Issue #169 / Dec 2014

Optical disks vary greatly in terms of quality. To use them optimally and avoid data errors, you need only two things: Linux and QPxTool.

When he sees vapor trails in the skies above the Lower Rhine area, sys admin Charly Kühnast doesn't just dream of faraway places. With a Linux system and a DVB-T stick, he grabs the signals from jets flying overhead and tracks their courses on a map.

The open source Discourse framework modernizes bulletin boards and online forums with live updates as you read, providing never-ending scrolling, community moderation capabilities, heuristic spam blocking, special layouts for mobile devices, and more.

To discover possibly undesirable arrivals and departures on their networks, a Perl daemon periodically stores the data from Nmap scans and passes them on to Nagios via a built-in web interface.

The Ruby-based Facy command-line client lets you display Facebook streams at the command line, as well as comment and post messages. However, getting there can be tricky.

We take a spin through several personal calendar apps that you can manage from the command line.

Krita began as a hobby but became one of free software's success stories with the help of its users.

The open source Strut tool lets you create slideshows and other presentations quickly and easily – with no compatibility issues.

Understanding the full power of ExifTool can be daunting. We show how to put it to practical use.

"maddog" recounts a tale illustrating the importance of thorough product testing.