GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is an alternative for Photoshop for Linux as well as for Windows operational systems. I was not fair to skip this image editor in my reviews on this site because most of this site itself was made in GIMP and not in Photoshop. The latest versions of GIMP are getting nicer and nicer featurewise and it is easier to use it from day to day. For those of you who used to work with Photoshop a lot, GIMP may appear a little unconfortable to work with but after  a few weeks of working with it you can see that you can do most of the things that you do in Photoshop but without any payment, because GIMP is free as in FREEdom. So, why not to try it?

Their site is GIMP.org

Do you want to have nice and short name for your website/blog? but you dont want to pay? ok there is an option to get domain name for FREE as freedom. Your domain name will have manaement panel where you will be able to customize NameServers, A, C, MX records. You can configure your google apps to use this domain name. And the main thing: your domain will look like this: yourname.co.cc

Check this up: http://co.cc

I just had a time when I needed to convert scanned photo of the document to text and usually people using for this perposes spesiall software like FineReader, but I dont have it on my computer, dont even know if it is available for linux, so, I hade to look for other solutions. And I found one!

There are a few sites on the web that offer text recognition services, and I tried two or three of them and liked only one - http://www.onlineocr.net/

Ok, they have registration which is free, and then you can upload your documents and process them converting to number of different formats including MS Word, rtf, text etc. There is also a try out window where you can test how good or bad their translation is. 

I dont think you do such things as translating text from image evry day, I needed this function for the first time in whole year, there is no point for me to keep heavy text recognizer software on the computer, so, this solution is the best for me.

If you have your own site and have contact form on it you probably get a lot of spam messages from that web form, what to do to fight it? install CAPTCHA(Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) in your form. What is captcha? according to wikipedia it is "A distorted image of letters and numbers used to prevent automated use of websites. Anything that a human must do to prove that they are not a computer." So, how to install this thing? There are plenty of php classes and functions on the web helping you to do exactly it. Just search for captcha and you will find one. I use captcha tool from http://puremango.co.uk and it works nicely, the generated words are human mind relative, so, easy read by human being and very complecated for robot. It works the same way as all captchas do - when the form is loaded, the captcha is generated and the content of it is saved in $_SESSION variable and on submition of the form the content of session variable is compated to inserted text and form is processed according to this comparison result. Very smart and easy. Try to install captcha on your site form and you will see effectiveness of it.