Sharing with you my list of Linux and Open Source podcasts and vidcasts I subscribe to:
FLOSS Weekly(podcast) – part of the Twit.tv world, excellent interviews with leaders of different FLOSS projects; Linux Outlaws(podcast) – this show is quite informal but has very nice comments on what’s new on the Linux and FLOSS world; Stack Overflow(podcast) – more geared towards programming and software development; The Linux Journal(vidcast) – short but very nice Linux tips; Category 5(vidcast) – a lot of good information for those starting in the world of Linux with live Q&A session; The Source(vidcast) – just started following it and so far I’ve seen some very nice interviews with important community members of the open source world.
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If you’re using Linux with Gnome, do a mouseover the music file and you’ll start hearing the song immediately.
You don’t even need to double-click to open the file in a media player, not even a mouse click is needed. Nice little hidden secrets of an awesome desktop file manager.
If you’re interested in Free Libre Open Source Software and would like some valuable reading material to become an expert, FLOSS Manuals is a great site.
You can find books about Blender, Inkscape, Firefox, OpenOffice, Audacity, WordPress, Linux Command Line, to name a few. Find the manual you want, read it on their site, download, or order a printed copy. Only the printed copy is not free.
Also cool is the ability to remix your book to get only certain chapters that you find interesting.
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On Linux a nice small but highly effective tool I use to work with SVN is RapidSVN. The program is pretty small but highly effective for commit, checkout, merge, and log info.
RapidSVN works on Windows, Linux and MacOS X.
From their site, the list of features include:
Simple -easy to use for SVN features; Efficient – simple for beginners but flexible enough for those experienced with Subversion; Portable – runs on several platforms on which wxWidgets can run (Linux, Windows, Mac OS/X, Solaris, etc).
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GanttProject is currently what I’m using for my project management duties. Why?
it is multi-platform (works on Windows, Linux, and MacOS X); simple to use; open source; allows me to manage well dependencies, resources and milestones. The main drawback is that it is Java based so a bit slower to run than other native programs.
Bugzilla has a very interesting feature called Whining. With it you can schedule reports to be automatically sent by email to you or anyone else in your team.
As an example, I have sent to me on the weekend a report of all items that were created or worked by our dev team in the past week.
Creating a whining report is pretty easy:
save a search criteria that interests you (eg.
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Google Maps could very well be the most highly used online map service, why would anything else be better? GMaps’ data is proprietary, you can use it but with some restrictions and software developers can not use its full potential for their own benefit.
OpenStreetMap is a world map done entirely from user’s submitted data. Similar to a wiki, you construct the map details by adding street names, information of buildings, commercial and government establishments, everything including terrain information.
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I was recently using Nokia’s N96 which is an impressive phone. The phone has a great camera, flash, a nice screen size, bluetooth, wifi, an impressive 16GB of storage space and it even plays DTV. I switched it for an Android G1.
A while ago we tended to switch phones when the hardware got better. A lighter phone, a better camera, better screen resolution / size. But, now the mobile OS war has just gotten interesting with Apple leading the new era.
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If you like to support open standards format, here is a (at least for me) new discovery: .epub.
If you like open standards and ebooks, support the spreading of .epub. This file extension is a mixture of three open standards OPS ( Open Publication Structure ), OPF ( Open Packaging Format) and OCF (Open Container Format), produced by the IDPF.
From what I know Kindle – the hot ebook reader of the moment – does not support .
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A question I seriously ponder quite constantly… why would someone prefer to use pirated copy of softwares instead of using free open source alternatives?
Most of the people I know back home in Brazil have a hacked copy of Windows. Why use it if you won’t pay for it?
I see people all excited about getting their hacked Photoshop just to use it to crop images, resize them, or at most do some basic image editing.
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