Check out the ajax-ified Turbodbadmin, an ajax-powered riff on phpmyadmin. It’s got a ways to go to reach feature parity with phpmyadmin but it’s already worth checking out, and it has a sure chance of displacing it once it’s ready for primetime. If you’re not familiar with it, phpmyadmin is a web-based management tool for MySQL databases, and turbodbadmin is basically the same thing with a much nicer and more responsive interface.

I’ve written a couple of times about voodoopad, the excellent little desktop wiki from Flying Meat Software. I noticed an alternative this weekend, wikinotes. It’s the product of a student project, but don’t let that scare you off – it’s been stable and useful in several hours of testing. It’s also free, so if you’ve tinkered with voodoopad but haven’t liked the concept well enough to consider paying for it, check out wikinotes and see if free is the right price for your desktop wiki needs.

Paint.net has been around for a while now, in fact I might have mentioned it before, but if you’re on windows and need a light-duty image editor it’s hard to find something superior to paint.net, and it’s free. While it’s not going to replace Photoshop any time soon, it can serve very capably for most user’s image editing needs – red eye removal, contrast, tone and color adjustment and so on. If you’re an amateur digital photographer on the PC and need something to work with images, and you’ve run into the limits of picassa, check out paint.net.

It’s also an interesting app in that it emerged out of student work at Washington State University, and successive classes of students have been adding features and squashing bugs. The only downside, depending on your outlook, is that it requires Microsoft’s .Net libraries. Chances are fairly good that you already have them; if not they’re free from Microsoft and easy to install.

Tagging’s all the rage, thanks to the likes of Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati and a variety of other social software tools. Allow me to introduce a new site to you – myprogs.net. Folks are building lists of the software they use and tagging the programs. You can check out their tag cloud and find your way to a cool new piece of software or two you might not have otherwise heard of.

Check out Jacuba – it’s a web service that allows you to activate a spell checker inside any form element in your browser. Simply drag their bookmarklet to your browser’s link bar, or bookmark it. Then when you’re filling in a form online, toggle it and viola, you have an instant interactive spell checker – right click on any word Jacuba flags as possibly mis-spelled and you’ll be offered a set of alternatives. This can come in very handy. Folks will laugh but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pasted a word into ecto to make sure I’m spelling it correctly. The tradeoff is that since it’s a web service it can get a little laggy as you type and it passes your data back to their servers to check the spelling. It also doesn’t seem to work universally – I couldn’t coax it into working for my yahoo or gmail accounts for example, meanwhile it worked fine with ebay and my speedymail account. Still, it’s free and no registration required, so it costs you nothing but a few moments to check out and test with whatever services you might need a spell checker.

Here’s something not so surprising – I prefer electronic texts to books these days, especially when it comes to documentation and training materials, for a pretty simple reason – you can search them. The best index in the world still misses 99% of the content, and a decent search engine solves that problem. Every time I buy a text I’m off to usenet and the torrent networks to find a digital copy. The challenge is that the digital texts come in a variety of formats. Enter the excellent $12 utility uBook. It handles almost all ebook formats, has some very handy annotation tools, and is a tiny little application that loads fast and has a responsive UI. PC and pocketpc only, but well worth checking out if you’re on that platform.

As I’ve mentioned, I recently switched over to WordPress for my weblog. The WordPress Codex has been an invaluable resource for me as I worked through the issues I encountered, and as I’ve worked on tweaking the template I’m using. Movabletype and other engines could learn something from the well organized and comprehensive fan-contributed documentation found on the codex. Two thumbs way up all the folks who’ve contributed to the content there. More broadly, the codex serves as a great example of how a carefully moderated wiki can excel as a documentation repository.