Synapse is a desktop utility that adds speed and convenience to finding files and launching applications. It does not eliminate the Linux distro’s menu, favorites bar or panel icons. Instead, it cuts down on how often you resort to using them. A semantic-based tool that makes use of the Zeitgeist engine, Synapse is a graphical launcher that pops up when you call it with the Control-Space key combination.

The early-90s Windows 3.11 operating system offered a graphical user interface that was a breakthrough for me. It was, in fact, my first GUI. I’d been using command-line, error-prone MS-DOS for two or three years before that, and it was a delight to suddenly be able to maximize screens, switch programs, and point around with a mouse, after living with the syntactically regimented MS-DOS.

If you package e-books in the EPUB format, one of the handiest editing tools available is Sigil. The growing interest in mobile apps and e-reader devices such as Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook is fueling the e-book business for both reading consumers and authors.

We’re seeing an entire genre of Twitter clients proliferating within the Android ecosystem — each app with its own idea about the best way to interact with the monolithic, 500 million-strong social network. OneLouder’s Slices Pro for Twitter is the latest client to grab my attention — not least because it provides a way to browse Twitter directories by category to find the best Follows.

The creators of Nirvana Editor, or NEdit for short, consider it paradise for writers. I found, however, that it’s not yet the perfect text editor. NEdit is currently in version 5.5, so it is not a newcomer to the text editing scene. I tried it with the hope that it would bring a few new tricks to my aging collection of text editors

I’ve been running into major headaches with file-storage memory on my Android tablet. If you too have been having problems getting files to fit on your device, it may not be that your device’s memory or SD card is full, but that phantom files are hogging resources. I’m usually — carefully — buying cheap gear. In the device business, that usually means limited on-board memory.

Puppy Linux is a distro I keep coming back to. No matter how entrenched I become with any flavor of Ubuntu — sans the Unity desktop — or Linux Mint’s Cinnamon and KDE desktops, nothing can beat the speed, convenience and reliability of Puppy Linux on a stick.

Blender Master Class is a must-have for anyone who uses or even plans to use the Blender graphics tool. It is a learn-by-doing guidebook that takes all the frustration and guessing out of the Blender equation. Author Ben Simonds is a professional 3D artist and co-director of Gecko Animation Ltd.

Have you ever considered becoming a cartographer? It’s not as hard as you might think. I’ve been trying out OruxMaps, a map viewer for Android that functions two ways. One mode is online with the usual suspects like Google maps, OpenStreetMap, and so on; the second and more intriguing method is offline with maps you’ve created yourself. Creating your own maps, while not hard, is a project.

If you subscribe to the view, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” perhaps Fuduntu is the Linux distro most ideal to your computing needs. Fuduntu was first released in 2010 as a Fedora-based Linux distribution. Its developers forked it the following year. The result is a Linux distro that has a user desktop experience somewhere between Fedora’s functionality and Ubuntu’s user-friendliness.