Thinking about Algol 68
I took my first computer science course in my second year at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. The course was a full year, starting in September 1974, and we programmed in Waterloo FORTRAN IV, which if memory serves was called Watfor or maybe Watfiv at the time. We also had a brief session with IBM 360 / 370 Assembler language. Both languages were available to us in the form of batch timeshare services where we wrote our programs on IBM 029 key punches and submitted the card decks to be run, generating printouts which were almost entirely compilation or execution failures interspersed with the occasional output of a program that generated the hoped-for results.
Breaking Free from Windows 10: KDE Plasma Is Your Upgrade to Freedom
October 14, 2025, is a big day if you’re a Microsoft Windows user. That’s the day that support for Windows 10 ends. But what if...
Writing with open source tools
Aside from my other work, I also teach a few university courses about technical writing. One class I like to teach is about writing with...
GIMP: the free Photoshop alternative
The GNU Image Manipulation Program, the acronymous, free drawing program, is often also named as the free Photoshop alternative: GIMP. I’ve used it since 2009....
Why does M$ require so much personal information?
Microsoft is really getting insistent about requiring an account before you can install new versions of Windows. They're even blocking known circumventions in order to...
Top Five KDE Apps
I’ve been using Fedora 41 KDE Plasma for awhile now and I’ve already discovered some of the great available apps that I use daily. My...
Fixing Ansible playbooks
I've been using Ansible for several years to perform different tasks on my many physical and virtual hosts. It's an excellent tool for defining the...
My Go-To Podcasts for Linux and Open Source
I spend much time on the road or walking around my village and enjoy listening to podcasts about various topics. One of my interests is...
How to get started in open source?
Linux, LibreOffice, GnuCash, and Audacity are all open-source projects, meaning the folks who write the code and/or the documentation are usually not paid for it....
For a traditional Unix experience, try Crux Linux
The Linux operating system can be implemented in many ways, and these implementations can very generally be divided into "traditional" Unix and modern Linux. This...
The day my mind became open sourced
Image by: Opensource.com This article by Phil Shapiro originally appeared on Opensource.com and is republished here with the author's permission. I can remember so clearly...
Best Articles of 2024 about Linux system tools
Linux has many excellent tools that allow SysAdmins to manage our systems. We've published many articles this year about those tools, and here are 9...
What I’ve learned about open source community over 30 years
Open source projects are about more than just the code. It’s about the people that contribute to it.
Top 5 open source stories of 2024
2024 has been an interesting year in the news for many reasons. The open source world has been generating a lot of news this year....
Celebrating 30 years of open source with FreeDOS
Explore retrocomputing with this open source operating system that recently turned 30 years old.
Embracing Open-Source Solutions in the Age of AI: A Path to Digital Independence
Everywhere you look, whether in print or on the web, the rage is AI. I’m part of the group that sees potential in machine learning...