The Annals of Improbable Research magazine's articles are now freely available on the web as well as a low-resolution PDF download. The high resolution PDF version as well as the paper version are available for a fee (seems reasonable to me :-). The magazine also sponsors the annual (and usually hilarious) Ig Nobel Prizes. A video of the 2007 event is available for viewing on their website.

Witty 0.1.5 is a Twitter client for Windows XP and Vista built on WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). It performs reasonably well. However, as the low version number indicates, it is still early in its development phase. The window captured part of a dialog box that wouldn't go away at one point. And, it crashed a couple of times when I tried to refresh (running under Vista, btw). I think it will be a useful little Twitter app once it becomes a bit more stable.

A combination of holiday busy work and being a bit under the weather (wheeze, sniffle) has me a bit behind checking out items on my list of freeware and Open Source apps for Mac OS X and Windows.

In the meantime, I hope everyone who reads this blog (all three of you :-) has a safe and happy holiday season.

Here's wishing for more great freeware and Open Source apps in 2008.

Samba is an Open Source suite/protocol that provides file sharing, printer sharing, and authentication that is built on reverse engineering the NetBIOS network protcol used by Microsoft Windows. It essentially allows a server other than Windows (like Linux) appear to be a Windows server.

I'm re-purposing a blog item from my mobile devices blog since it involves freeware for Windows Mobile phones...

Microsoft announced an updated version of Live Search for Windows Mobile...

I'm still playing around with Microsoft Office Live Workspace since I think it may become an important in my web toolkit. Tonight I'm working on a Mac running Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) and Firefox 2.0.0.11. Office Live Workspace appears to be behaving very strangely. But, I can't tell where to assign the blame since I'm too lazy to switch to a PC and don't have a Windows virtual machine on this Mac at the moment. At first, none of the workspaces I created appeared in my workspaces list. Then, all three workspaces appeared.

Ulteo (beta) lets you run OpenOffice.org without installing it. It provides a Java powered web-based version with 1GB free storage. Note that you need to a Java runtime 1.4 or newer running to use Ulteo OOo.

TrendMicro HijackThis may sound like the name of a piece of malware. But, it is actually a freeware utility from a respected security software firm that scans your Windows computer to find settings that may have been changed by spyware, malware or other unwanted programs. Note that HijackThis is a diagnostic tool that does require a bit of expertise to interpret.

It works on versions of Windows ranging from Windows 98 to Windows Vista.

It figures. Right after I said I only found one YouTube downloader/converter for Mac OS X in a Mashable list, I found a second freeware option while thumbing through the current issue of Mac Life (Dec. 2008, p. 18). It is...

TubeTV 0.9.2

Ruby on Rails 2.0 is out. This web development framework written in the Ruby dynamic programming language was the hot web dev topic for the past year or two (is it still a hot topic?).

UnRarX 2.2 is utility for Mac OS X to unpack files stored in the Rar archive format. I don't use Rar. If you do and have tried UnRarX, please let us know here how it works for you.

The UnRarX website says that source code will be released on SourceForge. However, there isn't any source code on there. So, although UnRarX lists its license as GPL, I'm going to call it Freeware for now.

Here's an update to a small handy Open Source programmer's and text editor for Microsoft Windows...

Notepad++ 4.6

I find it amazing that this one-person project has been so frequently updated.

DLO is an iPod peripherals retailer. However, they do provide one very handy web application on their website...

DLO OpenFM

...finds open FM frequencies in your area (US only) by ZIP code or City/State. If you use a DLO (or any other) FM transmitter with your iPod or MP3 player, this can help find an unused frequency in your area to use.

If your child (or you for that matter) want to track Santa's progress in style on Christmas Eve head over to read the Official Google Blog item...

Tracking Santa, then and now