It is often inefficient to fire up a tape drive whenever you need to back up files or restore a backup. The Rsync tool pushes critical files to a second computer, where you can access them easily.

If you have a LAN in your home or office, why not use it for something really important – listening to music?

Graphic artists often face the problem of turning a photograph into an image that will tile over a larger surface. This task is not as easy as it sounds, but if you’re up for the challenge, this tutorial will give you a first-hand look at some advanced tools in the GIMP toolkit.

Thanks to automatic hardware detection, today’s admins rarely need to configure the X window system manually. But if you want to use X11’s excellent networking capabilities and tuning options, you will certainly benefit from some background knowledge.

Firewalls sometimes prohibit everything but everyday surfing, leaving users with no hope of running IRC or streaming servers through the firewall, unless they use a virtual private networking tool like OpenVPN.

You need good software and plenty of CPU power to create virtual worlds. Luckily for today’s animators, powerful PCs are inexpensive, and some excellent animation tools are absolutely free.

Zsync handles a special case: large volume download files that change frequently but not drastically. Charly shows how this handy file fetcher can save you time and bandwidth.

Rsync lets you synchronize your data – on either a local or remote computer. You can even use Rsync with SSH to encrypt your data.