The...

U.S. Open Government Initiative Dashboard

...provides an openness rating for each federal agency. But, more importantly, it provides a link to open information (data) available from each agency.

doubleTwist Corp. was co-founded by DVD Jon. It can sync photos, videos, and playlists from a Mac or PC with a variety of mobile devices including Android,BlackBerry, PSP, Nokia and others. The public beta is a free download. I could not find anything on the website indicating whether or not it would remain free after it exits its beta testing phase.

doubleTwist

I don't see any download links. But, this is apparently going to be released as an Open Source product by Facebook. They developed HipHop as a way to get better performance for their PHP based site.

HipHop for PHP: Move Fast

HipHop is a source code transformer that translates PHP code into optimized C++.

I finally got around to playing with the Arduino microcontroller the other day and started looking around for related projects. This search led me to...

Processing.org

GrandPerspective is a free Open Source app for Mac OS X that scans your hard disk and produces a graphical map of how space on the drive is being used. I decided to clean up my drive today, and decided to check if a newer release than the 0.9.9 version on my Mac was available. And, yep, it was last updated in September 2009. You can find the current release at...

GrandPerspective 1.1

I've been using the free...

Microsoft Security Essentials

...anti-malware product on several PCs since its release and have been very happy with its:

1. Relatively low resource requirements (doesn't slow my PC down)
2. Quietness (doesn't tell me things I don't care about)

LifeHacker reports that it also beat out other free anti-virus products in a test run by AV-Comparatives.org...

From jkOnTheRun...

Free Office 2010 E-Book Available From Microsoft

Microsoft Press/MSDN page with free ebook (PDF) download link...

Free e-book: “First Look: Microsoft Office 2010”

Interesting article over on Infoworld comparing the free (for personal use) VirtualBox virtualization software against the for-fee VMWare Workstation and Parallels Desktop 4 for Windows & Linux (not the Mac version)...

InfoWorld review: Desktop virtualization for Windows and Linux heats up

VMware Worsktation 7: 8.6
SUN VirtualBox 3.1: 8.4
Parallels Desktop 4 for Windows & Linux: 8.2

All three products' score are in the "very good" category.

Test a free Drupal blog editor app for Android on a Droid.
Created with Drupal Editor

The Open Source file container and whole disk encryption software for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux was updated on November 23, 2009. This update is a minor dot update release for bug-fixes (always important!).

TrueCrypt 6.3a

Just in time for the holiday season... well, um, ok, not really :-)

But, good dictionaries are always useful. And, it is nice to apparently have another one online from Google. You can find the Google Dictionary at:

http://www.google.com/dictionary

Note, that this is not a single dictionary source. It also provides links to a number of other sources on the web... a one-stop dictionary shop.

I've been a perfectly happy user of OpenDNS's free public DNS service. It has been much more responsive than my broadband provider's DNS which actually flaked out a few years back. It looks like OpenDNS has competition from Google now though:

Google Public DNS

FYI: I've found that I couldn't use OpenDNS on notebooks/netbooks that I used in managed hotspot locations like Starbucks and hotels that require a login to get to the Internet (makes sense).

There's a bit over a year's gap between 0.9.3 and...

HandBrake 0.9.4

But, it arrived late in November and is available for download. Mac uses with Core 2 Duo processors should note the download page advises they use the 64-bit version.

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. It handles DVD-like sources (you can decode that language I'm sure :-)

I know there are a lot of good GUI tools to burn ISO files to a CD or DVD. However, I guess I'm "old school" and have been using the two free command line tools Microsoft provides in their...

Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools

...for several years now.

If you install the toolkit, you'll find two command line tools named CDBURN.EXE and DVDBURN.EXE. They do exactly what you think they should do: Take an ISO file and burn and unpack it to a writeable CD or DVD.

From Softpedia...

VirtualBox 3.1.0 Final Released

Oddly, VirtualBox 3.0.12 running under Windows said it is the current release when I selected "check for updates". However, the 3.1.0 update for all platforms is available at...

VirtualBox 3.1.0 downloads page

The Softpedia article mentions several interesting enhancements available in the 3.1.0 release:

- Teleportation: Live VM migration session (wow)

No Mac OS X version yet. But, here's the link to Amazon's...

Kindle for PC Beta

It works under Windows XP, Vista, & 7. As with the Kindle for iPhone ebook reader, you don't need to own the Kindle hardware product to buy and read Kindle ebooks.

Wonder what you have in various Google services (including privacy settings)?

Transparency, choice and control — now complete with a Dashboard!

You can find the Google Dashboard for your services at...

https://www.google.com/dashboard/

I freely admit to "not getting" what Google Wave is about. Fortunately, there is a new book on the topic co-written by LifeHacker founder Gina Trapani...

The Complete Guide to Google Wave

FYI: The link above is to the URL...

http://completewaveguide.com/

Here's a new Google Docs feature that I've been wanting for a while now...

Liberate your Google Docs with Convert, Zip and Download

It lets you bundle together multiple Google Docs documents in the format of your choice and then download them all in a single ZIP file.

More info about it is found on the Google Docs Blog...

Data Liberation, "Mark as viewed", and New!

PC World reports that the free...

AVG LinkScanner

...can scan web addresses shrunken by URL shortener services like bit.ly and tinyurl. Interestingly, AVG's website for the product doesn't seem to tout this ability at all.