Text expansion and hotkey automation are the sort of things you don't realize you need until you try them. Those of you who ever have played with system settings in order to change the function of a keystroke on you system understand the value of custom hotkeys.

Git has become the most popular version-tracking platform around for open-source projects. Whether you're using GitHub, Gitorious, Bitbucket or similar, or even if you're hosting the git repository yourself, accessing the code is something us Linux users take for granted.

If anyone understands the importance of a good text editor, it's a Linux user stuck on Windows. Sure, Microsoft supplies Notepad and Wordpad, but neither really feels like the powerful sort of text editor a Linux user expects. Enter Notepad++.

My family is in the middle of moving from one house to another. Part of that move involves arranging furniture. I'll be honest, I can move a couch across a room only so many times before I start to think perhaps there's a better way. Thankfully, there is.

Even those of us on the Linux side of the fence have been watching Microsoft's Windows 8 roll-out—albeit for us, it has been with morbid fascination. Granted, we're not without our drastic changes (ahem, Unity), but the new interface Microsoft has chosen for version 8 is seemingly unusable for most people. The iconic Start menu has been taken away without a clear replacement.