Scratch is a visual programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. I recommend 7 free books that really help young people to master Scratch. These recommended texts are also open source goodness.
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9 Best Free Books to Learn about Rust
If you had to describe Rust in just three words, they would be fast, safe, and productive. There’s memory safety without garbage collection, concurrency without data races, abstraction without overhead, and stability without stagnation.
I recommend 8 books to get you up to speed with the Rust programming language. There’s introductory texts, books that dig deeper into the language, as well as other texts that will help you migrate from C++ and Ruby to Rust.
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Radiotray-NG – rustic internet radio player
Radiotray-NG is a continuation of the discontinued Radio Tray. It seeks to embrace the same philosophy, fixing some of its flaws, and adding a few new features along the way.
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Excellent Free Books to Learn about Clojure
Clojure is a dynamic functional general purpose programming language that runs on the Java platform. There’s lots of good reasons to learn Clojure. It offers a modern take on Lisp. There’s an excellent parser library, and a fully featured logic engine. In Clojure, immutability is the default. Once an object or data structure is created, it cannot be changed.
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Halo – Weather software written in Python
Halo lets you view the weather in your town/city and check out the forecast and historic temperature trends. Halo identifies your location based on your IP address. But you can also add other locations.
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20 Recommended Free Books to Learn about Ruby
I recommend 15 free books which will teach you the basics of Ruby. Many of the books are open source. All of them can be read without requiring payment.
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Excellent Utilities: Paperwork – personal document manager
Paperwork is designed to simplify the management of your paperwork. The software lets you scan or import your documents, and quickly find what you want, wrapped together in a GTK interface.
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Excellent Utilities: lnav – the log file navigator
This is the second in a new series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We’ll be covering a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides. For this article, we’ll put lnav under the spotlight.
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Tauon Music Box – Excellent desktop music player
Tauon Music Box (Tauon) is an open source music player based around disposable playlists and the assumption that folders are albums. Luke puts it through its paces and loves it tons!
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QMPlay2 – Qt based video and audio player
QMPlay2 can play most video formats and audio formats. It plays all codecs supported by FFmpeg, and supports YouTube videos too. With internet radio, Audio CD, and a lot more besides, there’s lots of functionality on offer. Here’s our review of the software.
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ncmpy – curses based Music Player Daemon client
ncmpy is a curses based Music Player Daemon client written in the Python programming language. Luke puts the software through its paces with a detailed review.
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Poddr – podcast client built with Electron and Angular
Poddr is an open source podcatcher made with Electron and AngularJS. It sports a very user-friendly interface that really is easy to navigate.
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ncmpc – Frugal Music Player Daemon client
MPD is a free and open music player server. It plays audio files, organizes playlists and maintains a music database. In order to interact with it, a client program is needed. ncmpc is billed as a fully featured MPD client with a tiny memory footprint. It runs in the terminal, provides an intuitive to use ncurses user interface and comes with a large set of useful features, including the ability to search and browse your music library, create playlists and read song lyrics.
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Essential System Tools: Unison – Excellent Console and Graphical File Synchronization Software
Unison is a file-synchronization tool that allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.
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Excellent Utilities: tmux – terminal multiplexer software
This is the first in a new series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We’ll be covering a wide range of utilities. For the first article, we put tmux under the spotlight.
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