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The top utility needs little introduction to seasoned Linux users. top is a small utility that offers a dynamic real-time view of a running system. It allows users to monitor the processes that are running on a system. BpyTOP is an alternative to top. It’s a resource monitor that shows usage and stats for processor, memory, disks, network and processes.

There’s a wide range of free and open source software that lets you listen to internet radio. With so many different possibilities available it’s easy to get lost trying to find the right one for you.

For this week’s blog, I examine how well the most popular open source astronomy programs run on the AWOW AK41 Mini Desktop PC.

Digital Assets is a GUI that lets you monitor movements in the prices of cryptocurrencies. The program is written in Python. Digital Assets uses the Nomics API to retrieve the prices.

Variety is a wallpaper manager for Linux systems. It supports numerous desktops and wallpaper sources, including local files and online services: Flickr, Unsplash, and more.

This week’s blog looks at video recording on the AWOW AK41 Mini PC. OBS Studio relies heavily on a PC's GPU. But the AWOW AK41 doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card. This Mini PC uses the Intel UHD Graphics 605, an integrated processor graphics unit from the Gemini Lake generation.

Annie is an open source video downloader. It supports sites like YouTube, Tumblr, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and other sites (mostly Chinese) I’ve never used.

A common misconception about contributing to open source is that you need to write code. In fact, it’s often the other parts of a project that are in urgent need of assistance. Other ways of helping an open source project include writing documentation, identifying bugs, testing code changes, answering queries from users, planning events, suggesting design improvements, perform user experience testing, making a monetary donation, and more.

Linux Candy is a series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We only feature open-source software in this series. pipes.sh is a Bash script written for the Bash shell. It draws randomly pathed pipes over the terminal. This shell script is dual purpose. It can be used as a screensaver or purely for amusement. A perfect candidate for the Linux Candy series.

For this week’s blog on the AWOW AK41, Luke looks at emulating home computers such as the Amiga, Atari ST, and the ZX Spectrum. Heady days in the early 1980s.

Linux offers a vast collection of open source small utilities that perform functions ranging from the obvious to the bizarre. It is the quality and selection of these tools that help Linux stand out as a productive environment. This is particularly true when it comes to image viewers. There are so many image viewers that are available for Linux that the choice can make selection difficult.

Linux is endowed with a plethora of open source music players. And I’ve reviewed the vast majority. But I seem to keep finding interesting music players. Byte is the latest I’ve stumbled across. Byte is a GTK-based music player. It was created with the desire to make a good music player for elementary OS. It focuses on two aspects: features and design. Byte isn’t tied to elementary OS; it runs on other Linux distributions.

This is a weekly blog chronicling my experiences of using the AWOW AK41 Mini Desktop PC on Linux.

Termgraph is a command-line tool which draws basic graphs in the terminal. Termgraph is free and open source software and written in Python.

For this week’s blog, Luke looks at gaming on the AWOW AK41 Mini PC. This tiny computer uses the Intel UHD Graphics 605, an integrated processor graphics unit from the Gemini Lake generation.

There are lots of simple steps you can take to reduce eye strain and fatigue. These include adjusting the brightness, contrast settings, and text size displayed, as well as minimizing glare, and ensuring your room has proper lighting. Taking regular breaks is also very important. This is where Stretchly is designed to help.

Buoh is a reader for online strips comics. It’s free and open source software.

In this week’s blog, I look at some of the ways you can run programs from different operating systems on the AWOW AK41. I examine hardware virtualization, dual booting, as well as using a compatibility layer.

Glances is a cross-platform monitoring tool which aims to present a large amount of monitoring information through a curses or Web based interface. The information dynamically adapts depending on the size of the user interface.

For this week, I’m going to look at an area very close to my heart. Multimedia. It’s a large topic to tackle. So I’ll confine this week to video and audio playback.