In the movies, smart homes automatically greet you when you return after a hard day's work. But in reality, this hasn't been very easy to do. In this article, Gordon Meyer shows you how you can program your Mac to know you're there. Once you get started, you'll find all sorts of useful ways your Mac can welcome you home.

After capturing 65% of the voice-recorder market, Olympus has now aimed its zoom lens at portable WAV/MP3 recorders. Guitarist Mark Nelson tests this 24-bit, curvaceous, aluminum-clad beauty and likes what he feels and hears. Telephoto mics, anyone?

Continuing the trend started with Amazon's Elastic Cloud (EC2), Google plans to make their vast resources available to developers who wish to deploy massively scalable applications on the Google Infrastructure. In this tutorial, you'll get a look into the APIs and database capabilities that Google is providing, and how to leverage them in a sample application.

One of the fun things about running the "Inside Aperture" site is receiving reader contributions. Every now and then a clever new technique shows up in our aperture@oreilly.com mailbox, many of which I try. But why should I get to have all the fun? So, this week I'm sharing a handful of reader-submitted techniques. My guess is that you'll find one or two particularly useful.

Cloud computing has become the new hot thing (Web 3.0?) Amazon was one of the first vendors to offer a cloud development environment, the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2. They followed it up with a storage capability called S3. This tutorial will show you how to set up and get started developing applications on EC2 and S3.

With an exotic OLED display, baby-simple controls, good sound, and an attractive price, the Marantz PMD620 aims to stand out in the crowded world of portable digital audio recorders. How well does it perform? Mark Nelson frails a gourd banjo to find out.

Perl 5 has come a long way in the past few years. The newest version, Perl 5.10, added several new features to make your programs shorter, easier to maintain, easier to write, and more powerful. Here's how to start using files and strings in modern Perl.

After several years away from anything resembling enterprise software, chromatic accepted a challenge from SAP Labs to try their new software development platform. What lessons have they learned from dynamic languages and frameworks? Has developing big serious software truly become more agile? In this second of three articles, chromatic uses SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment to build a bare-bones application from the data model to the UI.

XML Databases, coupled with the power of XQuery, offer a potentially paradigm-changing way of dealing with data. The Oracle Berkeley DB XML database provides a rich XQuery-based engine that can be manipulated via XQuery, opening up possibilities for any web developer.

Aperture 2.1 includes a more versatile book-making tool than we saw in earlier versions. So powerful in fact, that calling it a book making tool is really selling it short. It's actually a flexible layout application with some very useful output options. In this podcast, Derrick Story talks with Joe Schorr and tries to uncover all the hidden gems buried in Aperture 2.1.

Ubuntu 8.04 (code named Hardy Heron) is out, and Brian DeLacey not only has the scoop on the new features, but a look at some of the players who made it happen, places it's in use, and what machines it's running on.

This article is an introduction to Flexive, an open source Java EE 5 application development stack. The authors have extracted a complete application template and describe its use.

ScreenFlow grabs audio and video from the computer and external sources, provides a timeline for editing these recordings, and offers a range of effects aimed specifically at creating on-screen software presentations. This screencasting studio is easy to use and affordable. And if you have a Mac running Leopard with ScreenFlow loaded up, you're suddenly in the educational movie making business. Jochen Wolters reviews this application and provides plenty of video samples.

Another release of OpenBSD is imminent, which can mean only one thing... Federico Biancuzzi must be out with his virtual microphone interviewing all the major players to put together a roundup of what's new and interesting in OpenBSD 4.3. Read how a nasty little bug in DHCP was caught and fixed, and all the new features you can expect on May 1st.

To celebrate his 200th blog entry, O'Reilly Digital Audio Editor David Battino shares the sounds behind the stories. Hear how a bad pianist inspired the first computer music program, the surprising benefits of high-resolution distortion, and sneaky uses of voice recorders.

Perl 5 has come a long way in the past few years. The newest version, Perl 5.10, added several new features to make your programs shorter, easier to maintain, easier to write, and more powerful. Here's how to start using modern Perl productively.

Photographer and fine art printing expert John Paul Caponigro sits down with Derrick Story at Photoshop World 08 in Orlando to provide an inside look at the Epson Print Academy, the changing world of photography, and even a few remarks about his favorite printing papers.

Don't settle for cruddy looking, dismal sounding YouTube video. Follow our insider tips and you can upload, watch, and share movies that look and sound dramatically better. We even explain how to make the ultimate poster frame or "money shot."

Designing products and services that resonate with customers takes more than just a few stock demographics reports. By studying practices of successful companies, you can apply the same techniques to your own endeavors. In this podcast, Derrick Story interviews three of the four authors of "Subject to Change," who provide insights about how prosperous businesses can--and should--use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish.

Ubuntu is about to release Hardy Heron, the newest Long Term Support version of this popular Linux distribution. To mark the occasion, we're launching a new video interview series, Spotlight on FOSS, and leading off by chatting by Mark Shuttleworth himself!

Apple automation guru, Sal Soghoian talks about the scriptability of Aperture in this podcast interview with Derrick Story. Sal points to the "Aperture-InDesign Integration Demo" as a powerful example of how AppleScript can extend Aperture's capabilities.

No one likes developing reporting tools for an application. But without them, many applications are only half-done. Luckily, Ruby has a great reporting infrastructure available to build on, and in this article, you'll learn how to use it.

Amazon's Simple Storage Service provides a simple, flexible, and inexpensive way to manage online data storage. Amazon's S3 modules for Perl make storing and retrieving data in your own programs almost trivial, leaving Amazon to worry about hosting, scaling, and backups. Abel Lin shows how to store, retrieve, and store data with Amazon S3.

Jochen Wolters scours the world's biggest musical instrument trade show and finds magical software, exotic synths, handheld recorders, and exceptional performers.

Samba has made getting Linux and Windows systems talking to each other much easier than it once was. But there are still some tasks that are more than a little finicky. One of them is definitely joining a Samba client to a domain-based Windows network. Luckily, now you'll have a step by step guide to doing just that.