I hadn’t realized that Deb A Day is back online. Now run by multiple authors, this blog features cool open source packages with detailed descriptions. All the packages can be trivially installed using Debian’s brilliant package management system. But whether you’re a Debian/Ubuntu user or not, you’re likely to discover some new tools reading this blog. I already found three which I’m likely to keep around:

• Qalculate – a desktop calculator with autocompletion, history, and plenty of built-in unit converters (including currency conversion using Internet data).
• Zim – a desktop wiki and outliner. I previously used Tomboy. Zim appears to be a little bit cooler in that it supports namespaces (which can be used to build a document tree, and export selected branches) and comes with a calendar plug-in which makes it easier to manage daily to-dos in parallel with global pages. At least that’s the theory — I’ll see how it works out.
• htop – just a neat replacement for your run of the mill command line process manager. There’s probably hundreds of these replacements for common Unix tools out there. I wish distributors would start making the cooler versions the default.

The value of Deb A Day also demonstrates that we need better open source knowledge bases. Wikipedia is pretty good (the free software portal is an excellent index to tools for various purposes), though the deletionists sometimes aggressively remove “non-notable” applications (I had to fight to rescue poor Pingus from deletion). Pakanto could become a good source for vendor-neutral freely licensed package descriptions. And freshmeat.net is good to find highly rated or popular tools in a particular category. But what’s missing is a database of in-depth reviews and tips, one which (like Deb A Day) highlights interesting new projects or little known old ones. For now, this nice little blog will have to do.