom” is by far the superior of…
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Last month, I reviewed Kile, a KDE editor for LaTeX. This month, I am going to show the basics of formatting a document in Kile. Once you know the basic structure of LaTeX, writing documents in it is even less complicated than manually coding HTML. Whether you use unmodified Kile’s templates for document structure, write…
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Ever since Plasma Active was released in 2012, I’ve been waiting for KDE to release another desktop environment for mobile devices. Last week, that wait was finally over with the first alpha release of Plasma Mobile, Active’s successor. However, delay may have raised my expectations too high. While Active was full of innovations, so far,…
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Purism, the company that has delivered free laptops, is now hoping to do the same for phones. As I write, the fundraising campaign is just over halfway to its goal, with 27 days to go. You might imagine that, with Purism’s past record, its efforts would be applauded, but instead, dozens of self-appointed pundits are…
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To modern newcomers, Linux means Linux Mint or Ubuntu — a polished desktop with a few advanced details to differentiate it from any other operating system and a standard set of applications. However, the schools of Linux can be different enough that one distribution can differ from another so much that they could almost be…
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What is the role of programmers in software development? The question is never far away in free and open source software (FOSS). Last month, however, the issues surrounding the question were emphasized by Robert C. Martin’s attempt to write a programmer’s oath that states best practices and the resulting discussion.
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