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Okay. Technology is my addiction. Well one of them. Anime is the other big one. But that’s neither here nor there. I was supposed to work on my painting for class, due Monday, and yet I spent most the day tricking out my little laptop even more. ::sigh:: I am a tech junkie. But I guess you all might benefit from some of the cool stuff I down loaded so I’lll list it here.

• GAim

  This supper spiff program may soon replace Trillian as my all time fave chat program. Both are free, and useful, ie. they connect to all the networks that I want to (AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, IRC, and several others). So if they both do that and are free then why would one be better? The features that come with GAim are along the lines of those that come with Trillian Pro (which is the version of Tillian you have to pay for). Really I’m trying them both out to see which one I like better. Both are truely killer and you all should download them and try ’em for yourselves.

• CDex

  This is a truely spiffly little program for all you music lovers! I love my iTunes but this with WinAmp is quite a combination. It will rip wav files or go directly to MP3! w00t! It’s quite fast too. It’s prime MP3 encoder is LAME (Lame Ain’t a MP3 Encoder) which once was not on my list of faves but now it has come a long way and it qutie good! It may not be as highend as a Fraunhoffer based encoder but hey it’s free and it sounds good. *Note* I am not a true audiophile (aka audio quality freak) so my opinion is rather ‘uninformed’ but it sounds good to me. But the neat bit is that you can set it up to encode tons of differnt file types. For some of the others you’ll need to download their encoders but it’s still cool. I have been playing around with an AAC encoder. it sounds great! Plus if you have my next item you can still play them, even if you don’t use iTunes.

• Winamp 5

  Yep, the venerable MP3 player of the Windoz platform. It is now up to version 5, and if you were keeping track they skipped 4, why? Why not. They’re the ones making it they can do as they please. Version 3 took a fair amount of flak from users. I switched to iTunes. Now they have version 5. I was completely happy with iTunes, so why did I get Winamp again. Well because I got LiteStep (it comes next), and LiteStep is setup to control WinAmp from it’s task bar, which is just darn cool! And they made an iPod plugin for Winamp 5! I may not go back to iTunes. But the music store is a big selling point. We’ll have to see.

• LiteStep

  This roXXorz! Holy Cow does this thing roXXor! This is a shell project based on the AfterStep window manager for Unix and Linux. Thus it will feel really different, but for all you Linux geekz it will feel like home. Basically it replaces the way you interact with Windoz. You are still running Windoz but it just has a much cooler interface. Plus it takes up less memory too. AND it’s theme/skin able! w00t! Now I can geek out and look cool while doing it. Well at least I think I look cool.

• Virtual CD

  This is another truely rad little app. This will make an image of almost any CD. An image is a file that is bit for bit the same as the original. AND you can load them as ‘virtual’ CDs that run of the hard drive. This means that you can put all your game disks in a safe place and still play all your games! Well most of them some people have had some trouble with specific games. However it is free and a sweet way to keep your 50 buxxor disks safe from getting lost or scratched.

Well that’s more than enough for now. I’m going to get some sleep and actually work on my painting in the morning. ::sigh:: I wish I had a digital camera. Then the whole world could see just how much my painting skills are not l33t. Take care all! Peace!