In it's simplest definition watchdog is a hardware and/or software timer-register which can used to trigger an system reset or action if something doesn’t works as expected. The watchdog timer performs regular heartbeat checks and if failed performs the pre-defined corrective tasks.

The now hugely popular mini-computer Raspberry Pi features the BCM2835 SoC which has an built-in hardware watchdog timer, this can be used to check tasks like network connectivity, system load, system freeze and other metrics like temperature to perform corrective measures like automatic system reset. Just follow the steps as instructed next to get started with using watchdog timer.

If Apple iOS, Google Android, Microsoft Windows Phone, Blackberry OS, Symbian, Mozilla Mobile OS, Nokia MeeGo and Sailfish does not satisfy your need for the perfect, most hackable and customizable mobile operating system, here is an exciting "open-source" candidate with some promising features from the leading Linux distribution - Ubuntu.

Ubuntu's developer Canonical has announced their entry into the smartphone business with first public glimpses and features of upcoming Ubuntu for Phones. The Linux-based operating system will offer users an seamless experience on Desktop, PC and Mobile with some exciting features and an "android compatible kernel" so existing Google Android users can simply install and use Ubuntu on their phones. While Ubuntu for Phones will be available in 2013 for users to install on existing hardware, handsets powered by the OS will hit shelves in 2014. Canonical released an extensive video preview and this looks really promising - have a look yourself below.

EVDO is the 3G internet access technology for CDMA platform, the Evolution-Data Optimized(EVDO) technology offers mobile broadband speeds upto 3.1 Mbit/s.

I have been providing internet access to my Raspberry Pi via an TP-Link WiFi 3G Router, however we can directly connect a GSM/EVDO 3G dongle to any Linux computer and make it act like a WiFi access point using Linux utilities like WICD Network Manager. Configuring a EVDO modem to work on Linux can get a bit tricky, here is a simple to follow howto guide on setting things up.

UltraVNC is an fast and easy to use VNC viewer for Windows but it lacks any easily accessible option to save remote desktop session passwords for instant one-click login to remote sessions. Thankfully, UltraVNC supports saving session passwords and the feature can be activated as shown ahead.

Majority of the users must be using their little Raspberry Pi computer headless (without any keyboard, mouse or display attached), and while SSH is a great option for Linux users feeling comfortable with command line other users need an graphical user interface. Here is an quick tutorial to remotely access your Raspberry Pi's desktop remotely over an network.

While it's a better idea to allocate an static or fixed IP address to your Raspberry Pi, here is a simple trick to find the DHCP allocated IP address to your RasPi on a network. This specially come handy when you are trying to connect to RasPi remotely via SSH or VNC and don't know the dynamic IP it is currently active on.

While WICD network Manager is an excellent choice for configuring wireless networking with allocation of an fixed IP address, this can be achieved manually in Linux by editing the relevant \etc\network\interfaces file as shown below.

In my ongoing quest to get an free, lightweight and fast download manager with remote access ability for Raspberry Pi. I settled for Transmission to get torrent downloading and pyLoad for ftp/http downloading, however both of them have issues under limited resources of Raspberry Pi and had frequent crashes now and then.

After, a lot of research, tweaking and testing - I had finally found the best option for a perfect lightweight download manager on linux as "FatRat". Despite the name being FatRat, this open-source download manager for Linux is written in C++ and is slim on requirements, fast on performance and comes with all the bells and whistles one would need from an modern download manager including Segmented HTTP(S)/FTP downloads, FTP uploads, torrents and a super-fast web-ui for remote access.

Linux file-systems like ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, jfs and xfs are used both for compatibility and performance reasons. To access these Linux formatted partitions on other platforms like Windows and Mac, we can easily setup an Networked File Storage Server (NAS) as we did using Samba share on Raspberry Pi running an Debian image.

However, in-case you need to directly plug and read/write onto these Linux file-system formatted disks on windows computers - you will need help of third-party utilities as Windows does not natively support these file-system formats.

pyLoad is an excellent cross-platform download manager with support for one-click file hosters, captcha decoding and excellent web-interface for anywhere remote control over internet.

After installing transmission torrent client on Raspberry Pi, pyLoad is an suitable choice to take of the other downloading needs like handling links from One-Click-hoster's, container formats like DLC, video sites or just plain http/ftp links. Here is an step-by-step guide to get pyLoad installed and working on Raspberry Pi.