If you cannot face the thought of hunting down and re-installing all of your Firefox extensions one by one on a second computer, you need, appropriately, an extension to simplify the task. CLEO, the Compact Library Extension Organizer, can package all your extensions and themes into one installable .xpi file.

One of my resolutions this year is to try to cut down on the carbon I spend on music. Notwithstanding my purchase of the In Rainbows discbox, I’ve amassed an awful number of discs of metallized plastic in barely-recyclable containers. (I say “barely” because K. got me a pencil for Christmas made out of old CD boxes, and a pen from dead car parts. But there’s only so many pencils the world can use.)

There's been a lot of talk about the OLPC's cute little mesh networking laptop at Linux.conf.au this week. The foundation is taking its low-cost, robust laptop the XO to underprivileged kids around the world, but it's also funding its work by selling XO laptops to the public. The cool news from the LCA conference was that a local OLPC group is setting up in Australia to help get computers to kids across Australia.

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor, similar to Illustrator or Xara. It uses the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. It's capable of creating objects with a variety of drawing, shape and text tools. You can edit previously created objects with scale, gradients, masks, and filtered effects.

This is a look at the fourth Alpha release of Hardy; including many of the applications that are now included by default and the major changes that will improve stability and usability. Among these are the addition of Firefox 3 and Remote Desktop on the applications side, and a new method for systems control known as Policy Kit, which enables the administrator to unlock certain functions for normal users.

I have been using Vista for well over a year now (since Beta 1). Of course Vista is slow, its bloated (over 10x the size of XP), aero kills system performance (even though this should be done on the video card), networking is pathetically slow, etc etc. We all know Vista sucks.

But recently my blood has been set to a rolling boil by the fact that most of my games just don’t work in Vista. At all. Its so bad that out of spite I have decided to make a list of games that work better in Linux under Wine than in Vista. These are games that were originally written to run in Windows XP, are broken in Vista, but magically work in Linux.

Feed readers are quickly becoming very important applications in people’s daily workflows. Along with your email client and web browser, your feed reader is a hub of information.

Despite some commentators deploring the state of Linux video editing tools, I continue to believe that somewhere out there is a non-linear editing program that is feature rich, intuitive and stable for the Linux platform. Maybe I'm deluded, but I would settle for a nice tool in its current state, that has an active community, a development road map and doesn't crash all the time!

I decided to give Open Movie Editor a chance. I thought this project was largely dead, but a new release was made on January 2nd 2008, so it looks to be still very much alive. I was also somewhat put off by the screenshots on the website. The GUI looks poor and clunky. After installation I am pleased to say that this isn't entirely the case.