Plasma Pass 1.0.0

Last year I wrote about Plasma Pass, a Plasma applet for the Pass password manager. Over the couple last months I got some emails from packagers from various distributions asking for a proper release so they can package it…so here it is, proudly announcing Plasma Pass 1.0.0.

Games: King of Cards, GOG, Blade Symphony and Monster Logic

• Shovel Knight's final two expansions King of Cards and Showdown have been delayed

  Yacht Club Games originally announced the final two expansions would be released in April but they've decided to delay them. For those not up to speed, King of Cards is the next and final expansion for Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove. You take on the role of King Knight, through 4 new worlds and more than 30 all new courses. Then we have Showdown, which is a mix of multiplayer madness for up to 4 players as well as giving another new story mode. Both are going to be free updates when released!

• GOG has another sale on for the 'Lantern Festival' with some good Linux games going cheap

  It seems there's a game sale for every possible event in the world now, not that I am complaining as it's good for our wallets. The current sale over on GOG is their 'Lantern Festival' to celebrate the Year of the Pig. So you too can pig-out out on some of the great deals going. This time, there's not a huge selection for Linux gamers, so I've picked out a few of the best deals.

• Blade Symphony patch 7 is out with experimental asset streaming, free to play release next month

  Some big news for Blade Symphony today, not only do they have another major patch release they've also announced the free to play release date. On March 7th, the flood gates will officially open on Steam for everyone to jump into Blade Symphony completely free. This is a huge milestone for Puny Human, something they've been solidly working towards for some time now.

• Monstrous programming puzzle game 'Monster Logic' is coming to Linux this year

  While it has no clear release date other than this year, Monster Logic certainly looks like a sweet programming puzzle game that's coming to Linux.

All-in-One Messaging Application Franz 5 Sees First Stable Release

After 24 beta releases, Franz, an all-in-one messaging application, has reached version 5.0.0 stable. Besides being the first Franz 5 stable release, the latest 5.0.0 version brings automatic spellcheck language detection, an option to quit Franz from the Windows taskbar, updated Electron to version 4.0.4 (from 4.0.2), and small bugfixes and improvements. Franz is a free Electron application for Windows, Linux and Mac that combines almost 70 chat and messaging services into a single window that can run in the background, with multi-account support, notifications and a system tray, spell checking, and other useful features.

5 Good Open Source Speech Recognition/Speech-to-Text Systems

A speech-to-text (STT) system is as its name implies; A way of transforming the spoken words via sound into textual files that can be used later for any purpose. Speech-to-text technology is extremely useful. It can be used for a lot of applications such as a automation of transcription, writing books/texts using your own sound only, enabling complicated analyses on information using the generated textual files and a lot of other things. In the past, the speech-to-text technology was dominated by proprietary software and libraries; Open source alternatives didn’t exist or existed with extreme limitations and no community around. This is changing, today there are a lot of open source speech-to-text tools and libraries that you can use right now. Here we list 5 of them.