tech-report had a great friday night topic this week. Everyone posted their favorite little utilities they use. I found several gems in there, including a great registry tweaker, a free alternative to DU meter and a nice free alternative to ACDSEE/Irfan Viewer. Go forth and seek 😉

ZDNET has put up a quick overview of what OLED’s are all about. OLED stands for Organic Light Emitting Diode. They’re going to start showing up in laptop and PDA screens and possibly in flat panel TV’s and light bulbs and the like over the next several years. To summarize the article, they have several strengths compared to existing flat panel systems – they’re easier to manufacture (and thus cheaper) use lots less power (where is my 8 hour life laptop!) and they are a lot brigher and have a more vivid picture which is also viewable from any angle, unlike the polarized screens in existing flat panel screens. The downside is their shorter lifespan and uneven degradation of picture quality (imagine a laptop where the red channel is faded and there’s nothing you can do about it). Despite this they’re going to start showing up in all kinds of devices. Kodak is already shipping a camera with one in it that i saw on Tech TV and the difference in quality is obvious, I could see it even on tv, they look excellent. Cross your fingers they deal with the lifespan issue and these things start showing up soon in retail, I want a $200 21″ flat screen monitor.

It blows my mind that Hollywood is not freaking out more about the easy availability of DVD copying software these days. I mean, check out this little number. It’s completely free. You need it and a copy of TMPG encode and away you go – rent a DVD, stick it in the computer, 4 hours later you have 2 SVCD’s you can play in your DVD player. Assuming you have a DVD player that supports SVCD anyway. Jack Valenti is off in Congress ranting about some draconian law or another to stop the trading of movies on the internet, meanwhile any shmooten with half a brain can download this software, sign up for Netflix, and begin building a movie library to rival the one in the library of congress. Amazing.

Click this link just as fast as your mouse can get there. Spybot cleans out malicious cookies and spyware you’ve been accumulating on your computer probably without even knowing it. Be aware however that you need to pay close attention when running it – it’s possible to incapacitate software you rely on if you don’t read the instructions when running it – (Mike, this means you!).

A brief explanation in case you’re not familiar with the concept – advertisers dump little ‘cookies’ on your computer as you browse the web. These cookies are used to track what sites you visit and ads you click on, and they build up a profile of your usage. Spyware is also installed by various software packages like Kazaa when you install it, and the spyware reports back to the developer about how you use their software. In both cases, you don’t want this – if you can’t infer why from the description of what it’s doing, then just take my word for it 😉

Spyware blockers have become as important as virus checkers imho, and this one is the new king of the hill, displacing my old favorite ad-aware.

Here’s a handy collection of bookmarklets you can use in your browser. Bookmarklets are little snippets of code that can perform all sorts of useful functions for you, like looking up a phrase in google or translating text from one language to another. To use them just bookmark them, then when you are on a page where you need to perform one of the functions, just use your bookmark. Ta da! Very handy stuff.

So I’ve gotten fed up with advertising and spam again. I’ve mentioned Popfile for email filtering in the past. If you spend the time to get it up and running you’ll be psyched, no more spam. Or very little anyway.

But now I have a new favorite. I’ve tried a variety of pop-up blockers for web browsing, and some have worked ok. But now I’ve discovered a better tool – the proxomitron. It’s a proxy server you run locally on your machine and it works miracles, you will not see any ads at all if you take the time to set it up. And setup is easy as pie compared to popfile. Plus all it takes is a single right-click to set it into bypass mode in case you want to visit a site that has ads you want to see. Well worth checking out if you’re tired of the barrage of advertising you have to suffer through when browsing.

Got macOSX? Go check out the Konfabulator It’s a totally cool little ‘widget engine’ that lets you grab desktop widgets folks have written. Things like currency converters, RSS feed readers, desktop rulers, alarm clocks, mp3 players, and more. Just tons of stuff, all wrapped up in a gui to die for. I’m going to register this one.

Do you suffer from gadget lust? Are you tempted to whip out the credit card every time AMD ships a new cpu? Did you used to read the gadget pages of wired and dream of buying that surfboard with the builtin engine? gizmodo is just the site for you. It’s a cool weblog that tracks the release of nifty electronic gadgets. Check out their photo galleries from expeditions to japan, lots of cool photos of ‘next year’s’ techno festishist wet dreams to be had 😉

So…you ever play Tunnels and Trolls when you were young? Ok, I admit it, I’m probably the only likely to read this who has. It was a simple and fun DnD-like game we used to play at Pat Leighton’s house now and then. Some enterprising fellow has put a bunch of the old adventures online so you can relive those moments of past glory. Or pretend you were me at 14. Or something 😉

I mention this in the post below and I realized I’ve never really brought it up here. In a sentence: DC++ is the best thing since Hotline first emerged 5 or 6 years ago. It’s file sharing software along the lines of, say, napster. It’s got some rough edges, but it works better than any other currently available package. You can find anything your heart desires – movies, games, music, obscure novels, pictures of your dear aunt minnie’s rose gardens. Whatever! Except maybe that last one. Anyway, the catch is, you have to share too. It does a better job than any software to date of making sure that if you want to get stuff, you have to share your stuff too. This leads to more universally available stuff.

I can’t say enough good things about it. I’ve been running it pretty much constantly since it came out. Check it out, it’s available for all the major OS’s.