Akkana Peck

F-spot, shotwell, solang — some distros are arguing about what should be the default “simpler than GIMP” image editor. But there’s one that never seems to get mentioned and deserves a look: fotoxx. Despite a name that sounds like a wrinkle treatment, this little image editor is lightweight and doesn’t have many dependencies — great […]

Hardware is getting amazingly fast. But sometimes it seems like software gets slower faster than hardware speeds up. So why do so many apps feel poky? In this series, I’ll look at some of the ways you can examine your system to see what’s taking up resources, and offer some tips on slimming your system […]

Curious about programming, but having trouble getting started because you’re confused about all those languages? This article will give you an overview of the most common desktop languages you’ll see in free software today. C and C++ You might call C the king of Linux programming languages. It’s the primary language used in the Linux […]

In the last installment, I talked about the simplest form of “bookmarklets”: bookmarks defined by Keywords and user-defined strings. But you’ll more often see the term “bookmarklets” used for a different sort of bookmark: those that execute Javascript code. Javascript bookmarklets have been around since the early days of Javascript. They’re possible because Firefox and […]

Firefox … we use it all day, for everything from managing finances to socializing to playing games. But it’s a large and complicated programs. Are you getting the most out of your browser? In this series, I’ll offer some tricks you can use to spend less time getting more out of the web. I’ll concentrate […]