As for Nikon Picture Project, just use something else! Picasa can import and catalog for you and it’s free. Been using it for years, never a problem. There’s a few out there for Linux but they’re not very good at all including Picasa For Linux (which is just WINE+Picasa). There’s also Adobe Lightroom if you want to pay for something, my girlfriend and I use this for our professional photography.

As for spell checking in Firefox, I have no clue, I rarely depend on it, mostly because it sucks if you’re using en-US by default and spell lots of non-English English words (like colour). If I wonder how a word is spelled, I simply type “define: WORD” in Google and it can point me in the right direction or I use dictionary.com . This stuff is no fault of Firefox, it’s a fault of the dictionaries it uses (usually aspell and ispell).

As for the iPods, you can use another manager such as Anapod or Winamp or many others. Ipods work in Amarok in Linux by default.

As for wireless connectivity, I’m having the same issue. Been using the same router for about 2 years and nary a problem but in this last week, the wireless connectivity out on my patio (where I do most of my surfing) has gone from awesome to almost unusable. No reason for it either, the router hasn’t moved and I haven’t swapped out my beefy antennas for crappier ones. There’s nothing new as far as interference-inducing electronics either. I believe it’s a case of the overwhelming humidity we’ve been having but I’m not sure.