Akkana Peck’s Gimplabels is a set of scripts for the Gimp image editor that make creating labels and business cards a snap.

Virtually any photo manager out there lets you perform mundane tasks like adjusting contrast, adding a watermark, or applying effects to your photos. But even the most powerful applications like digiKam or F-Spot can’t really help you when you need to perform the same action (or a sequence of actions) on dozens or hundreds of photos.

Scribus is free software page-layout tool applicable to designing all sort of documents: from newspaper ads to fliers to whole books. Because it can precisely position both images and text, it is also the preferred type of tool for designing mailing labels and business cards.

While F-Spot and digiKam are among the most popular photo management applications, they are not the only fish in the sea. In fact, if you need a lightweight tool that can help you to manage and tweak your photos with a minimum of effort, Fotoxx can do the job just fine. Fotoxx’s interface looks deceptively spartan: the main window sports a single menu and a toolbar that contains buttons for frequently used functions. But behind the simple interface hide quite a few powerful features like support for the RAW format (this feature requires the UFRaw package installed on your system), an easy-to-use panorama stitching function, and the ability to create HDR photos.

Scribus is the leading open source solution for desktop publishing (DTP); it supports professional features like press-ready color separations and PDF output, as well as every media file type under the sun. With Scribus you can design high-end documents with a separate workflow for authors, photographers, and graphic designers in an office environment, but it is easy enough for single-user work, too. The latest release, 1.3.5, just hit the Internet, and packs a suite of new features. If you have never taken Scribus for a test drive, now is the time.

Ever tire of laying out a sheet of address labels in OpenOffice.org or Word templates when you’re in a hurry? Karl Fogel’s LabelNation may be able to help. It is a small free software tool that whips out printer-ready label layouts from the command line. All you do is put the addresses in a plain [...]

By now, you’ve probably discovered how delightful the Firefox Web browser is to use while surfing or working on the Internet. One of its best features is that it’s easily customizable by using add-ons to add extra functionality. Here are 10 favorites that make getting things done a little easier, more efficient, and fun.

In a symbolic show of support for Free Open Source Software and the OpenDocument Format, Brazilian President Lula da Silva recently attended the Linux-related FISL 10 conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where he gave an address underscoring the importance of Free Open Source Software to Brazilian national interests. He appears here wearing a hat with [...]

If your laptop is getting long in the tooth, there is no reason to rush out to buy a new one. Instead, you can relegate the most demanding computer tasks to your desktop machine and use your laptop to run applications remotely.

When the third largest city in Germany rebuffed Microsoft, even people in the US were talking about it. The Munich city council’s decision some years ago to gradually banish Microsoft software from City Hall computers made news in American newspapers. In the meantime, while the software revolution has quieted down, the change goes ahead with [...]