With Labour Day past, we back in the season of slide shows -- million of them daily in both academia and business. For over a decade now, slide shows have become an accepted prop for public speaking, regardless of whether they are useful or well-designed, and the trend shows no sign of slowing.

Alltray is a free opensource tool to dock any application with no native tray icon (like Evolution, evoluThunderbird, Terminals) into the system tray. A high-light feature is that a click on the ‘close’ button will minimize back to system tray. It works well with Gnome, KDE, XFCE 4, Fluxbox and WindowMaker.

MIME HTML or MHT is a standard way to combine the external resources, like images or sound files, that in normal browsing situation are linked externally (downloaded), into the same file as the HTML code, using MIME.

Enforcing password security with a multiple-user system can be a hassle — users all too often use inadequate passwords. john-the-ripper (also available via most distros) is a password-cracking tool that enables the identification of vulnerable passwords before someone with nefarious intentions finds the weakness.

The FOSS (Free/Open Source) world has inspired a large number of excellent groupware and messaging servers. These offer nice, large feature sets: shared calendars and contacts, meeting planners, e-mail, file sharing, instant messaging, and lots more.

StarCraft and Red Alert are two of my favorite real-time strategy (RTS) games. Though these games are closed-source, they are still playable in Linux through Wine. Recently, I have tried a few free and open-source RTS games and was really impressed with some of them.

GNOME enthusiasts have a couple of good options when it comes to searching, launching, and otherwise manipulating and accessing files, applications, and information right from the desktop: GNOME-Do, and the GNOME Deskbar applet.

Songbird is a free opensource customizable media player and web browse powered by Mozilla. Songbird runs on Mozilla’s XULRunner platform, thus capable of running on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Solaris and Linux. On the Windows and Macintosh platforms, Songbird utilizes the VideoLAN Client for media playback.