This is the third installment in the series “Apple Jailbreak Q & A”! If you missed it, check out “What is Jailbreaking?” before getting started with the rest of the series. Can My Device be Jailbroken? Not every iDevice can be jailbroken, but most any of them that run the iOS firmware (iPod touch, iPad, and iPhone) can be jailbroken to some degree...

Welcome back to the second installment in the series “Apple Jailbreak Q & A”! If you missed it, check out “What is Jailbreaking?” before getting started with the rest of the series. Many people – the media especially – have drawn conclusions about whether or not jailbreaking your iDevice is legal. MYTH: Jailbreaking Your...

Even if you’re not heavily vested in the “hacking” and device unlocking scene, you’ve probably heard the term “jailbreak” used in conjunction with Apple’s line of devices. The term has become so ubiquitous that other device hacking groups have begun to use the term instead of “hacking” because of the softer...

Some of my favorite console games are the Super Mario series (I didn’t care much for 2 though) which graced the NES and Super NES. So fans of the landmark game might want to take a look at the open source Secret Maryo Chronicles which shares a very (very very) similar style of play. Just by taking a look at the screenshots and power ups you can tell where...

Linux, for a long time, has natively supported virtual desktops in their window managers but this feature is not standard within the Windows GUI. No problem though as there are plenty of freely available tools to add this functionality. One such tool is the open source VirtuaWin. In addition to the typical features you would expect from a virtual desktop tool,...

When it comes to graphics editors, there are loads of options but typically many of the free ones are either online only or designed for Windows. Mac users wanting a free (and open source) image editor should check out Seashore: Seashore is an open source image editor for Mac OS X’s Cocoa framework. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for...

We have all heard of open source software which produces many popular programs, but have you ever heard of open source hardware? Basically the premise is exactly the same as open source software – the specs for building the hardware are freely available for you to do anything with. To view some of the open source hardware projects of this past year, take a...

For those of you who like to create and manipulate 3D images, an alternate to pricey commercial packages is the open source application, Blender. Blender run on any operating system and has a pretty impressive feature list and is capable of producing professional quality output. I am not really a graphics person so I am going to avoid calling attention to...

First off, I don’t use a Mac so I don’t really know what the uninstall process is, however a utility I came across which looks like something our Mac readers might like is AppTrap. Moving an application to the trash is simple and easy. Shouldn’t true uninstallation on the Mac be the same way? With AppTrap, when you move an application to the...

For those of you who are either hardcore traders or if you just like to dabble in the stock market, keeping up with the current price of both your portfolio as well as your watch list is essential to decision making. If you are looking for a tool which may help, give the open source project JStock a look. JStock is a free stock market software for 23 countries....

While the most popular/well know open source bit torrent client is probably Vuze (formerly Azureus), I have written in the past about how the program’s “take over your system” style approach is not for me. So if you are looking for an alternate open source bit torrent client, then check out G3 Torrent. G3 Torrent boasts a rather lengthy...

If you find yourself performing a certain task over and over (and over) again, setting up a macro to do this for you is the way to go. It may take a little bit of time up front, but it easily pays for itself. A tool which can make the process of setting up a macro easy is the open source utility AutoHotKey. With it, you can:Automate almost anything by sending...

I have posted about several tools to create PDF files, so today here is a tool to help you manipulate them. PDF Split and Merge is an open source program which does exactly as its name says:split your pdf documents (into chapters, single pages, etc.). merge many pdf documents or subsections of them. extract sections of your document into a single pdf...

Many people do not like Adobe PDF Reader because it is extreme overkill for the simple task of reading PDF’s. As a result, said people use an ‘alternate’ PDF viewer (such as Foxit Reader), however if you are looking for the ultimate lightweight PDF reader then you need to check out the open source program Sumatra PDF. To quote their...

The vast majority of times when I post tips to software, the respective product is free. However, just because it is ‘free’ doesn’t mean it has no restrictions as there are different models of free software. The primary ones are freeware, shareware and open source. It is a good idea to know the difference between these release models. For a...

A week ago, I ran a post about an article comparing 3 popular media players and several commenters pointed out VLC was their choice and were surprised it was left off the list. Well, the popular open source media player users will be happy to know VLC 1.0.0 is now available. This major release introduces many new features, new formats and new codecs to the VLC...

One of the more popular tools among people who run their own web sites is Google Analytics. Rightfully so as it is able to track just about anything you want. The only problem with Google Analytics is that you don’t own your own stats. Google keeps all the data on their servers and you access it through their portal. If you are looking to self host these...

You have probably seen several tips in the past relating to the excellent Notepad replacement Notepad++, however today I am going to write about another open source text editor which is geared towards editing source code: Scintilla. As well as features found in standard text editing components, Scintilla includes features especially useful when editing and...

You have probably seen many articles and tips on this site about downloading videos from YouTube, however if you want to download from other sites a tool you need to check out is xVideoServiceThief. This open source tool allows you to download from (at the time of writing) 55 popular websites which use embedded videos. Additionally, xVideoServiceThief boasts the...

If you like the look and feel of iTunes, but don’t like it’s ‘take over your system’ style approach, an alternate you might want to take a look at is the open source aTunes. aTunes is a full-featured audio player and manager, developed in Java programming language, so it can be executed on different platforms: Windows, Linux and Unix-like...