Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Who needs a Shuffle, when you can have your very limited edition Steve Jobs Mini, thanks to those mad folk at PodBrix.

Meet Keynote:



All 300 sold out - in 36 minutes!

Gawker's Lifehacker blog is putting together a list of essential free tools for Windows users. I'm amused to see that I'm already using all of them...

• Firefox Tabbed, pop-up-blocking web browser with an ever-expanding base of functionality-enhancing extensions.


• Thunderbird Email client with spam filters, saved search folders, RSS-reading and multi-account support.


• Trillian Instant messenger that supports multiple protocols (AOL/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo!), being logged onto multiple AOL accounts at one time, instant Wikipedia lookup, spellcheck, and conversation logging.


• Picasa Photo manager tracks digital images and albums with keywords and ratings, exports web galleries, resizes images, removes red-eye and offers effects and edits.


• iTunes Music player organizes thousands of tunes into saved search "smart" playlists, records play counts and last played timestamps, de-duplicates your collection, auto-arranges songs into folders by artist and album.


• Ad-aware Spyware detector and cleanser can save even the slowest, most advertising-pummelled Windows installation.


• AVG Anti-Virus Monitors your computer and email for viruses, auto-updates and schedules regular scanning.


• OpenOffice Office suite package opens, edits and saves to Microsoft Office formats, minus the licensing costs.


• Skype Long-distance computer calls over the 'net minus the bill.

I think I'd want to add a few more of my own...

• SmartFTP Fast, well designed FTP client. A real Ronseal application...


• BitLord Probably the best BitTorrent client around.


• jBidWatcher A Free eBay auction watcher


• VLC Watch and listen to pretty much every media format out there...


• Flickr Uploadr Share those photos with the world on Flickr


• CDex Best (and fastest) MP3 ripper around, by far


• RealVNC Direct access to all your PCs and servers


• Spy-bot S&D You can never have too many adware defenders running


• Daemon Tools Mount your CD and DVD images, without burning the disks.


• Sipphone Lite Free 1-800 number calls in the US from the UK using the Internet


• Windows Services for Unix Run and compile UNIX apps on Windows - with better integration than CygWin


• IrfanView Quick Windows image viewer and editor
  

I'm sure there are many more, but that's just a few off the top of my head...

Or rather, off my Start Bar...

...who needs friends?

Just take a look at www.flickrsucks.com

Now that's a fan base!

Does anyone have an APS film scanner I could borrow for a couple of weeks - I want to digitise a pile of old films...

TIA!

Listening to a random iTunes playlist, I came across a rather amusing little sample.

The track "All My Dreams", by Spiralhead used the final diatribe of Fenella Fielding as the Blue Voice from the classic 70s psychedelic movie, Dougal and the Blue Cat.

From WarrenEllis.com's announcement of the hardcover printing of the excellent Dan Dare-inspired alternate history Ministry of Space, and this rather lucious Chris Weston illustration of a British lunar lander on display...



Buy it now!

...following elinor...

You Belong in New Zealand

Good on ya, mate You're the best looking one of the bunch Though you're often forgotten... You're quite proud of who you are

Nice to see that it's a kea and not a kiwi...