I would have voted for any version of AdBlock/AdBlock Plus but there's a catch: I'm also an Opera user and, in that particular browser, I discovered that a custom CSS stylesheet can be an extremely effective ad blocker. I satisfied my curiosity one day by making minor adjustments to the Opera ad-blocking stylesheet…

Great to see clear, well-written *nix tutorials like this! As a Linux user with some experience under his belt I agree with the above posters that an understanding of file permisions should be as basic to Linux users as breathing or walking; but that doesn't mean there's no room for simple and concise explanations.…

I used to be a weapons electronics technician in the Navy, so I had access to all sorts of solvents. One trick we used on our boots was to first spit-shine the leather as well as we could get it then take a cotton t-shirt, dip it in a bit of denatured alcohol** (commonly used to clean circuit boards) and lightly buff…

@Loodac: I'm sort of on the fence as far as the "Mac Look" is concerned. It's not everyone's cup of tea but I liked it enough to run my own variation of it on my Debian desktop. On the other hand (again, my opinion) it can get a little old after a while, and I've been searching for an alternative setup; so far I…

"Myocd" pretty much took the words from my mouth; it's not as if everyone came from the womb already being familiar with Windows. They had to learn what they know just as they'd have to learn with Linux. A lot of this *nix bashing happens only because people aren't used to doing anything other than the "Microsoft"…

pcmanfm for Gnome, Krusader for KDE

Definitely Geekbrief TV, Diggnation, Digg Reel and Epic-Fu. I'm also a sucker for any National Geographic and Discovery Channel feeds, and Port City P.D. is a surprisingly *very* well-done web action/drama series.

@Viroz: Sounds like lazy site maintainers to me. Firefox is light-years ahead of anything Microsoft has ever put out when it comes to standards complaiance; so, if the site will render correctly in Fierfox 2 or 3, then 95% of the time it *will* also render correctly in Opera. One of the biggest reasons that "Opera…

This reminds me of a trick we used to use when I was in the Navy: a ship going to various parts of the globe tends to run into varying degrees of humidity and this can sometimes cause salt to clog up the holes in the salt shakers. To combat this, the cooks used to throw in a bit of uncooked rice along with the salt.…

@usbrit: jtimberman's suggestion re: Samba is spot on. In fact, this is the exact setup we use at our office, and administration is a breeze. The Linux computers and the one or two-odd Windows machines play well togather in this configuration.

@geekfather: As far as gaming in a virtual machine, XP doesn't seem to do very badly at all. You may have an issue with anything using DirectX, however (FWIW I use XP in a VirtualBox VM on Debian Testing so your mileage may vary, even though Ubuntu is a direct descendant of Debian Unstable).

@ schwnj: I used to work at an electronics repair shop, and microwave ovens were one of my specialties. If you are going to put something like vegetables into a microwave then it's usually best to have a little water on the side. Microwaves cook the food by exciting the water molucules inside; this tends to cook the…

Safety razors are the way to go IMHO. The blades aren't even half the cost of the typical 2, 3, or 4 blade refill and, if you do it right, the shave can be every bit as smooth as those modern contraptions.

I used to repair TV's for a living, and one thing I've learned from that experience is to try keeping your power cables seperate from the rest of the cables in your bundles. Sometimes I'd have to remove a TV and take it to the shop for further repair and this usually means taking the power cord with it. This, in turn,…

When using a cable wrap I highly suggest keeping the power cords seperate from any of the signal cables. I used to repair TV's for a living and, whenever a TV had to be transported to the shop for further repairs, that usually meant *completely* undoing all the neatly-wrapped cable bundles just to get to the power…

I prefer to avoid big lunches like the plague; having to digest all that food requires the body to expend energy and, if you're already fighting sleep, this is definitely not going to help you stay awake. During meetings I also practice ramrod perfect posture in my seat; you may look like a dork but you're a lot less…

I think he forgot one more very important tip: try something out of the ordinary for your job search, like cold calls on a Friday or maybe even visiting a company's lobby and checking their bulletin board. Every time you look in the classified ads in the newspaper it's easy to forget that the jobs section only…

EDIT: when I was still in the Windows world I paid for Spyblocker, and it was worth every single penny. It does exactly what the advertisement says it does, and it will make your Ad-aware and SpyBot scans come up empty nearly every time.

Nothing. I use linux, and the office run 100% Linux+OSS as well. Fortunately I was just promoted to a better-paying position so I can *finally* start showing my appreciation by contributing to these wonderful OSS projects, as I think all OSS users should.

This is exactly why I miss Demonoid. Demonoid made things like checking comments and the quality of the torrents so easy it was practically painless, and they achieved this through the simple concept of sorting the files by categories (Name, format type, software type, OS, etc). If I could find another site with…