Did you know that Pidgin (formerly named Gaim), a Free and Open-source multi-platform (Instant Messaging) IM client, can be used to send and receive SMS text messages for free?

My dad has been pestering me for some time to find him an open source tool that he could use to follow the market trends. He's been thinking about investing a little something in the market, but not without due diligence. Grism, written in Ruby, is the tool my dad now uses to easily follow the changing market trends.

One of the things that amazes a lot of new users to Linux is how flexible the clipboard is. It's one of the many features of Linux that I've come to depend upon greatly.

KDE 4.1, released last month, brought a great number of improvements to the popular desktop environment. It's the best desktop I've ever used -- but that doesn't mean it couldn't be better. 2009 will see the release of KDE 4.2. Here are 10 features that would be great additions to a future KDE release that I hope the developers will consider.

Web scrapping is a clever idea, but extracting data from a Web page manually can be a real chore. The new OutWit extension for Firefox provides a solution to this problem. Better yet, it allows you to save and export the scrapped data, which makes it a great research tool.

Deluge is a full-featured free opensource BitTorrent client for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It uses libtorrent in it’s backend and PyGTK for it’s user interface. Deluge was created with the intention of being lightweight and unobtrusive. Deluge features a rich plugin collection; in fact, most of Deluge’s functionality is available in the form of plugins.

For those of us who don't have 300 bucks to drop on the full-featured Adobe Acrobat, there are a few less-costly -- and sometimes free -- ways to create .pdf documents, writes Lou Dolinar, technology columnist for Newsday.