ChessMD is a free and open source lightweight PGN database viewer and analysis tool. Here’s my verdict on this software.
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AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 NPU in Linux: Gaia – Run LLM Agents
Gaia is open source software designed for the quick setup and execution of generative AI applications on local PC hardware.
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8 Best Free and Open Source Linux Mapping Tools
This roundup includes mapping software which offers quick access to maps all across the world. We also include some specialised tools.
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Best Free and Open Source Perl Linter Tools
A linter is a tool used in software development to analyze code for potential errors, stylistic issues, and adherence to coding standards.
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AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 NPU in Linux: Introduction
This blog documents my adventures with using the NPU present in the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in Linux.
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Euphonica – MPD client with delusions of grandeur
Euphonica is an MPD client with a GTK4 interface. It sports an integrated spectrum visualiser, metadata downloading and more.
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Active Linux Distributions
A distro provides the user with a desktop environment, preloaded applications, and ways to update and maintain the system.
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Minisforum AI X1 Pro: Gerbil – Run Large Language Models Locally
Gerbil is a desktop app to easily run Large Language Models locally. The software is powered by KoboldCpp, a fork of llama.cpp.
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Benchmarking the Radxa Cubie A7A Single Board Computer
For this article in the series I put the Radxa Cubie A7A single board computer through a series of benchmarks.
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Minisforum AI X1 Pro: AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370
The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 came to market in the third quarter of 2024. It has 12 cores and 24 threads, with 4 Zen 5 cores, and 8 Zen 5c cores.
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9 Useful Free and Open Source Scrobbler Tools
Scrobbling is the process of automatically tracking and recording the music you listen to, sending the data to a service.
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8 Best Free and Open Source General Purpose Linter Tools
A linter is a tool used in software development to analyze code for potential errors, stylistic issues, and adherence to coding standards.
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Benchmarking the Radxa ROCK 4D Single Board Computer
For this article in the series I put the Radxa ROCK 4D single board computer through a series of benchmarks.
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Volla Phone Quintus running Ubuntu Touch: Waydroid battery life
Waydroid is a container-based approach to boot a full Android system on Ubuntu Touch running Wayland based desktop environments.
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Radxa OS – Debian-based Linux distribution
Radxa OS, or Radxa, is an open source operating system developed by the Radxa team based on the Debian Linux distribution.
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Radxa Cubie A7A Single Board Computer Running Linux: Introduction to the Series
Radxa Cubie A7A is billed as an ultra-compact yet feature-rich SBC designed to deliver powerful performance in space-constrained environments.
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Minisforum AI X1 Pro: ComfyUI – Generate video, images, 3D, audio with AI
Let’s start with ComfyUI, open source node-based software for generative AI. I install ROCm, ComfyUI and a useful model manager.
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4 Useful Free and Open Source Distrobox GUI Tools
Distrobox is software which creates and manages container-based development environments without root privileges.
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Minisforum AI X1 Pro: Jan – Chat with AI without privacy concerns
A simple real-world test of the performance of the Radeon 890M with Jan, an open source ChatGPT-alternative that runs 100% offline.
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Radxa ROCK 4D Single Board Computer Running Linux: Introduction to the Series
This series looks at the Radxa ROCK 4D single board computer. It’s billed as a high-performance SBC for Edge AI and 4K multimedia.
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Minisforum AI X1 Pro running Linux: Power Consumption
I put the Minisforum AI X1 Pro mini PC under a series of power consumption tests and compare it to other machines.
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ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H Running Linux: GIMP AI Plugins
I’m exploring GIMP AI plugins for the Arc 140T. These provide a set of OpenVINO based plugins that add AI features to GIMP.
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Volla Phone Quintus running Ubuntu Touch: Linux Desktop Applications
Libertine is a confined sandbox where you can install deb-packaged desktop-based Ubuntu applications on the Volla Quintus.
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11 Best Free and Open Source Zsh Plugin Managers
Zsh is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a command interpreter for shell scripting.
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6 Useful Free and Open Source Linux WhatsApp Clients
WhatsApp is a popular, free messaging, social media, and voice-over-IP service that lets users send text, voice messages, and video messages
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mtoc – visually-rich music player and library browser
mtoc (music table of contents) is billed as a visually-rich music player and library browser. It’s written in C++ and built with Qt, TagLib and GStreamer.
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Benchmarking the Minisforum AI X1 Pro
The Minisforum AI X1 Pro is a powerful mini PC based on an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with integrated Radeon 890M.
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Aiffro K100 All-SSD NAS running Linux: Power Consumption
For this article in the series, I’m looking at the power consumption of the Aiffro K100 All-SSD NAS.
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Volla Phone Quintus running Ubuntu Touch: Pre-installed apps
I explore the apps already present on the Volla Phone Quintus, a premium smartphone running Ubuntu Touch.
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Minisforum AI X1 Pro running Linux: Introduction to the Series
The machine has the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor with integrated Radeon 890M. This is no ordinary processor and no ordinary integrated GPU.
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Best Free and Open Source Software: August 2025 Updates
August 2025 updates to the largest compilation of recommended free and open source software available for Linux.
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16 Best Free and Open Source Linux Chess Apps
Linux chess software generally is separated into a “front end” application and a “chess engine”. There are a wide range of chess-playing software for Linux which can defeat most master players under tournament conditions.
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File Browser – web file browser
File Browser provides a file managing interface within a specified directory. Upload, delete, preview and edit your files.
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Super-linter – collection of linters and code analyzers
Super-linter is a ready-to-run collection of linters and code analyzers, to help validate and fix your source code.
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Hoodik – cloud storage solution
Hoodik is a lightweight, secure, and self-hosted cloud storage solution.
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15 Best Free and Open Source Linux Ham Radio Tools
Ham radio is a popular hobby and service bringing people, electronics and communication together. We pick our favorite ham radio tools.
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MegaLinter – analyzes the consistency of your code
MegaLinter is a tool for CI/CD workflows that analyzes the consistency of your code, IAC, configuration, and scripts
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14 Best Free and Open Source Linux Video Converters
The best video converters make the process simple, and support a wide number of different codecs and formats.
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ownCloud – content collaboration, file-sharing, and file-syncing
ownCloud is a software system that offers file hosting services. It’s free and open source software widely used.
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7 Best Free and Open Source Zsh Configuration Frameworks
We highly recommend installing a framework with Zsh as it makes dealing with configuration, plugins and themes a lot more straightforward.
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Alternatives to popular CLI tools: less
This article spotlights alternative tools to less. All of the tools are free and open source and sport a command-line interface.
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remarklint – check Markdown code style
remark is an ecosystem of plugins that work with markdown as structured data, specifically ASTs (abstract syntax trees).
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Benchmarking the Aiffro K100 All-SSD NAS
In this article I run a series of benchmarks on the Aiffro K100 NAS and compare it to other low cost computers.
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Alternatives to popular CLI tools: more
This article spotlights alternative tools to more.
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harsh – habit tracking for geeks
harsh is habit tracking for geeks. A minimalist, command line tool for tracking, understanding, and forging habits.
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ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H Running Linux: Intel Core Ultra 7 Processor 255H
The NUC BOX-255H has the mobile/embedded class 15th generation Intel Core 7 255H processor, based on the Arrow Lake architecture.
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Radxa ROCK 5T Single Board Computer Running Linux: Power Consumption
For this article in the series, I’m looking at the power consumption of the Radxa ROCK 5T single-board computer.
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LinuxLinks – The Home of Linux
Our popular series on the best free and open source Linux software, hardware, programming, Android, and much more.
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Volla Phone Quintus running Ubuntu Touch: Introduction to the Series
This is a new series looking at the Volla Phone Quintus running Ubuntu Touch. This phone sports a powerful Mediatek Dimensity 7050 with 8 cores and 8GB of RAM.
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ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H Running Linux: OpenVINO AI Plugins for Audacity
The plugins provide AI-enabled effects, generators and analyzers. I can run them on the NUC Box-255H with no internet connection needed.
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Aiffro K100 All-SSD NAS running Linux: Introduction to the Series
The Aiffro K100 is an All-SSD NAS with an Intel N100 processor, 8GB of RAM, and 4 M.2 2280 NVMe slots. The machine retails for around £227.
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fooyin v0.9.1 is released – the best open source music player gets better
fooyin is a customisable music player that strongly resembles foobar2000. The new release adds some neat features and improvements.
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ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H Running Linux: Stable Diffusion
In the series I’m going to explore the GPU capabilities of the machine covering AI and gaming. Let’s start with deep learning.
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15 Best Free and Open Source Linux Serial Terminals
A serial terminal is software that allows communication with devices through a serial port, often used for debugging embedded systems.
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ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H Running Linux: Power Consumption
For this article in the series I’m looking at the power consumption of the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H.
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Firefly AIBOX 3588S – Set up Flatpak to use external disk
In this article I explain how to install Flatpaks to my microSD card. This is useful given the small size of the eMMC.
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Benchmarking the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H
In this article I’ll benchmark the machine. The tests are run using the Phoronix Test Suite, unless otherwise stated.
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Benchmarking the Radxa ROCK 5T Single Board Computer
In this article I run a series of benchmarks on the Radxa ROCK 5T single board computer and compare it to its peers.
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ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H Running Linux: Introduction to the series
This is a series of articles looking at the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-255H. In this series, I examine every aspect of this Mini PC in detail.
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Firefly AIBOX-3588S Running Linux: Access Remote File Systems Over SSH with SSHFS
SSHFS is a file system in user space (FUSE) that uses the SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) to mount a remote file system.
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Radxa ROCK 5T Single Board Computer Running Linux: Introduction
This is a new series looking at the Radxa ROCK 5T single board computer. It’s billed as an elegant computer with 8K + 4K dual display.
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Firefly AIBOX-3588S Embedded Fanless PC: Power Consumption
For this article in the series, I’m looking at the power consumption of the Firefly AIBOX-358SS fanless PC.
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BrosTrend AX3000 WiFi Range Extender & Wi-Fi to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter Review
The BrosTrend AX3000 is a 2 in 1 device. First, it’s a dual band Wi-Fi range extender. It also provides a Wi-Fi to Gigabit ethernet adapter.
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Benchmarking the Firefly AIBOX-3588S Embedded Fanless PC
I benchmark the Firefly AIBOX-3588S and compare it to single board computers (both ARM and RISC-V) as well as an Intel N100 Mini PC.
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Orange Pi R2S Single Board Computer Running Linux: Power Consumption
I’ll see how the Orange Pi R2S compares to a few other single board computers and mini PCs which cost considerably more.
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Raspberry Pi 5 Desktop Mini PC: Good value compared to an Intel N100 Mini PC?
A question I get asked a fair bit is whether the Raspberry Pi 5 represents good value to purchase as a desktop PC.
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Firefly AIBOX-3588S Embedded Fanless PC Running Linux – Introduction
This is the first in a series of articles looking at the Firefly AIBOX 3588S embedded fanless ARM-based mini PC.
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Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Autodesk FBX Review
FBX Review is a lightweight, standalone software tool for viewing 3D assets and baked animations quickly and efficiently.
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Orange Pi RV2 Single Board Computer Running Linux: Installing to the eMMC
In this article I document transferring my Ubuntu distribution from the microSD card to the eMMC. It makes the distro much snappier on the RV2.
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Raspberry Pi 5 Desktop Mini PC: Improve Wi-Fi
Let’s try to improve the Raspberry Pi 5’s Wi-Fi performance (transfer speed and latency) with a USB 3.0 adapter from BrosTrend.
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Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Autodesk Motion FX
Autodesk Motion FX is software to create real-time video effects using your computer’s camera. It’s also a video editor.
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Kioxia Exceria Plus G2 Portable SSD 2TB Review
For this review, I’ve evaluating the Kioxia Exceria Plus G2 Portable SSD. It’s available in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities. I’m reviewing the 2TB version.
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Orange Pi 5 Max Single Board Computer: Power Consumption
In this article in the series, I look at the power consumption of the Orange Pi 5 Max and compare it to some other computers.
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BrosTrend AX1800 USB WiFi 6 Adapter AX4L Linux Compatible
This is a review of the BrosTrend USB WiFi 6 Adapter. It supports Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian, Ubuntu Mate, and other distributions.
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Benchmarking the Orange Pi R2S Single Board Computer
The Orange Pi R2S features a RISC-V processor, four wired network ports (two 2.5G ethernet ports and two 1G ethernet ports).
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Whippy Term – modern GUI based terminal program
Whippy Term is a modern terminal program. It has been designed to have a modern UI and to run on modern OS’s including Linux.
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Scramble – privacy-focused image metadata removal tool
Scramble provides a clean, intuitive interface featuring a user-friendly drag-and-drop workflow for metadata inspection and removal.
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VIT – Visual Interactive Taskwarrior
VIT (Visual Interactive Taskwarrior) is a lightweight, curses-based front end for Taskwarrior
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Donut Browser – anti-detect browser
Donut Browser is billed as a powerful anti-detect browser that puts you in control of your browsing experience.
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Water Hammer Simulation – simulate the Water Hammer phenomenon
Water Hammer Simulation uses different numerical methods to simulate the Water Hammer phenomenon.
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15 Best Free and Open Source Linux Tools for Novelists
The software featured in this article is designed to meet the specialised needs of a budding novelist.
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MNELAB – GUI for MNE-Python
MNELAB is a graphical user interface (GUI) for MNE-Python, a Python package for EEG/MEG analysis.
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MUTN – self-hosted, SSH-synchronized password and note manager
MUTN is a simple, self-hosted, SSH-synchronized password and note manager based on libmutton. It is the successor to sshyp.
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Codanna – X-ray vision for your agent
Give your code assistant the ability to see through your codebase—understanding functions, tracing relationships, and finding implementations
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