Check out SmoothTeddy if you’re on windows and are interested in a really easy to use 3d modeling and painting application. I’ve never seen one as easy to use as this. Of course in part this is because it’s so feature-limited, but that’s really the point here – quick, easy to understand, fun to tinker with.

OS X comes with it built in, and if you’ve added a third party ssh client it is probably the wonderful iterm and on Windows I’ve been recommending putty, but today I noticed a credible cross platform alternative, the java-based MindTerm. It’s worth a look if you’re on a pc – while you pay a slight performance penalty due to MindTerm being based on Java, you get some handy tools like integrated ssh file transfer in return. On the mac side you’re probably better off with iterm, though again the integrated tools may make you consider switching. If you’re managing a campus lab environment this could be a great choice as it will simplify your support and documentation issues by standardizing on one ssh client.

My love of outliners used to know no bounds but I have to admit my ardor has cooled somewhat as wikis have taken over the role outliners used to play in my software toolkit. Still, I can’t resist tinkering with ones new to me as I discover them. Today I found keynote, an outliner/notebook type app which is most easily compared to products like Circus Ponies’ notebook and aquaminds notetaker. Keynote is for windows only and is pretty featureful – a tabbed interface, the ability to nest notes inside each other, encryption, an API to build extensions and a developer community supporting their creation, drag and drop support, plus a ton more. I think it’s fair to say it doesn’t really come close to notetaker or notebook on a feature basis despite all the aforementioned, but free is free and plus it runs on windows. If you haven’t taken to wikis as a model for your personal data storage needs, or if you’re a fan of outliners, check out keynote.

I’ve said it before here, I’ll say it again – if you have a Mac, go get quicksilver. No mac, anywhere, should be without this utility. I’m bringing it up again today because I happened across a great weblog post that gives a series of examples of how you can use quicksilver. It takes a little while to wrap your head around how to use quicksilver but man, once you get it and you sit in front of a mac that doesn’t have it, you’ll be frustrated. To review, it’s a file launcher plus a whole lot more. Every time you have to take your hands off your keyboard, you slow yourself down, and quicksilver provides a variety of tools to help you keep those hands on the keyboard and off of your mouse. Once again I encourage you – go check it out. Anyone want to lay odds on how long it takes Apple to bake it into the OS?

So I’ve sat upon the infamous dot-com fave, the Herman Miller Aeron chair. They’re definitely comfortable, but I missed out on the selloff that happened during the first dot.com collapse and I can’t justify dropping $600 or so on a computer chair. I don’t even own a couch! Still, I spend more time in front of the computer than anywhere else so some investment in my chair would make sense. I ran across a forum thread praising the Russell Executive Mesh Chair as a more than adequate Aeron knock-off. I’m sufficiently convinced to add it to my personal fetish list. Relatives take note – this is a great gift for me, and a relative bargain at around $230.

Take for example this Pedometer. Center the map on the area you’d like to measure, set it in record mode, then double click on the start point and then each additional point. The system will provide a total distance travelled as you add each point. Simple and useful and two thumbs up from me. It turns out my walk from the office to the post office is a mile longer than I thought at a little over 3 miles, as compared to the ~2 miles my car’s odometer was reporting.

It’s too bad that it wasn’t possible to keep the distance measuring tool found in the code google modeled their map system on (maps24) but this is the next best thing to it that I’ve come across.

If you’re in the market for an LCD monitor for your computer and you’d like to do a little comparison shopping, check out this super-handy collection of charts and diagrams that someone from bensbargains.net has put together.

Skype’s taken off bigtime in terms of popularity, and I’ve been considering switching over to it and ditching my cell and land line phones. Skype has one huge problem though, which is that it’s based on proprietary, closed source systems. If they become the predominant Voip provider we will have effectively switched from one proprietary vendor (the existing phone companies) to another, and we’ll confront the same sorts of issues with pricing and features that we have now. Enter Gizmo, which is based on the SIP standard that providers like Vonage use. Gizmo works on Macs and Win32 out of the box, with a linux version on the way. It’s free to download and comes with voicemail that Skype charges for, as well as conferencing and recording features. The downsides are that it’s still a little flaky, their callin (where you get a local number folks with regular phones can use to call you) service has fairly limited coverage right now, and most importantly it lacks the broad installed base that skype already has. In an effort to fix that, I encourage you to go download a copy. You might also find this piece which compares skype to gizmo and goes into more detail as to why we don’t want a repeat of history with the phone monopolies. My account name is the oh-so appropriate ‘davidhamilton,’ which leads to another observation – it pays to register these kinds of services quick so you can reserve your chosen identity.

Long ago there was a tool called Composer which came bundled with Netscape. For a lot of people it was the first html editing tool they tried. I hated it – it encouraged folks to write terrible font-tag laden html. Years later and the folks from Linspire have taken the remnants of Composer and turned it into Nvu, a free, cross platform, open source html editor. It’s relatively lightweight, works everywhere, and in comparison to the now bloated beyond belief Dreamweaver it’s a joy to use. This is not a tool for professionals who spend their days writing html, but it’s the perfect tool for that departmental coordinator who needs to occasionally edit an html page, or the class of students who need to build websites as part of their coursework. We’re using Nvu on the Skidmore campus to replace Dreamweaver in a lot of contexts – the public labs, for student use, and even for some departmental web development work. You can still end up with font tag laden html but it’s actually cleaner than the junked up code the average user is producing with Dreamweaver these days.