A few months back we took a look at the new GNOME Recipes app that's currently in heavy development. Matthias Clasen has announced that along with a growing team of developers, some further improvements are on the way, both in terms of user experience and the selection of recipes and cuisines…

Now, yours truly isn't much of a cook, but I am trying to improve on that. With that in mind, the new GNOME Recipes application caught my eye and I decided to check it out. GNOME Recipes is still in development and its included library of recipes is certainly not exactly exhaustive, so I'm looking…

In news sure to please all Firefox users who also use the Netflix streaming service, it's now possible to do so without any user-agent tweaks or hacks. It now works out of the box, as Netflix themselves have finally done the necessary changes in the background to make Firefox recognised as a valid…

Unless you've lived under a virtual rock since 2003, you have probably heard of Linden Lab's baby, Second Life at some point. The online virtual world, where you can literally pretty much do anything, might not be at the peak popularity it once experienced but there is still plenty going on. If…

In this article I've pulled together some command-line tips for alternating lines of text. Questions about alternating lines turn up regularly on online help forums, and they sometimes get complicated answers. Here I've tried to keep things simple. Interleaving lines For demonstration purposes I'll…

It took me a fair while to get comfortable with the ISO 8601 date format. After so many years of using DD MMM YYYY, my old eyes and brain had some trouble understanding YYYY-MM-DD. Finally something clicked, and I now read 'ISOdates' easily and I really appreciate their advantages. The biggest…

Feeling like something different, I recently bought a HP Chromebook 11. In this article I give my impressions on the device itself and also some Linux-specific goodness thanks to something caled Crouton, plus a few thoughts on working in the "cloud". As someone who uses a typical…

You know that trick where the magician snatches the tablecloth from the table, leaving the plates, cutlery and glassware in place? Watch as I do something similar on my computer. The screenshot above shows the top left corner of a large data table of mine in a spreadsheet. Drum roll, please... …

I have a data-entry script which adds records to a plain-text data table. It's a fairly complicated script with a GUI dialog, and until recently it added one record at a time. To add another record, I had to launch the script again. Was there a simple way (I asked myself) to re-run the script, or…

Nothing gives my wife the Screaming Meemies like dates in spreadsheets. Unless she formats the target cell in advance as text, the spreadsheet will turn a perfectly innocent, non-date string like 23/2/6 into '23-Feb-2006'. When she types 6420-11-3, according to both LibreOffice Calc and Gnumeric,…