The Butterfly Effect is an open source physics puzzle game about cause and effect, which the developers state is not entirely unlike “The Incredible Machine“. There are 30 now fully playable levels.

I finally experienced my first "phantom" update notification in Ubuntu 9.04. In previous versions of the system, a little icon on the upper panel would notify me that updates were available. I could either click the icon and open the Update Manager, then do the update. But in this new system (I've been running 9.04 about a week), the icon is gone.

Docky, the new GNOME Do interface in the form of a dock, is getting more and more used and causes sensation among GNU / Linux users.

Battery Status is a project for GNOME, that shows information about laptop battery state. It comes with a lot of additional features, so usual icon of GNOME Power Manager can be removed from Notification/Indicator Area.

Annoyed by the system beep from the speaker inside your computer's case? You've probably noticed it when pressing backspace on the terminal prompt, or when Firefox's find function can't locate your query. Using Compiz, it's possible to turn off the beep and replace it with a cool visual effect.

One of the great new features in Fedora 8 is the inclusion of the PulseAudio sound server. PulseAudio allows multiple streams of audio to be played at once, eliminating the worry of having your sound card locked up by another running program. There's also a handy volume control applet that will let you set the volume of each audio stream independently. That's right folks, listen to your MP3s, watch (and listen!) to a YouTube video, and voice chat with your IM buddies, all at the same time and with independent control over each program's volume. Setting up PulseAudio is very easy. Read on for instructions.

As many of you already know, Jaunty brought a small but significant change in the Ubuntu user interface: the beloved updates icon doesn’t show up anymore. The pop under technique is (purposely) slightly more obstrusive. Is there any problem with the new behavior?

Quite a long time ago (maybe in 2000), people started talking about the Slashdot effect. Being Slashdotted meant (and still means) that a truckload of computers online suddenly decide to access your site, because one of your pages was linked from Slashdot’s home page. The results on your servers used to be disastrous.

Music Applet is a small, simple GNOME panel applet that lets you control a variety of different music players from the panel. Music Applet provides easy access to information about the current song and the most important playback controls.