RedNotebook is a nifty little diary application. According to its Web site: RedNotebook is a graphical diary and journal helping you keep track of notes and thoughts. It includes calendar navigation, customizable templates, export functionality and word clouds. You also can format, tag and search your entries.

Part 1 of this series introduced arpeggiators in general and profiled the QMidiArp application. This week we conclude our survey with a look at two more arpeggiators for Linux musicians: Hypercyclic and Arpage.

This week Dave Phillips looks at audio loopers designed for live performance.

One of the least understood features of OpenOffice.org is graphics text. People understand vaguely that it differs from regular text, but exactly how it differs or why anyone should care is mostly unknown. However, if you know the distinction, graphics text can work for you in ways that regular text cannot.

I'm always on the lookout for original projects, and this particular application really took me by surprise. According to its Web site, “Flinks is a text-mode flashing word Web browser. It is intended for speed reading and/or skimming Web pages and text.”

Even with all of the high quality software available, sometimes you just have to break down and write a custom application, and usually you don't have a lot of time to devote to it. This is the situation I found myself in when my wife started a new business and needed a simple means of tracking sales leads.

I'm sure that most people hardly think about page options in OpenOffice.org Writer. The average person may change the paper orientation from portrait to landscape, or narrow the margins to squeeze more words into a page, but not much else.

One of OpenOffice.org's greatest strengths is its emphasis on styles. Some users balk at styles, claiming they are restrictive, but no other feature repays a little organization with so much ease of use and saving of time. Yet even those who are used to styles in Writer tend to overlook the styles used in other applications. That is especially true of graphic styles.

Although I do most of my professional writing in Bluefish, I usually use OpenOffice.org at least once a day. Consequently, I keep a close eye on the OpenOffice.org Extensions page.

Like other word processes, OpenOffice.org Writer makes creating tables of contents (ToCs) quick and easy. Unfortunately, it also works with unaesthetic defaults and allows you to make choices that complicate your work flow rather than improving it. Fortunately, Writer is also flexible enough to allow you to produce useful, aesthetic ToCs if you follow a few basic steps.

OpenOffice.org: The limits of readability and grammar extensions As a professional writer, my software needs are simple. Give me a text editor -- preferrably Bluefish, but vim or OpenOffice.org Writer will do -- and I have all I need.

Four years ago, I wrote an article about OpenOffice.org writer called "Fielding Questions, Part 2 - Cross References and User-Defined Fields." I regularly receive mail about it, but these days I have to preface each reply by explaining that the article is obsolete. Repeating the explanation gets old quickly, so I decided that an update is necessary.

Just one week shy of Christmas 2008, the Python world saw the release of version 3 of Python. Big deal, eh? Well ... it turns out it was and is, as Python 3 is the first major release of Python designed from the get-go to be incompatible with prior versions of the language. Python is well liked among the Linux Journal readership (winning the Favorite Scripting Language category in 2008), and such a development may come as a shock to some. A detailed description of all of the changes brought into Python 3 can be found in the what's new document, another interesting source can be found on the pythonology blog. Consequently, in this article, I don't intend to rehash such material. Instead, I present my own take on Python 3, as well as discuss what Python 3 means for the new and existing Python programmer.

If you're coming fresh from Microsoft Excel, you might wonder where the Pivot tables are in OpenOffice.org Calc. The problem is, they're masquerading under the name of DataPilots. But, under any name, DataPilots are Calc's way of allowing you to quickly reorganize information in a range of cells so that you can gain a new insight into them.

Problem: you're running your favorite application when you realize that there's a feature you want that is not yet implemented. You could write this feature yourself, but perhaps there is a similar application that has already implemented it for you.

Queries are the database equivalent of filters in a spreadsheet. Just as a filter can limit and reorganize the information displayed in a spreadsheet, so a query limits and reorganizes the information in a database. Either can be an efficient way of finding the information you want, especially when you're dealing with thousands of records.

Take a quick look at three Web framework technologies from the Python community.