The never-ceasing distractions of tweets, pokes on Facebook, Gmail spam to review are all enemies of writing. Was there ever an activity assailed by the vampires of impetuosity as much as writing?

PyRoom is not the only distraction-free editor out there, but it does contain a few useful features that make it a good choice for users who are looking for a lightweight full-screen editor.

The best way to write or compose something important using a computer is to do it without any distraction. But how is it possible to concentrate if your email notification keeps on popping, your Twitter updates are flashing, and you are always tempted to open your RSS reader? What’s my solution?

How would you like to be able to customize the layout of the Google homepage? How about add better video controls and a download button to YouTube? Or set a profanity filter that works across all websites? Maybe remove all the “What type of leafy vegetable are you?” quizzes from Facebook? These are very few of the things that can be done with Greasemonkey.

This piece of software is a very powerful suite of writer's tools that is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows and has a HUGE feature set perfect for making your writing task much easier. In this article we will be discussing the Linux version of the software.

PyRoom is a fullscreen text editor that stays out of your way. It has no buttons or widgets. You can't even use different font types on it!

While they are not busy doing (crazy) research, most scientists do a lot of technical writing: papers, presentations, posters, reports. Such writing is usually accompanied by large number of references; managing them by hand can be tedious and long. That is why scientists use bibliography managers.

Over the weekend I was writing an article for TechRepublic about two alternative Linux word processors (Abiword and KWord.) As I was writing this article, I discovered something that might lend a hand to not only the developers of those tools but to Linux developers in general. This discovery is simply a matter of target audience.

I've written numerous times about the importance of writing to governments about their hare-brained schemes, but this one is rather different. In this case, it's the normally sane Internet Engineering Task Force that wants to do something really daft.