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The year was 2003. I was an underpaid accountant-turned-IT-professional, and father to two children under the age of four. The idea of using Linux was intriguing, but it wasn't until I had a chance to experience it while taking a class on Long Island for work that I was fired up enough to try it out.

There's a long way to go before it becomes an “anyone can do this” hack, but games console tinkerers fail0verflow have replicated their PlayStation 2 work, getting Linux to run on Sony's PlayStation 4. However, as they told the Chaos Computer Conference in Germany, their work is only useful on an older PS4, because the jailbreak vector, present on version 1.76 of the machine's firmware, is patched on later versions (a new machine would be running 3.11).

If you are investing in the stock market, you probably understand the importance of a sound portfolio management plan. The goal of portfolio management is to come up with the best investment plan tailored for you, considering your risk tolerance, time horizon and financial goals. Given its importance, no wonder there are no shortage of commercial portfolio management apps and stock market monitoring software, each touting various sophisticated portfolio performance tracking and reporting capabilities.

In this article, I am going to focus on the hardware, software, and configuration issues that we Linux laptop users must confront in order to really enjoy that wonderful digital music on our hard drives.

In this week's edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at reasons to use open source software, betting on open source, cryptocurrencies, a look back at 2015, and—since it's that time of the year—some predictions for 2016.

Not being able to carry your configurations across was an issue for several Steam gaming enthusiasts, but not any more. The latest update of Steam controller lets you take your custom configurations with you. You can also customize the on/off sounds and brightness of the Steam button. It also lets you share non-Steam-game configs.

This year, we’ve seen some incredible price/performance breakthroughs in sub-$100 single board computers that can run Linux or Android and do cool stuff. The world of community-backed SBCs continued to expand in 2015, marked by lower prices and more modular, kit-like Internet of Things boards. Here we take a look at the top 10 most important — and probably the best — under $100 Linux- or Android-based, open-spec hacker SBCs that began shipping in 2015.

Every year we look back at 10 of the hot open source projects from the past 12 months. (Last year's list made a splash!) And, we expect more great things from these projects in 2016.

As open source fans, we tend to spend a lot of time curled up in front of our computers. Many of us we work in front of computers during the day, and some of us even work on or with open source projects, too. If you are anything like me, spending an entire day in front of a screen and then spending most of the evening there, too, is not uncommon. Today is a good example: I started work at 8:00AM, and at 8:21PM I am starting to write this article...

In June this year, Apple raised more than a few eyebrows at its WWDC conference with an announcement about Swift. Just a year before, Apple had released Swift, a new programming language. It was a big deal--a much simpler language for faster development. Swift was a major competitive advantage for the company, making it easier for teams to build new apps for Apple devices. So Apple's decision to give it away to everyone as an open-source project puzzled many attendees. Why would Apple share such an asset with the world, including its competitors? Was Apple really going to carry out its plan? Yes, on December 3rd, Apple did exactly that.

Microsoft has released Windows Live Writer, a popular blog authoring tool, as an open source project on GitHub, under the MIT licence. The original Live Writer was developed by a company called Onfolio, founded by JJ Allaire when he left Allaire Corporation, the business he founded with his brother Jeremy to create web development tools including ColdFusion and JRun.

ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager. The features of ZFS include protection against data corruption, support for high storage capacities, efficient data compression, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs. This tutorial will show you how to install ZFS on Debian 8.

Building a website with beautiful design and killer content is a huge undertaking. Compared to the time, money and effort put into crafting a website, people however tend to pay surprisingly little attention to "backing up" the website they have built. It is no-brainer to understand that without a proper backup, you stand to lose months or years of investments in your website should something bad happen to the website, be it accidental deletion of files, faulty software/database upgrade, website defacement by hackers, disk/filesystem failure, etc. Especially for websites like WordPress-powered blogs which get updated often with daily postings, comments and plug-in upgrades, regular backup is something you must not be lazy about as a website owner.

Releases big and small debut.

Like all of Parrot’s previous drone models, including the original Bebop, the Bebop 2 runs Parrot’s open source Linux flight stack. In San Francisco, Parrot unveiled a smaller, faster, longer lasting version of its Linux-based Bebop drone, helping to solidify its dominance in the mid-range consumer market. One of the key new features is an emergency cutoff that instantly kills the quadrotor motors when a blade hits an obstacle. The increasing focus on safety was also demonstrated this week when 3DR (Solo) and DJI (Phantom) announced similar new technology to make it easier for their customers to avoid restricted airspace (see farther below).

It is very unlikely for anyone nowadays not to own a device that is capable of shooting many consecutive pictures (burst mode). While this is useful for helping you take the perfect shot in sport events etc, you may want to use some of those successive frames to create a movie. Thankfully, you can do this very easily on Linux. In this tutorial, I will use five (not so closely successive) shots of my Cockatiel parrot bird trying to drink some of my coffee.

Google has given Windows XP and old versions of Apple OS X their marching orders. Support for the ancient (in the case of XP) / no-longer-supported (OS X Mountain Lion and older) operating systems will end in April 2016. The Chocolate Factory announced the decision here. Google's original EOL date for XP was to be April 2015, but it relented just before the hammer fell.

October was a solid traffic month for Opensource.com, with 681,334 page views and 110 articles published. We published 17 articles by first-time Opensource.com contributors, and we kicked off a new community column, My Open Source Story. We reported from All Things Open and the 2015 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, and we started speaker interview series for OpenStack Summit Tokyo and LISA15.

Intel unveiled three new Quark CPUs, including models with x86 compatibility, -40 to 85°C support, and integrated sensor hubs, plus a new IoT Platform. The three new members of Intel’s low-power, IoT-focused “Quark” processor family were announced as part of a second-generation Intel IoT Platform. The Quark D1000 is now shipping, and a more robust D2000 model is due by year’s end. The Quark SE, which is built into Intel’s Curie modules, is expected in the first half of 2016, featuring a sensor hub and integrated pattern recognition.

If you've ever dropped Mentos in a bottle of Coke with kids or grown your own rock candy in a jar with string, you know how excited children get when doing science. For some of us, that fascination never goes away, which is why things like Maker Faire exist. If you want your children (or someone else's children) to grow into awesome nerds, one of the best things you can do is get them involved with projects at http://www.makershed.com.