• Lifehacker Best Of 2008 Roundup
• Howto: Add Items to the Right-Click Menu in Nautilus | Techthrob.com
  GUI app to customize the nautilus right click menu. An essentially feature of any descent file manager.
• Best Of 2008: Most Popular Free Windows Downloads of 2008
  An impressive list of some damn fine looking software. Could Launchy actually have some competition?

Of course, I've tinkered with tunneling X through SSH, tunneling VNC, the somewhat faster tight VNC, and I even tried the XRDP project which aims to provide a Windows compatible RDP server (remote desktop) for *nix systems. In the past I'd combine one of the above with a bare minimal window manager like ratpoison or evilWM, and I'd achieve somewhat usable speeds. Certainly tight VNC isn't a bad option, and it can even provide for detachable and re-attachable X sessions, but nothing has really lured me away from screen till now.

Enter NoMachine's NX. All I can say is I am simple stunned. The speeds are phenomenal. Indeed, nothing really prepared me for this kind of remote X goodness. I have a Gnome desktop running, and I am happily rediscovering X Windows and the Linux desktop after a long absence. As much as I love ncurses and screen, I think it would be foolish to deny that certain applications can benefit from a graphical interface. So, If you need remote access to your Linux desktop, I would definitely check it out. There is an open source offshoot called FreeNX, which is what I currently have installed on my Ubuntu system. NoMachine is also kind enough to offer their server with few strings attached, and clients are available for virtually all platforms.

• Compiz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  A crazy 3D window manager for *nix systems. You can use this in place of metacity on a gnome desktop.
• Alan Doyle » Setup FreeNX under Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)
  This thing is so fast I'm speechless. After fiddling with XRDP and VNC, I've decided this is the definitive remote desktop solution for Linux. And it all happens over ssh automagically (no tunneling required, like with VNC).
• rss2email
  A handy tool for delivering RSS feeds to your email account.

Now, if only it was possible to detach and reattach XDMCP sessions (like you can RDP sessions), then maybe I'd go with a graphical client. Something clumsily approximating remote desktop's "resummability" can be accomplished in VNC, but I'm just not convinced.

• RTorrentUserGuide - The libTorrent and rTorrent Project - Trac
  The indispensable rTorrent user guide.
• polishlinux.org » rTorrent — console P2P!
  Here are a couple of nice screen shots explaining rTorrent's window.
• Howto: Use rtorrent like a pro « Motho ke motho ka botho
• wTorrent - Trac
  You can even use it with a web front end.

• AppleInsider | Apple ordered to end exclusive iPhone deal with France's Orange
  I wish something similar would happen in the States. If I could use the iPhone with Verizon I'd almost definitely get one.
• Bash Shell PS1: 10 Examples to Make Your Linux Prompt like Angelina Jolie
• Huffduffer
  Delicious for audio files.
• Lastpod
  An audioscrobbler (last.fm) client that works nice with the iPod. Very useful for those not using iTunes.

The idea behind iTunes "genius" feature is to scour your music database and queue up tracks similar to the one you are currently listening to. How well it does this is debatable. iTunes seems to cook up it's "similarity" data based on the listening and purchasing habits of it's users. Interestingly, if everyone's listening habits were completely eclectic, and if they always kept their player on random, there would be nothing to go on. Fortunately, this isn't the case.

Sometimes these genius playlists are spot on, other times they are wildly divergent. Either way it's kind of fun.
Unfortunately iTunes doesn't make their "genius" info available via web services, so my plugin leverages Last FM's web services instead, which will give you a list of similar tracks for any track, as well as a list of similar artists. Once again, results vary.
Here's an example:

>>> Looking up "When We Get Famous" by Math And Physics Club
Merging with current Playlist

Found 149 Similar tracks according to Last FM
Found track: Mars by The Lucksmiths
Found track: Young and Dumb by The Lucksmiths
Found track: Get It Right by The Fairways
Found track: Twee by Tullycraft
Found track: Leaders of the New School by Tullycraft
Found track: Emblematic by Pipas
Found track: Run Run Run by Pipas
Found track: Popkiss by Blueboy
Found track: Talulah Gosh by Talulah Gosh
Found track: One Two Three Four by Acid House Kings
Found track: Springtime Sunshine by The Shermans
... and so on.

Here's a screen shot:

I've tried this on J. River Media Center versions 12 and 13, and also on Jukebox. Here's the installer:
J. River SmartAlec Plugin v. 0.1

Here's the source code as well, in case anyone wants to poke around. I did this in MS's Visual C# Express Edition. If you do anything cool or useful please send me a copy. The project uses Martin Lottering's CheckBoxComboBox control which can be found on CodeProject, as well as an XML-RPC wrapper which can be found here.

J. River SmartAlec Plugin v. 0.1 source

• Screenwm
  An improvement on the invaluable console multiplexer "screen".
• Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops - New York Times
  This was embarrassingly predicatable. What did they think these kids were going to do on their laptops... crossword puzzles?
• Vista Keyboard Shortcuts

• ExtremeTech | Ten Must-Have Gadgets for Windows Vista Sidebar
  I've always been suspicious of sidebars and other desktop applets, long before Vista came out (the concept has existed on Linux and OS X for a while now). Sure, they can be fun, but I'm not convinced they are anything more than resource hungry toys. If there really is some piece of software you need running all the time, why not have it in your system tray? Is the Vista sidebar simply extra overhead, or does it actually provide a framework for coding light weight applets? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I suppose computers are meant to be fun as well as useful.
• ExtremeTech | Speed Up Windows Vista
  A descent article on tweaking Vista for performance.
• LibraryThing
  LibraryThing allows you to catalog your books online. "Why?", you might ask... well, LibraryThing will connect you with people who read the same things, and offer recommendations. It also allows you to display what you are reading on your blog.

I ended up going with EveryDNS. They provide a dynamic DNS perl client (eDNS.pl) you can use to keep their nameservers up to date with your IP address. If you are behind a firewall (and you probably are), you first need to figure out what your real IP address is, and then use this with their perl script. To do this I simply use wget in conjunction with the very useful site www.showmyip.com. This site will offer up your IP address in xml, html, rss, or simply plain ole text format. I then use head and cut to grab my IP and pass it off to eDNS. Sed would probably be easier. My crontab entry looks like this:

55 */6 * * * /usr/local/bin/eDNS.pl -u USER -p PASS -ip $(wget -q -O - http://www.showmyip.com/simple/ | head -1 | cut -d ' ' -f 1) -d DOMAIN

This updates my IP address every 6 hours.

• FlickrCash
  This is an amazingly cool use of javascript and AJAX. Just type in some keywords and this site searches Flickr for matching images, then presents them in a fullscreen thumbnail gallery. While you are viewing it caches the next couple of pages for you.
• DC++ your files, your way, no limits
  This seems to be a popular up and coming p2p protocol.
• Wired News: Downloading Is a Packrat's Dream
  Obsessive hoarding in the digital age.
• Microsoft: Make our HD Photo format a standard | CNET News.com
  This new photo standard sounds great, and MS is actually playing nice and wants to make it an open format. It's compression algorithm is roughly twice as efficient as jpeg apparently, meaning for the same file size you will have a much better quality image.