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.

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 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

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.

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

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.

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.

Wow! I'm really impressed by Google's Picasa 3.5 release.

Google Picasa

The XMind mind mapping service an free Open Source (so they claim) app for Windows and Mac OS X (Linux too) looks interesting. But, I dislike the idea of being required to sign up for a "free" XMind ID just to try the app. I've been a reasonably happy FreeMind user for a while now and have been using it more regularly recently. But, I wonder if it is worth the time and effort to take a closer look at XMind.

Any comments from someone who has use XMind?

Subversion is a widely used version control application that is very powerful but can be a little tricky to configure properly. My experience with it has been on Linux servers. I suspect installing it for Microsoft Windows is a bit tricker since installing and configuring Apache's httpd web server might be a bit trickier there too (I haven't installed Apache httpd under Windows in a couple of years). VisualSVN provides a free installer that installs and configures both Apache httpd and their VisualSVN Server...

VisualSVN Server Standard Edition

SpeedFan 4.38

Just a quick note that TrueCrypt 6.2a was released on June 15. TrueCrypt is an amazing Open Source encryption app that can create encrypted file containers that are mounted as drives or entire drives (including boot drives). It works with Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Interesting item from Microsoft's Port25 site...

Announcing the PHP SDK for Windows Azure

I found this part of the announcement equally interesting...

Microsoft has provided funding for two other SDKs that support third party programming languages: Java SDK for Microsoft .NET Services and Ruby SDK for Microsoft .NET Services so as to facilitate interoperability between the Azure Services Platform and non-Microsoft languages and technologies.

I'm way behind in listening to the Security Now podcast featuring Steve Gibson. So, I just listened to Security Now 189 (March 26, 2009). This particular podcast episode focuses on Internet Explorer 8. However, Gibson discussed an anecdotal, but very interesting, finding before the jumping into the main podcast topic. He mentioned that a friend's notebook became infected by malware. He tried the free editions of both AVG and Avast anti-virus.