I was looking through Smashing Magazine’s “Best Of” for May/June today and found Wakoopa.

I’m not really sure how useful it is, but it’s cool anyway.   Wakoopa’s a little program(~800kb) that runs in the background, tracking what programs you use and how long you use them for.   Kind of like what Xfire does for PC games.

There’s a PC and a MAC version right now.  Supposedly a Linux version is on the way.

Go sign up and add me as a contact.

I stumbled on this today. Apparently the multi-service and multi-platform im client Gaim changed it’s name to Pidgin a few days ago. They’ve been having legal troubles with AOL since they patented AIM.

It’s still the same program, but now the developers are going to start releasing real versions and not just beta versions. Their new web page is http://www.pidgin.im/

“After a long, and unfortunately secret debate (as we could not say why we were looking at a name change, we ended up just doing this ourselves), we settled on the name “Pidgin” for gaim itself, “libpurple” for libgaim (which, as of 2.0.0 beta6, exists), and “Finch” for gaim-text.”

Source: http://www.pidgin.im/ or http://gaim.sf.net

Part of the post that wordpress screwed me out of, was this software updater I saw at Google Operating System from FileHippo.

It’s kind of like `emerge -nupDv world` or `apt-get upgrade` but for windows, where there is no central repository for software. You download the 108kb exe from filehippo and it’ll automatically scan your harddrive for software you have installed, send it to filehippo and then output a page similar to below showing you what software is out-dated with links where you should download the updated version.

This is only going to work with software that FileHippo knows about and can find, but it’s still pretty useful if you like keeping your system up to date.

The next best thing I know of for windows is Google’s Google Pack,

Direct X 9.0c Apr. 7 was released the other day. Download it here.

edit: Somehow the date on this post got set to May 7th instead of April.  My bad.

Edit:   Wtf.   I had a long post typed out and wordpress auto-saved it a few times.  But after I hit publish, it was all gone except the title/tags/categories.  I’ll retype it tomorrow :\