The ASUS/Google Nexus 7 arrived at my door on August 1, 2012 with a lot of anticipation from both me and the rest of the consumer electronics world. A quad-core Tegra 3 processor from NVIDIA, a 1200x800 HD IPS display covered with the latest scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla Glass and a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera were among its most notable cool features.

For someone who works with, writes about and teaches cutting-edge technologies, I tend to be a bit of a laggard when adopting new ones. I upgrade my laptop and servers very conservatively.

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.

I often discuss the Linux port of Scrivener with my writer friend Ken McConnell. We both like Scrivener's interface, and we both prefer to use Linux as our writing platform. Unfortunately, the Linux port of Scrivener just doesn't compare to the OS X version. The other day, Ken told me about Plume Creator.

 "One picture is worth a thousand words" stated Fred R. Barnard.  No quote could be quite as memorable as this nearly hundred year old one when it comes to GIMP.

I was recently contacted by Earl Malmrose of ZaReason, who wanted to know if I'd like to review ZaReason's new Linux-based desktop computer, built around the new Intel 6-Core processor and quad channel memory.

For the minimalist programmer, there's vim. For everybody else, there's SlickEdit.

For a long time, my password tracking system was quite simplistic: hope I remembered the right passwords for each site or record them in an ordinary word-processor document. Such methods obviously have great flaws. I might have a hard time remembering a password for an infrequently used site, and a word-processor document isn't the most secure place to store passwords.

Do you ever have that moment when someone asks you for a recommendation on a book, and when put on the spot you spin around in your office chair, scan your ever-growing library of books that you bought over the years of IT experience but either: A. Never read? B. Flipped through but never finished? C.Passed out halfway through the first chapter? 

The Transformer Prime is a killer piece of hardware, no doubt...but can it replace a full-fledged Linux Netbook?

Why would you spend a few hundred dollars on a device that is little more than a smartphone (with a bigger screen, without the phone)?

A short while ago, an article appeared in Linux Journal implying Git was the be-all and end-all of source code revision control systems ("Git—Revision Control Perfected" by Henry Van Styn, August 2011).

When I switched from Windows to Linux, I found software to replace almost everything I had been doing in Windows. Most of the software I needed was in the repos, although I did pay for a couple commercial programs.

Many people's initial exposure to science is through astronomy, and they are inspired by that first look through a telescope or their first glimpse of a Hubble image. Several software packages are available for the Linux desktop that allow users to enjoy their love of the stars. I look at several packages in this article that should be available for most distributions.

Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs, 20th Ed. (Que) Besides our fealty to Linux, there may be nothing else besides tinkering with our PCs that defines our Linux geek identity. Therefore, we know that books like Scott Mueller's Upgrading and Repairing PCs, now in its 20th edition, will appeal to many of our readers.

Fellow control freaks, if you enjoy having dominion over just about every aspect of a program, I think you'll like this. Inspired by projects such as uzbl, and developed by fellow Perth-boy Mason Larobina, luakit is the Web browser for those who like the element of control. According to the Web site:

jEdit is a cross-platform text editor written in Java.