If you like to keep track of notes and to do lists on your computer, you have no shortage of applications and online services to choose from. However, if you find that these tools are suffering from “feature bloat” then a service you should take a look at is Paprika. Keep track of all your notes, todos dates, and tags in a easy, quick, text based...

Mac users looking to get some insight into their battery power outside of the typical X% charge left should take a look at the freeware utility coconutBattery. coconutBattery isn’t just a tool which shows you only the current charge of your battery – it also shows you the current maximum capacity of it in relation to the original capacity your...

Some of my favorite console games are the Super Mario series (I didn’t care much for 2 though) which graced the NES and Super NES. So fans of the landmark game might want to take a look at the open source Secret Maryo Chronicles which shares a very (very very) similar style of play. Just by taking a look at the screenshots and power ups you can tell where...

Whenever you see a commercial for an ISP who make claims on how fast their Internet service is, what they are telling you are the maximum theoretical speeds which you will virtually never reach (if you notice in the small print on commercial says your actual speed will vary). But if you want to see h0w the ISP’s stack up overall then check out this article...

Linux, for a long time, has natively supported virtual desktops in their window managers but this feature is not standard within the Windows GUI. No problem though as there are plenty of freely available tools to add this functionality. One such tool is the open source VirtuaWin. In addition to the typical features you would expect from a virtual desktop tool,...

For those of you out there who play fantasy sports (myself included), a browser plugin you definitely need to check out is Pickemfirst. Pickemfirst aggregates the latest news and stats from Rotowire, Twitter, Fantasy Sharks, Fantasy SP and many expert bloggers. Pickemfirst delivers them directly to you whenever and wherever you need them. In a nutshell, this...

A disturbing trend among popular freeware applications seems to be the inclusion of browser toolbar and/or other garbage options as part of the installation wizard. One rather lengthy message post has an updated list of offending programs which they have titled the “Installers Hall of Shame“. As a developer I can certainly appreciate the hard work it...

When it comes to graphics editors, there are loads of options but typically many of the free ones are either online only or designed for Windows. Mac users wanting a free (and open source) image editor should check out Seashore: Seashore is an open source image editor for Mac OS X’s Cocoa framework. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for...

If you view a lot of pictures online and have wanted to make the preview images larger (or smaller), then a Firefox add-on you might be interested in is the aptly named Image Zoom. From the author’s description: Easily zoom in, zoom out, fit image to screen or set custom zoom on individual images within a web page. All this can be done by using the context...

Internet Explorer 8 features a very useful function which allows you to view the time an add-on takes to load. To view this information, go to the Tools > Manage Add-Ons menu option and then scroll over to view the Load Time column. If you are having problems with IE8 or new tabs being slow to open, you can use this information to figure out who the culprit...