Digital video capture cards and USB dongles can be had for less than $50 a piece. With such cheap hardware, turning a Linux server into a personal Digital Video Recorder (DVR) becomes very tempting.

Everybody makes New Year's resolutions, and I wonder how many of you made the resolution to waste less time browsing the internet? If so, here's an easy way to track the amount of time you spend online.

LINUX USERS can banish forever Adobe's Flash Player cookies, which can be a good idea because, for one thing, as a plugin Flash doesn't observe web browsers' Private Browsing modes.

The Ubuntu Unleashed blog has an excellent guide to the ins and outs of the Uncomplicated Firewall (ufw), a new feature in Ubuntu Linux 8.04, or Hardy Heron, that makes it easy to control the traffic into and out of your system. While turning on the firewall is as simple as typing sudo ufw enable, you can do a lot more with ufw, including:

Remember the ever-popular "boy gets invisible and heads into girls locker room" storyline in movies? Free software may be about to make this dream a reality!

A security researcher intercepted thousands of private e-mail messages sent by foreign embassies and human rights groups around the world by turning portions of the Tor internet anonymity service into his own private listening post.

Flash cookies are the secret nasties of using the Flash player on any platform. These are somewhat like the ordinary HTTP cookies that Web sites infest on our systems. Some HTTP cookies have useful purpose, but the majority of HTTP cookies are tracking cookies.

OpenOffice.org Impress makes LaTeX + Beamer look user-friendly. Now that I've gone through turning my OLF slides from boring black-on-white to prettier, I realize how much of a usability nightmare Impress is.

Part of Linux’s appeal has always been its low cost (essentially free) so it makes sense that a new crop of low-priced mini-laptops are turning to the OS. The beauty of these desktop replacement replacements is that, despite their compactness, they offer a real opportunity for genuine productivity on the go.