I may not be Steven Spielberg, but every time I see a rerun of Gumby, I'm convinced I could be a famous producer. With Linux, I don't even have to get a fancy movie set. I can make my own science-fiction adventure film with nothing more than a Webcam and a streak of bizarre creativity.

Digital music and, more recently, digital video and digital books, have changed the way we consume media. Comic books are no different, and with the advent of tablet computers, digital comics are becoming more and more popular.

Live DJs chasing a simplistic but attractive application are going to love Giada. At the same time, Giada also covers something I've been wanting for a year now, which is a way to trigger individual samples from a computer keyboard simply in real time. According to the documentation:

No, I'm not talking browncoats and spaceships. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed. If you're the musical type, however, installing a Firefly Media Server is fairly simple. It was renamed from mt-daapd, so your distribution still might call it that. After a quick install, visit the Web configuration, usually at http://localhost:3689 with the default login mt-daapd and password mt-daapd.

Did you learn all your Linux console skills from books or from forums? Or, did you peek over someone's shoulder to see the real action? Once in a while, we stumble upon new projects that deserve some attention, like Playterm. What's the reason for this command-line "peep show"? To spread GNU Linux command-line knowledge.

If you are an Ubuntu user and a fan of the new Unity interface, you might be interested in a new lens in development by David Callé. The Books Lens provides a real-time search interface for e-books. It currently interfaces with Google Books, Project Gutenberg and Forgotten Books. By the time you read this, that list probably will have grown.

One area that chews up a lot of cycles on machines around the world is CFD. What is CFD? CFD is short for Computational Fluid Dynamics. The general idea is to model the flow of gases and liquids (or fluids) as they interact with solid surfaces.

Xbox Media Center (XBMC) is one of those projects whose name makes less and less sense as time goes on. Sure, people still are using XBMC on an actual Microsoft Xbox, but for the most part, XBMC now is run on computers. In fact, recent versions of XBMC installed on an ION-based nettop makes just about the perfect media center.

The folks over at www.literatureandlatte.com have a rather nifty writer's tool called Scrivener. For years, it's been an OS X-only program for novelists and screenwriters that acts like a project management tool for big writing projects.

First, a disclaimer: the program Sickbeard was created for the purpose of pirating television shows from Usenet and torrent sites. I don't condone piracy of any sort, but Sickbeard has some amazing other features that make it worth mentioning.

Whether you prefer OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice, which currently still are pretty similar, out of the box, they are missing some of the conveniences installed by their commercial counterparts. Granted, they are fully functional, but if you want a robust clip-art library and a decent selection of document templates, you'll want to add some extensions and templates.

Sencha is encouraging interactive designers to switch to its new Sencha Animator v.1, "the industry's first purpose-built tool for creating CSS3-based animations that deliver plug-in-free rich-media experiences".

Unlike some other OS's, Linux almost never has to reboot… or so I was told when I first started learning about it. To illustrate the point, my mentor introduced me to an app that he ran on all of his servers called uptimed.

I've been meaning to explore applications available for our Muslim readers for some time now. My main focus here is on the Minbar Project, but I also explore some of the highlights of the Islamic Tools and Libraries (ITL).

I've highlighted a few language programs in this column, but so far they've been for Japanese, Chinese and German—all languages spoken by large populations. So a dictionary program for a language like Serbian jumped right out at me. According to the SourceForge page: "Serbian Dictionary is a bidirectional Serbian-English dictionary. It currently contains only a command-line interface.

You know I love niche projects, but this is the first project I've come across that genuinely made me laugh out loud and exclaim, "I've got to cover that!" To quote the Web site:

If you're watching your weight, monitoring your health and dietary habits, or simply unconvinced by flashy food labels that don't tell the whole story, this is the project for you. According to the Web site:

The Book

If you're looking to improve your mental faculties, especially in the area of memory, check out this project. According to the Web site: Brain Workshop is a free open-source version of the dual n-back brain training exercise.