The first blog item posted in here was way back on October 1, 2006. Updating the Drupal CMS engine here is too much of a chore and, in the past, was fraught with problems including components like spam filters that never worked again after the last update. However, I don't want to lose the nearly 800 blog posts here since they might provide useful historical information to people looking for freeware and Open Source products. So, I'm going to let this blog go dormant for now.

Microsoft Standalone System Sweeper Beta

Microsoft describes this free tool as: recovery tool that can help you start an infected PC and perform an offline scan to help identify and remove rootkits and other advanced malware. In addition, Microsoft Standalone System Sweeper Beta can be used if you cannot install or start an antivirus solution on your PC, or if the installed solution can’t detect or remove malware on your PC.

Very cool way for web developers to play around with an Arduino microcontroller.

RESTduino - Arduino hacking for the REST of us

RESTduino is a simple sketch (an Arduino program) that lets you talk to the Arduino using easy REST-like http requests.

Microsoft changed PowerShell's license to one that makes it possible for third parties to port it to platforms other than Windows.

Microsoft Opens Up PowerShell Language Spec

Note to self: Check out this text editor on Codeplex.com:

AeroNotes

Project Description
Full Featured Vista Aero Glass Window Text Editor.

Features:
-multi-line find & replace
-standard file & edit text editor features
-preference window for font settings
-automatically remembers window size & location

TrueCrypt 7.0 was released. New features are:

- Hardware-accelerated AES
- Volume can be configured to be mounted whenever it its host device is connected to a computer (w/password, of course)
- Sector size can be selected for partition/device hosted volumes
- Favorites Volumes Organizer

Here's something I think might kickstart Silverlight by making it more approachable.

Intro to "Small Basic" with Vijaye Raji

You can find Microsoft Small Basic at:

http://smallbasic.com/

Intended for use on Linux systems. But, it is written in Python. So, it should be able to be used on Windows PCs and Macs too with a little bit of end user adjustment.

Google Command Lines Tool

F# is Microsoft's new functional and object-oriented programming language. If you are interested in using it for web development, you might want to take a look at:

IntelliFactory WebSharper Platform

It free and can be used for commercial and non-commercial use. However, its extensions can only be used for free if used for non-commercial purposes.

I don't know if this game development environment will remain free. However, it is at the momen in its "technical preview" stage of development.

Kodu Game Lab - Technical Preview

Info from NewTeeVee:

New VLC Version Supports WebM, H.264 Hardware Decoding

Note that version 1.1.1 is a release candidate. You can find VLC at:

VideoLAN

Potentially interesting Windows app/web service combo:

Soluto

It watches your PC boot and provides a time to a useful/useable state state (a bit over 4 minutes in the case of my PC).

MugTug is a free web-based photo editor. It demoed at Google I/O 2010 as being HTML5 based.

Interesting new Microsoft blog that focuses on installing WordPress using Microsoft's server products.

WordPress on Microsoft

A friend bought the waterproof Lumix DMC-TS2 digital camera which can shoot a large rapid sequence of still photos. I found a freeware for Windows that can take these photos and create a stop-motion video.

Images to video

And, yes, the TS2 can shoot HD video too. But, stop motion has its uses too.

Wow, this took so long I completely forgot about it. But, Amazon finally has a Kindle ebook reader app for Mac OS X:

Kindle for Macintosh

It requires an Intel-based Mac running OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or newer. And, yes, it is free like Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for Windows.

Microsoft Research's...

Image Composite Editor

...is a panorama photo stitcher. It has not been updated since November 26, 2008. But, it is free and available in either 32 or 64-bit versions for Windows Vista (and presumably Windows 7). I'm planning to try it soon.

I learned about this Google Safe Browsing Diagnostic page from a Security Now podcast. You can find the Google web address below...

http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=URLgoesHere

Replace URLgoesHere with a web site address (no http:// needed). Google tells you if the site hosted any malicious software in the past 90 days.

Google is definitely making good progress in delivering web tools to provide a desktop software-like experience in a web browser. Here's the latest one...

Announcing Google Chart Tools

It consists of two sets of APIs: Chart and Visualization.