Working in computer repair I meet a variety of people every day, and while I am ritualisticly astounded by the daftness of many, I do try to help those people figure out how to do what it is they wish to do.

Waiting for a laptop or desktop to boot has to be one of the biggest time wasters for the majority of computer users no matter what the operating system. You would think with faster CPUs that the problem would just go away, but it hasn't. In fact, if anything, it has gotten worse.

Imagine coming home from work and instead of plugging your phone to a wall where it will just dully wait to be recharged, plug it to your computer via USB and make a few phone calls, send a few SMS messages or tidy up your phone book all by using your computer keyboard and mouse, rather than that tiny phone keypad!

I’ve been slowly tweaking the way my family uses their computer to make it easier to migrate everyone to Linux. First, I completely removed Internet Explorer and got everyone used to Firefox. Then, I moved my wife off of her thick email client and onto Gmail. Next, I replaced Office with OpenOffice. Each of those moves was relatively painless. Spreading them out over time helped.

Downloading YouTube videos is among the first things you will look for once you get Ubuntu installed in your computer. Let me introduce you the easiest way to download(or save?) YouTube videos in your Ubuntu machine.

When going to sleep I sometimes like to leave my computer on playing ambient music from an internet radio station. It's a really good intro to the dreams. However I don't want to have the computer play and be turned on all the time...

Many people have complained about the lack of pre-integrated computers running GNU/Linux or the lack of fully free software drivers for important hardware. Ultimately though, it’s up to you, the consumer, both to satisfy your own requirements and to send a message to vendors that supporting free software pays. You can do this fairly easily by integrating your own computer from its major components, and selecting only components that have free software drivers. It’s certainly possible, and even if you’ve never built a computer before, it’s not all that hard!

This tutorial explains how you can configure monit to send alert messages per SMS to your mobile phone when a service fails. Because monit can send only emails but not SMS, we will use an email-to-sms gateway where monit will send its emails to, and the email-to-sms gateway will convert the emails to SMS messages.

Imagine a different way of computer life. For 80% of your computer-using time, you carry a usb key as your notebook computer You come to a foreign place and are allowed to use an unfamiliar computer. The computer may work perfectly or it may have been rendered non-bootable by a virus. It may be a powerful one or it may be an inexpensive netbook. It may speak Zulu or Tamil.