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.

TechCrunch reported that...

Aviary Now Free As A Bird

Aviary is an online image editing webapp that used to charge $24.99 per year for its full service.

Aviary's own blog item explaining the change is found here...

Setting Aviary Free

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'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”

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).

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.

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.

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

Google Picasa

This is mostly a note to self :-). The Google Apps Status Dashboard is found at:

http://www.google.com/appsstatus

Saves a lot of wondering to check it when a Google web app seems flakier than usual.

Ran into an odd problem. I tried uploading a video from my Mac to YouTube. This is the first time I've tried to do this since upgrading the Mac to Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6). The problem is that YouTube doesn't even let me see the dialog box to upload a file from the Mac. You can see what the problem looks like in the screenshot above. This happens with both Firefox and Safari on the Mac.

I was able to upload a video file from a Windows 7 computer and Firefox without any problems.

j.mp == bit.ly in the literal sense. j.mp is simply an alternative domain and 2 characters shorter than bit.ly. Everything else is the same: Login name/password, statistics, etc.

I was seeing "503" errors (server not found) for about 10 minutes when trying to get to Twitter.com. Finally, the somewhat rare Fail Whale message above showed up. Twitter seems to be up now. But, I'm not confident it will stay up.