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.

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

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++.