Debian

Sometimes you want to pretend you're from somewhere else. Fortunately, there's no Law of the Internet that requires you to divulge your IP address, and thereby where, and (for all intents and purposes) who, you are. You can instead rely on the kindness of strangers who will form a virtual bucket chain to carry your data from one place to another, with nobody involved (or any evesdroppers) knowing anything more than the location of the next link in the chain. For this recipe you will need:

Have a whole bunch of ultra-high resolution images to upload to your website, but you don't have time to individually scale them to a Web-appropriate size in the GIMP? Imagemagick and bash to the rescue:

for i in `ls *.jpg`; do convert -resize 50% -quality 70 $i scaled/$i; done

…hey presto! That  9½MB file is now 50% smaller (in pixel dimensions) and a mere 750KB (in file size), and the same goes for the other hundred-or-so images in that directory.

Sudoku is a puzzle game consisting of a grid partially filled with numbers. The presence of a number in a particular square may tell you that in some other squares certain numbers cannot be placed, or that in some other squares certain numbers must be placed. You can then deduce how to fill all the squares on the grid.

The Debian package management system may tell you that if a particular software package is to be installed on your system, certain other software packages cannot be installed on the same system, or that other packages are required to be installed on your system.

Obvious next step - if you're insane - work out how to express a Sudoku puzzle as a set of Debian packages, and let the package management system solve the puzzle for you.

Only Microsoft Windows has a longer and less predictable release cycle, but the release of "Etch" is still big news for freedom lovers everywhere. It's not the ideal newbies operating system, but if you know what you want in a system, and want to customise yours precisely to your liking, Debian is a good place to start. Also if (like me) your livelihood depends on a stable, secure operating system you can't go past Debian. I've been using Etch since January on one of my web servers, and it's been running like a dream, precisely as you would expect from Debian.

Being included in a stable Debian release also confers an aura of trustworthiness over free software projects, and this release sees packages like OpenOffice.org 2, GNOME 2.14, KDE 3.5, PHP 5, and MySQL 5, enter the boringly reliable stage of their lives.

Also included in this release is the very familiar-looking Iceweasel web browser, thanks to the Mozilla project's misguided trademark policy, along with Icedove and Iceape.