I usually lock my screen when I leave my cubicle for a tea-break etc. With all the talk of saving energy these days I've disabled screen-savers on my system. Still, when I'd lock my screen I noticed that the LCD didn't turn off completely. Wanting to go as green as I could I wanted to switch off the LCD as well.

Over the past few months I've been drifting into the world of Linux video applications and development. I've already written a review of the LiVES video editor, and I've made occasional reference to the Kino editor. Recently a reader asked if I'd tried a recent version of Kdenlive. I started looking into it and I liked what I saw. The following article is an account of my continuing experience with the latest codebase from the project.

In Part I we tested out Android on VirtualBox. Now we'll try running Palm's WebOS as a Virtual Appliance. This article assumes that you are using:

With Google and Verizon recently announcing that several Android phones will be coming out on their network, a Linux lover might have smartphones on the brain.  Obviously, having Linux running on your phone is awesome, but which Linux OS should you choose? Android?  WebOS?  Maybe even

Read an excerpt from the 4th Edition of the book Python Essential Reference by David Beazley.

Everybody's seen redirection in bash commands, that's pretty common, but bash also allows you to define redirections when you define functions. This causes the redirections to be evaluated/executed whenever the function is called. This feature doesn't really give you any new features, just another way to express existing features.

In diff tool speak, a visual diff tool is a GUI application. Meld is such a tool: a tool for displaying differences between files (and directories) and also for merging the differences. Meld is programmed in Python.

Like other word processes, OpenOffice.org Writer makes creating tables of contents (ToCs) quick and easy. Unfortunately, it also works with unaesthetic defaults and allows you to make choices that complicate your work flow rather than improving it. Fortunately, Writer is also flexible enough to allow you to produce useful, aesthetic ToCs if you follow a few basic steps.

I don't do a lot of audio/video stuff with my system, but the other day I had the urge to see if there was some voice synthesis software available on Linux and it turned out that I already had it installed: it's called Festival. Turns out there are a number of voice synthesis and analysis packages available.

If you're a Vonage user and you'd like to keep tabs on your bill as the month progresses, the script described here can help. The script uses curl to login to your Vonage account and download the web page with your current balance. The balance is then extracted using grep and sed.