Ruji Chapnik is a freelance creator of miscellanea, including but not limited to text and images. She studied art at the University of California, Santa Cruz and writing at Portland State University. She went on to study Linux in her bedroom and also in various other people's bedrooms, crouched anti-ergonomically before abandoned Windows computers. Ruji currently lives in Portland, Oregon. You can find her experiments at rujic.net and her comics at dondepresso.rujic.net.
Want to run a chat room on your website to make it more social? phpFreeChat is an open source, AJAX-based chat server that you can install on your site. Compared to other chat software, phpFreeChat is a breeze to set up. It doesn’t even require a database!
If you’re using a lighter-weight desktop for your Linux machine, or you just want a dedicated application for viewing and interacting with your remote filesystems, Gigolo is the one for you.
Who doesn’t want a talking computer? Festival is a multilingual TTS system and framework that will run on any Unix-like system, including Windows with Cygwin installed.
The Plasmoids is one useful feature in KDE that didn’t receive plenty of attention. Here, we will show you 5 useful KDE plasmoids that you can make good use of.
If you’re a visual artist or someone who collects a lot of images, you may have a need for a custom web gallery on your website. Piwigo is a particularly nice, open-source photo gallery software that you can install on your website.
Do you crave a stunning visual accompaniment when you listen to your favorite songs? Do you want to turn your computer into an extravaganza of sensory stimuli? If so, the music visualization app projectM is for you.
Evilwm is a stacking, or floating, window manager for the X desktop. It is known for being almost obscenely minimalistic, boasting only 1-pixel borders for application windows and using no panels, launchers, or menus.
Most podcast fanatics on Windows and Mac OS X use iTunes as their main podcast client. What about Linux users? What are the podcast client that you can use? Here are five alternative podcast clients for Linux that I would recommend.
Are you on the hunt for a low-latency voice chat and recording software for groups? Mumble is a popular, open-source voice-over-IP (VOIP) solution that can intelligently differentiate between voice and background noise, making for a very clean sound. Here is how you can install and set it up in Linux.
Is Skype a little too modern for your taste? Hasciicam will take you back to the electronic days of yore, where you can broadcast live video to your friends – and even the public – in ASCII art.
NewHive is both a social network and a creation engine for Web 2.0 content. Users create pages called “expressions,” which can contain a wide variety of elements and media types. Find out more and sign up for the beta now.
As long as you have a microphone and a recording device such as your PC, you can create your own podcast. In this article, we will give you some podcast technical tips for creating and distributing your own podcasts.
Do you have ton of media files on your home computer that you wish you could play when you’re away from home? If so, Subsonic is the open source solution you’ve been waiting for.
You may have heard of GIMP as the alternative to Photoshop, but do you know that you can perform advanced image processing on GIMP with G’MIC? Today I’m going to show you just a few of the things you can accomplish with GIMP and G’MIC together.
Have you ever spent hours trying to perfect your résumé in Microsoft Word, only to want to throw your computer out the window? Today I’m going to tell you about a better, and ultimately easier, way to design a professional résumé with LaTeX.
If you have a large file you want to distribute to several people – say, a documentary you shot, or your band’s discography – creating a torrent is the way to go. If you make your own torrent, it will speed up the download time for each consumer of your content, provided you and others continue to seed it (remind your friends to be good seeders).
If you’re a developer of any sort, you’ve probably heard of Pastebin.com. Stikked is an open source pastebin-like product that you can host it on your own web server and it is probably one of the best out there.
In this installment of the “Social Media From the Command Line” series, we’re going to show you how to access Tumblr, Flickr, and YouTube from the command line.
Since young, I’ve developed an affectionate nostalgia for old school computing. Imagining how digital artists of the early ’90s laboriously crafted character-by-character ASCII text art, as well as ANSI, blows my mind! Today I’m going to blow your mind as well by showing you how to turn your boring lines of text into exciting ASCII text art.
As we welcome in a new year that many are saying will finally be “the year of the Linux desktop,” we want to take a look at some of the up-and-coming Linux distros for 2013. Read on to learn about some newer distros that we expect to continue rising in popularity, maybe even to the level of stardom, over the year.
We know you’ve got at least a little bit of geek in you because you’re reading our tech blog. How about turning back the clock and learning how far we’ve come with technology? Here are 7 wonderful (and free!) documentaries we’ve personally selected on the history of computing. They’re all available to download and/or watch online.
In Part 1 of this series, we showed you how to use your command line to access Facebook and Twitter. Google offers many different services, several of which are available from your terminal. Today you’ll learn how to manage your Google services from the command line.
There are plenty of git site that you can use to store your projects, but if you prefer to setup and host your own git server, here is how you can do so.
Haiku is an open-source OS is based on the older BeOS, a long-defunct operating system. The Haiku developers are keeping their project up with the times. Today I’m going to give you a screenshot tour of this unique OS.
Be the envy of all your geekiest friends by using command-line programs to access your favorite sites and online tools. In the first part of this series, we will show you how to update your status on Facebook and Twitter via the command line. Let’s go!
Spotify is an awesome on-demand music player for all platforms and what makes it even better is the ability to install apps. Here are 6 cool Spotify apps you should really check out.
So you’re a live DJ or musician, and you want to get some exposure for your skills online. There are various services you can sign up for to host Internet radio stations, but getting their tools to work on Linux is not always trivial. A fine alternative is Icecast. Learn how to run a DIY Internet radio station with Icecast.
One of Vim’s features is extreme extensibility. If you can dream it up, there’s probably a plugin for it. Here are 8 useful plugins that will help you be more productive when using Vim. If you lean towards hating it now, give these plugins a try and then see how you feel.
![Antiword: Read MS Word Documents in Your Terminal [Linux]](https://www.maketecheasier.com/assets/uploads/2013/03/antiword-display-document-cropped-386x165.jpg.webp)
![Make Your Computer Talk with Festival [Linux]](http://.webp)
