Geoscience Australia has a freely downloadable gazetteer of Australian placenames with more than 370 000 entries. The download is a .zip file (83 mb) containing a user guide together with placenames data in GML, KML and Microsoft Access (.mdb) formats. What I wanted from all that data was a simple…

Here's a BASH shell script that automatically logs the date and time I start my Iceweasel web browser, and the length of time I use it. I launch the script (and Iceweasel) with a keyboard shortcut, and close the script by closing Iceweasel. Click for full size The log file has entries in the form…

On Linux systems, numerous users often come across a program or process that locks-up. The user will usually kill the software if the system does not do it first. Users may be familiar with some of the kill commands and signals, but does anyone understand all of them? There are four common kill…

It was only a bit over a week ago that I wrote an article on the Birdie Twitter application. Well, now the Birdie team is scrapping the current codebase and looks to be rebooting the application as Birdie 2.0. In a blog post titled "It's time to say goodbye" on the 26th February 2014, the…

Humble Indie Bundle 11 adds another three games plus Valve announces the release of the Portal 2 beta for Linux! Humble Indie Bundle 11 launched last week, featuring six cross-platform games, although at this stage only five are completely Linux compatible. As usual the three additional games have…

The new Debian-based distribution known as Tanglu has just recently been released as 1.0, 'Aequorea Victoria'. I took a look at the live GNOME edition. Tanglu is a fairly young project and perhaps has flown under the radar somewhat. The 1.0 release is a major milestone for the distribution, which…

I work a lot with spreadsheet tables of points in the landscape. Each point has a latitude and a longitude, in decimal degrees. If I want to check where particular points are on the map, I could import the whole table into a GIS program and then select the points of interest. But that's way too…

I recently had something of a debate on the meaning Linux Advocacy and thought I should offer explanation of my take on the topic. Before that, to clarify my background: I’m not by any means an uber-geek, one of those people who see matrix-like code streams everywhere and solve any tech issue with a…

The Linux Rain has recently undergone some visual updates and layout improvements which I'll detail in this post, plus any possible updates/upgrades to come. The website started out relatively simple when I created it whilst trying to populate it with content but has had some steady changes along…

It's that time again folks, another Humble Indie Bundle has landed featuring 6 Linux compatible games. Well, sort of... for now, let's just say 5 Linux compatible games. It almost seems like the Humble Bundles are rolling out quicker and quicker these days. Humble Indie Bundle 11 has recently…

Evolve OS is a new upcoming Linux distribution based on openSUSE and sporting a new desktop environment based on the Gnome 3 stack. You may immediately be thinking, is this yet another 'Ubuntu Killer' promising a lot and ultimately delivering little? But Evolve OS has a different philosophy and…