I got a great letter from a reader with a puzzle to solve, so let's dig in, shall we? Here's what he wrote: Love your column in Linux Journal. I've read it for years and learned a lot about shell scripting, but not quite enough to solve a puzzle on my own.

Like many LJ readers these days, I've been leading a bit of a techno-nomadic lifestyle as of the past few years—jumping from network to network, access point to access point, as I bounce around the real world while maintaining my connection to the Internet and other networks I use on a daily basis.

In my last article, I introduced the Libreboot project: a free software distribution of coreboot, which is itself an open-source BIOS replacement. I also talked about some of the reasons you may want to run a free software BIOS and discussed some of the associated risks.

Most of you probably have heard of Wireshark, a very popular and capable network protocol analyzer. What you may not know is that there exists a console version of Wireshark called tshark. The two main advantages of tshark are that it can be used in scripts and on a remote computer through an SSH connection.

I have covered several different software packages for doing scientific computation in Linux Journal, but I haven't spent as much time describing available libraries and the kind of work that can be done with those libraries.

Will the keyboard click enough? Is it small enough? Is it free enough? Find out below.

Would you change what you said on the phone, if you knew someone malicious was listening? Whether or not you view the NSA as malicious, I imagine that after reading the NSA coverage on Linux Journal, some of you found yourselves modifying your behavior. The same thing happened to me when I started deploying servers into a public cloud (EC2 in my case).