Check out these instructions on Bigblueball.com on how to get google talk configured to be a universal messaging client which will provide access to friends on all the primary messaging networks (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ). I’m hoping Adium on the mac can ultimately avail itself of the same configuration, but until it can I’m sorely tempted to switch over to google talk on the pc so that I get access to their excellent VOIP setup.

If you’ve clicked on my webcam links to the right and you like the popup effect I’m using, you can now install it as a wordpress plugin rather than hacking it into your templates. Check out www.m3nt0r.de‘s site for instructions and the download.

And yes, I’m aware of the stale picture on the office webcam. There was a kernel update for my linux box which broke the webcam drivers. I’m already tired of having to recompile them every time there’s a kernel update – can anyone recommend me a webcam that will work out of the box with ubuntu such that I don’t have to do this every time?

Ever run into trouble getting your router configured? Downloaded some cool application only to discover it doesn’t work because your router is blocking access? Read a ReadMe file for a new application, seen it mention NAT or port forwarding and run screaming from the room? Check out portforward.com, a tremendously helpful site that contains extensive guides on how to configure your router to work with dozens of applications. Guides typically contain tons of screenshots specific to your router model and javascripts that help you figure out what value to put in each field in your router’s configuration forms. If you’ve ever been frustrated by this process in the past, it’s very likely this site will resolve your issues.

If you have a mac and can deal with computer generated speech synthesis, check out books2burn, a utility for OSX that takes text files and turns them into AIFF files you can listen to or transcode to mp3 to tuck on your ipod. Then head over to project gutenberg and grab yourself a classic or two.

So you’ve connected to a linux box, or you’re poking around on OSX, and wondering what the heck /usr, /bin, /etc, /lib and so on are all about. Take a look at the File System Hierarchy site and enlighten yourself. After you’re done you still may find yourself wishing the directory names were more descriptive, but at least you’ll have a better sense of how they’re intended to work, where to find things, and where to install things to.

I’ve mentioned repeatedly how much I think of Quicksilver, and I’ve linked to a number of similar tools for windows. The truth is none of them compares, though. On a feature by feature basis neither does Rock-it Launcher, but it gets the file launching piece right. Hit your control key sequence, start typing the name of the application, document, or whatever it is you need to be working with, and it pops right up. If you’re not familiar with file launchers of this nature, the basic premise is instead of littering your desktop with icons, or having to burrow through your file system looking for the program you want to launch, simply begin typing its name and you’re all set. Rock-It Launcher is free and speedy. Its only downside is its large memory footprint (42MB on my machine). Also for folks like me who jump right in without reading the docs, take note: you need to generate a file system catalog before it does anything useful – hit the catalog button and go from there.

This has become an essential utility for me in just the few short days I’ve had it installed. Kudos to the developer for an excellent piece of software.

This isn’t going to replace photoshop anytime soon, but check out PXN8, an HTML/CSS/Javascript based image editor. You can crop, adjust color balance, remove red eye, rotate, and a bunch of other basic image editor tools are also available. Pretty slick stuff and potentially handy if you find yourself in front of a computer that lacks an image editor. It’s also available for licensing for incorporation into your existing project or to run on your own servers.

This is a brilliant idea. Instead of a single server hosting a web forum, apply the principles of p2p software to them and have every forum participant host a full copy of the forum database on their local machine. What you get is excellent security, a forum that’s immune to the slashdot effect with better overall performance in general, and (at least in theory) better search. It’s called Keyforum and it’s free and open source.

It’s a little on the clunky side right now and not easy for non-geeks to get up and running unless you’re on windows where they have an .exe installer, but the intent is to get this running on all platforms. I can see immediate potential for this on campuses where the faculty lack access to sufficient IT resources to bring a forum online for them.

Here’s my little contribution to trying to correct this. Quite some time ago, VMware announced the availability of the VMware Player, a free version of their superb VMware Workstation product line. While it’s feature limited compared to their commercial products, it’s still an absolutely awesome piece of software and has become an essential tool on my machines.

If you’re not familiar with it, VMware workstation and its siblings are virtual machine applications. These are not emulators like Virtual PC – they use the native hardware of the machine they’re running on and thus perform relatively close to the native speed of your machine when running software. They allow you to run additional operating systems simultaneously on your machine, say for example Windows 98 inside of your Windows XP machine, or Windows 95, or, in my case, linux.

This has become enormously useful for me – I run a duplicate of my server’s operating system (the server hosting this site) on my pc and test out software builds and patches on it before I install them on the actual server, saving me the heartache and time. I’ve also used it to test out a variety of other linux distros and even OSX on intel – there’s a user community out there that’s busily offering up a host of different operating systems and flavors for the free player. Whether you’re doing software/web development stuff, want to test out linux, or just want to play some old DOS games, or for any of a hundred other reasons, this is a fantastic tool that’s worth checking out.

Note that this is Win32 and Linux only, and while performance is really good, you wouldn’t want to be playing a modern 3d shooter using VMware player. Older stuff from the pre-windows xp days generally works fine though.

Next purchasing cycle at work, this is going to become part of my professional toolkit as well (the workstation product) and help me get rid of the ridiculous array of screens strewn across my desk. I’m at 5 and occasionally 6 at this point. I also hope they consider developing an OSX port of their product once OSX is running on intel hardware.