Recently, a friend gave me a recent model of a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion laptop. He said, “It turns on but goes off almost immediately. Maybe you could use it?” I gladly accepted the gift and took it home, and it performed as he described. I got CMOS battery errors from the BIOS and decided to take … Read more
Many people don’t realize the abundance of free and open-source resources available online. Here are some of my favorite open-source tools across different categories, designed to enhance your daily life, work, and digital experience. Browsers Firefox stands out as a privacy-conscious and open-source browser. Chromium is another open-source browser that was developed at Google. Web … Read more
My initial reaction to Linux was that I did not fully understand its range of tools. At that time, I was the technology director for a small K-12 public school district with limited resources but a growing number of classrooms, learning labs, and administrative offices. I came from a social science background, and although I … Read more
I’ve been using Fedora 41 KDE Plasma for awhile now and I’ve already discovered some of the great available apps that I use daily. My top five are: Okular, Spectacle, Gwenview, Dolphin and Konsole. Okular is a versatile and powerful document viewer. It supports many document formats, including PDF, EPUB, DjVu, and Markdown, as well … Read more
It has been some time since I last enjoyed a Fedora spin. I began my journey with Fedora when it was first introduced in 2003, having previously used Red Hat Linux versions 7, 8, and 9. In my work for the Franklinville, New York school district, I utilized Fedora to develop content filters, data storage … Read more
I have been a Mastodon user for nearly six years. I started on Fosstodon and have since moved to Mastodon. social but that’s unimportant because both Mastodon instances are connected with the ActivityPub protocol. ActivityPub is a protocol created for decentralized social networking which enables seamless communication between different servers. I can make a post … Read more
I spend a lot of time on the road or walking around my village and enjoy listening to podcasts about various topics. One of my interests is keeping up with the latest news and information about Linux and open source, and that led me to Jupiter Broadcasting, an open-source (both in topics covered and its license) … Read more
Linux, LibreOffice, GnuCash, and Audacity are all open-source projects, meaning the folks who write the code and/or the documentation are usually not paid for it. It’s quite impressive when you think of it. In a day when nearly everything is monetized, open source is still free. I used open-source software for years before contributing anything, … Read more
I’ve been interested in photography since I co-opted my father’s Kodak 620 camera as a young boy. I used it to take pictures of the flora and fauna of our neighborhood. My love of photography led me to an Instamatic camera in high school and eventually to digital cameras as they entered the marketplace in … Read more
Emmanuel Engelhart and Renaud Gaudin wanted everyone to have access to Wikipedia, and in 2007, the dream became a reality with the creation of Kiwix. The project aimed at making knowledge accessible offline and the idea was born out of the need to provide Wikipedia and other educational content to people without reliable internet access. … Read more
