Using a Linux distribution as your desktop operating system can be hit or miss. Depending on your needs, it may work brilliantly or horribly. You see, most mainstream apps are not available, so you must depend on alternative software. For instance, for some users, GIMP is a passable replacement for photoshop and Libreoffice for Microsoft Office.

When it comes to photo management, there is really only one great Linux app -- Shotwell, by a company called Yorba. If you do amateur or professional photography and you want to organize your photos, there really isn't a better piece of software on Linux. Sure, there are alternatives such as F-Spot, but Shotwell is the definitive app. Sadly, it hasn't been getting the attention it needs lately, which was worrying to some users (myself included). As a result, Yorba has handed over development and the recipient is rather surprising -- the Elemenatary OS team.

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Handset news aplenty this week. The Nokia Lumia 929 appeared for sale in China, and also showed up on Verizon's US website under the Nokia Lumia Icon name before quietly disappearing. None of this did anything to improve Windows Phone sales for Nokia which were found to be disappointing. Figures released this week showed that phablets are going to become increasingly popular as user look to merge smartphones and tablets in to a single device. It will probably come as little surprise that in the next few years it is predicted that mobile apps will be the most used software. Samsung Galaxy Note 3 owners were disappointed to find that upgrading to KitKat killed their ability to use third party accessories.

Ahead of the release of Update 1 to the operating system, Microsoft finally got around to releasing a guide to mastering Windows 8.1. So keen is Microsoft for you to learn more about Windows 8.1, a second batch of guides was released later in the week. And while you're becoming an expert Windows 8.1 user, Microsoft would like you to take a second look at Internet Explorer and rethink its web browser.

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There is something to be said for the cloud and web-based services. However, when you rely on these things, sometimes it goes a bit wrong. That's not as bad as it sounds. It can go very wrong with your home computer and network as well. Today, Google is experiencing one of those "glitches".

As of this writing, the Gmail service seems to be restored for all users, and I've inquired with writer friends around the US and the world to verify that. However, there is a rather bizarre side-effect, but it's only affecting one poor user. Sadly, that person is getting the bulk of the email being sent since the outage relented.

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Macintosh is 30 years old. If this were "Logan's Run", January 24 would be Last Day. Or the 1960s, time to ditch the computer because, you know, don't trust anyone (or anything) over 30. Declaration: I am a Mac user, which surely surprises the long line of people accusing me of being anti-Apple. My Mac sojourn started on a Winter's day in December 1998. I've abandoned Apple a few times since, even briefly boycotting, but always come back.

My first Macintosh sighting was August 1984. I spent the summer in Chapel Hill, N.C. and often hung out on the University of North Carolina campus. The college book store displayed the Apple, which I found remarkable. I wasn't a computer geek, nor am I one now, but nevertheless found the device charming. A decade later, I started using a Windows PC and for a while was a Macintosh bigot. I particularly enjoyed ribbing the graphic designers with whom my wife worked when their Macs crashed, wiping out hours of Photoshop or QuarkXpress work. "Get a PC!" was my common retort.

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If you want to have a little fun with a picture of someone, then you could open it in a graphics editor, draw on glasses, add a clipart wig, maybe a hat. But if that sounds like too much work, you could just use Funny Mask to do much the same thing, at a click.

The program is small, portable and easy to use. Just launch it, and click "Draw On Screen". Funny Mask uses OpenCV (the Open Source Computer Vision Library) to look for faces, and adds one of twelve silly customizations to anything it finds (wigs, glasses, hats, a mustache, and more).

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BillP Studios has unveiled the 30th major version of its snapshot-based security tool with the release of WinPatrol 30.0.2014. Although this release isn’t a beta, it’s been billed as a "Preview", with many additional enhancements -- including support for international date formats -- promised to follow.

What is already present in the new release is an interface redesign, improved performance, enhanced reporting, new cookie support, better handling of Windows Update and a tweaked Delayed Start function.

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Screen recorders are a great way to show others what’s happening on your desktop, as we saw with oCam earlier this month. But they usually save their results as videos, which can be a problem if you want to be sure they can be viewed by anyone, on any device (you’re embedding them in a website, for example).

GifCam can help by recording your desktop activity as an animated GIF. This means you won’t be able to include audio, of course, and file sizes will be larger. But they’ll be accessible to everyone, everywhere -- and the program is far better at tuning the results than you might think.

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Sixty-fifth in a series. Growth has been almost negative this week. Not because of a lack of new applications published to Windows Store, but because of Microsoft's continuing clean-up operations.

About 500 apps were removed from the Tools category alone, and slower than usual growth in other categories is an indicator that Microsoft removed apps from other categories as well in this week.

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Yesterday, Nokia posted its final financial results before the Microsoft deal closes. Unfortunately, the part of Nokia being sold to Microsoft doesn't seem to be in great shape. Nokia's recent traction with the Lumia range seems to have stalled as it announced a 7 percent sequential decline in unit sales. Let's take a brief look at the causes of the decline and what Microsoft is really buying.

The chart above shows Lumia shipments and ASPs for the past eight quarters. As we can see the Lumia's ASP (Average Selling Price)  has continued to decline as shipments grew. This reinforces the fact that the Lumia sales mix was dominated by low-end variants -- primarily the Lumia 520. We need to keep this in mind while examining the cause of the Q4 decline in shipments.

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While the Terminator films were make-believe, there was definitely some real knowledge mixed in with Arnold's "Hasta La Vista" one-liners. The greatest take-away is machinery replacing humans. While I don't think my toaster will ever become self aware and kill me, the possibility of humans losing jobs to machines is very real and already happening.

I was recently invited to Detroit by Ford Motor Company, where I had the opportunity to tour the factory where the F150 truck is made. While much of the work is done by humans, I was taken aback by some of the quality inspection being done by robotic arms. Surely, that had been a human's role at some point and it made me a bit sad. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, warns that IT will suffer a similar fate as the automotive industry. In other words, there is a war brewing between humans and machines.

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Fourth in a series. Unsurprisingly, after last week’s post-holiday rush of big and important new releases and updates, things have quietened down a little in the App Store.

There’s the usual collection of interesting apps and games, of course, but nothing massively groundbreaking this time around. That said, as ever, I’ve found plenty of apps to take up space on both my iPad and iPhone 5s.

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Today is a day of celebration. Entering one's 30s is something of a milestone. It’s a time to look back at achievements, gather thoughts and see where the future is going to take you. 1984 was a big year. It's a year that will be permanently associated with George Orwell, the birth of my sister (happy birthday for today, by the way! Oh, and apologies for revealing your age!) and the first Mac. Three decades ago today, as my mum and dad were welcoming their daughter into the world, the technology world was welcoming the arrival of the Macintosh.

The Apple homepage has been taken over by a birthday message to the company's baby. Click through and there's a special mini-site that features a timeline of Mac evolution over the years. The intro page is both celebratory, forward-facing and a call to arms:

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Facebook has been in the news over the past few days after a report suggested that the social network is spreading in a similar way to a virus. Like all epidemics, the report suggests, the rate of infection will ultimately drop off, leading to the suggestion that by 2017 the social network will have shed 80 percent of its users. To which I -- and many others of reasonably sound mind -- cry "nonsense!" The catchily titled "Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics" paper published by, of all places, Princeton University puts forward the idea that Facebook users are set to abandon the social network in droves in the coming years.

Things don’t get off to a good start. In explaining the methodology, authors John Cannarella and Joshua A. Spechler say they will use "epidemiological models to explain user adoption and abandonment of OSNs [online social networks], where adoption is analogous to infection and abandonment is analogous to recovery". The abstract gets off on the wrong foot by suggesting that Facebook "is just beginning to show the onset of an abandonment phase" -- a wonderfully vapid term with no grounding in, well, anything really. It's easy to pick holes in papers that have slight flaws, but right from the start it is almost too easy here.

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Yesterday, Microsoft released its earnings report for Q2 FY2014 (that is Q4 CY2013), revealing revenue of $24.52 billion and net income of $6.56 billion (78 cents per share). The Redmond, Wash.-based corporation has managed to beat the average analyst consensus of $23.68 billion and 68 cents per share respectively, as my colleague Joe Wilcox noted.

Aside from the strong overall results, there was another part of the earnings report which has caught our attention -- Surface sales. Revenue from Microsoft's Windows RT and Windows 8 tablets reached $893 million during the quarter. That is $493 million more than in the first fiscal quarter of the year. Good news, right? Surface is finally starting to take off, after all. Well, an SEC filling puts a damper on any enthusiasm, as Microsoft actually lost money on its tablets in Q2 FY2014.

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With as much time as I've spent in the education sector, as a student on one end and a high school IT specialist on the other, I know the landscape of educational learning management systems (LMS) decently well. And to be completely honest, it's a landscape rife with half-baked products delivering a fragmented me-too experience.

There's a lot to be desired from LMS environments, at least the one's I've played with in the last half decade. As a grad student at DePaul University (Chicago, IL USA) right now, I'm juggling between no less than three distinct platforms the school relies on.

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