I've owned two different Android phones since they first were released, and I eventually rooted both of them. My Droid (original) was such a popular phone that rooting it was very simple. I used my rooted Droid until it wore out and rebooted every time I slid open the keyboard. My second Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy S2, is the phone I have right now.

I received an interesting message from Angela Kahealani with a challenge: "Here's what I'd like to see in Work the Shell: a full-blown shell script template. It should comply with all standards applicable to CLI programs.

It may not come as a surprise to anyone who regularly reads my column that I tried to be first in line to order the Raspberry Pi. I mean, what's not to like in a $35, 700MHz, 256MB of RAM computer with HDMI out that runs Linux? In the end, I didn't make the first batch of 10,000, but I wasn't too far behind either.

Extend PostgreSQL's capabilities with PostGIS 2.0 and discover all the magic of spatial databases.

Earlier this year, Google introduced its Google Drive cloud storage service.

Are you a Python programmer who wishes your storage could do more for you? Here's an easy way to add functionality to a real distributed filesystem, in your favorite language.

For Linux users, the command line is a celebrated part of our entire experience. Unlike other popular operating systems, where the command line is a scary proposition for all but the most experienced veterans, in the Linux community, command-line use is encouraged.

I was proudly wearing one of my Salt Stack shirts the other day when my daughter asked me, "What is Salt Stack?" I began by explaining the problem it solved. If you have multiple servers and want to do things to those servers, you would need to log in to each one and do those things one at a time on each one. They could be fairly simple tasks like restarting them or checking how long they have been running. Or, you might want to do more complicated things like installing software and then configuring that software based upon your own specific criteria. You also might want to add users and configure permissions for them.

One amazing thing about Linux is that the same code base is used for a different range of computing systems, from supercomputers to very tiny embedded devices. If you stop for a second and think about it, Linux is probably the only OS that has a unified code base.

High-energy physics experiments tend to generate huge amounts of data. While this data is passed through analysis software, very often the first thing you may want to do is to graph it and see what it actually looks like. To this end, a powerful graphing and plotting program is an absolute must.

The PirateBox is a device designed to facilitate sharing.

Who's using up all the bandwidth, and what are they doing? Use iftop to find out.

You might as well know from the start: Making bulleted or numbered lists in Scribus isn't as easy as in the average word processor. In fact, compared to LibreOffice, Scribus as installed is downright primitive in the way it handles lists. You can pull a script off the Internet to automate to an extent, but chances are you'll have to tweak it before it does exactly what you want.

When hearing the word interface, most people probably think of a Graphical User Interface or a physical hardware interface (serial, USB). If you dabble in scripting or are a serious developer, you, no doubt, are familiar with the concept of software interfaces as well.

Drag and drop your way to Android programming. MIT App Inventor, re-released as a beta service (as of March 5, 2012) by the MIT Center for Mobile Learning after taking over the project from Google, is a visual programming language for developing applications for the Android mobile computing platform.

As with many of the challenges we tackle, the latest project has sprawled across more articles than I ever expected when I first received the query from a reader. The question seems reasonably simple: given a month, day number and day of the week, calculate the most recent year that matches those criteria.

You've built the hardware, installed the software and cracked some passwords. Now find out how to fine-tune your attacks.

A high-availability stack serves one purpose: through a redundant setup of two or more nodes, ensure service availability and recover services automatically in case of a problem. Florian Haas explores Pacemaker, the state-of-the-art high-availability stack on Linux.

Playing and managing your music in text mode.