If you've always wanted to brew your own beer, you'll be glad to know there's an app for that. Created by Philip Lee, Brewtarget is an open source application that helps home brewers create and manage beer recipes. We talk to Lee about Brewtarget's history, its features, and its future.

The cron scheduler has been a useful tool for Linux and Unix admins for decades, but it just might be time to retire cron in favor of a more modern design. One replacement, still in heavy development, is whenjobs. This weekend, let's take a look at whenjobs and see what the future of scheduling on Linux might look like.

Sometimes, we have little tips and tricks that make life easier – but don't quite take up a full article. So today I've bundled a few practices that many Linux.com readers might find helpful. You'll learn how to control window behavior in KDE4, and make Nepomuk and Strigi be useful; and remove those silly proprietary U3 partitions from USB sticks.

Thanks to my photography background, I tend to equate "image manipulation" with "photo adjustment and retouching" – but of course that is just one task. For a lot of jobs, image manipulation means dull work like repeatedly converting, resizing, and compressing images for output – fitting them to the proper size for a post on the Web site, converting to the right format for print, and many other similar, repetitive tasks. You can use tools like GIMP and Krita for this class of work, but you would usually be better off firing up a dedicated batch conversion tool – saving yourself considerable time and mental energy. A comparatively young tool called Converseen is a good place to start.