Sometimes a gift just falls in your lap. This month, it came in the form of an e-mail out of the blue from Jared Nielsen, one of two brothers (the other is J.R. Nielsen) who created The Hello World ...

Meanwhile the advent of single board computers has given us affordable super-powerful hardware that can run a very capable GNU/Linux operating system and fulfill all our hackable computing needs.

Free software licenses and operating systems like GNU/Linux make it possible to learn programming and customize state-of-the-art software in countless ways. Hacking software, however, isn't the last ...

With some developer love and care, FreeBSD might make for a nice desktop alternative to GNU/Linux before long, one that could be tempting even for the die-hard Windows holdouts among us.