Free Software, Part Deux: Software For Starving Students

How could I forget Software for Starving Students (SSS)? Apparently, very easily. Same idea -- free software for Macs or Windows, and you can download the software immediately with a bit-torrent client, or via direct download (defintely try bit-torrent, if feasible, due to file size). Sweet! From their intro page:

What is SSS?

The Software for Starving Students CD enhances the Windows and Mac desktop computing experiences by providing an easy way to install free, high-quality software titles via a user-friendly interface. It includes popular open source programs like Firefox and OpenOffice, intended to help students learn about and benefit from open source and free software programs. The SSS team put all the most commonly used free programs onto one CD to make it easier for students to install useful software (including fully-featured office suites, 3D graphic editors and much more) for free.

Why do you do this?

We created the SSS CD because we love open source software and want to help make it more accessible to students all around the world. Although all students need good software to be successful, many have a hard time getting it on student budgets. We empathize with them because we've felt that pinch ourselves. This software enables students to achieve more for less, and that inspires us. People all over the world are using free software to make their lives better.

After all of these years of mooching off of great volunteer programmers, this is our little way of saying thanks. By providing a tool that makes their great free software more accessible to software-hungry students from Boston to Bangalore, we feel we've given a little back to the free software community and to students all over the world. We are proud and happy to do so.

Have a great academic year, everybody!

SoftwareFor.org

Free, Open-Source Mac Software

Hello, everyone. With students getting ready to return to college (or having already arrived), I though it would be nice to post two site links. If you are a Mac-totin' and Mac-lovin' student (or anyone else, for that matter), and are looking to score some quality Mac software for free, have I got the links for you.

OpenSourceMac.org features software in a bunch of categories -- web browsers, e-mail clients, IM clients, FTP, bit-torrent...just to name a few! Plenty of Universal Binaries here, as well.

From their site:

Open Source Mac is a simple list of the best free and open source software for Mac OS X. We aren't trying to be a comprehensive listing of every open-source mac app, instead we want to showcase the best, most important, and easiest to use. This page should be a handy reference and a useful tool for getting more people to start using free and open-source software. If you think we're missing any great apps, please let us know.

Then there is FreeSMUG, or Free Open Source Software Mac User Group, dedicated to free software on the Mac. More fantastic software listings.

Enjoy!

iPod eBooks Creator Script

Just ran across this handy script today, courtesy of a site called Ambience...if you've got a large text file that you'd like to break down into smaller 'notes' that can be loaded and read on your iPod, check this out...from the page intro:

This utility/PHP script loads large text file and splits it into notes for use on iPod. It is easy to read your book in plain text format on your iPod via Notes functionality. All notes will be automatically linked, so you can move from one to another with absolute ease. It's as simple as turning pages of the book.

And so it is...now you can download large text files, like web site news, or reviews, or any other text, really...upload it via this site, and come away with something easily handled by your 'Pod. Niiice...

iPod eBooks Creator

Play Chess And Watch the A.I. Think

For those of you out there who love chess, here's a fascinating website, Thinking Machine 4. From the intro:

Thinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.

The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the viewer. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer's thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.

I am by no means a good chess player, but it was interesting watching the A.I. sketch out its thought processes.

Thinking Machine 4

New Blog Layout via Beta Blogger

Hello there, K A C H U P fans. You may notice that the layout of my blog has changed. This is because I am one of the folks Blogger invited to their beta.blogger.com party, and so I 'updated' my blog to experience some of the upgrade features. It's pretty nice looking so far, and it does retain your previous template settings, so if all goes awry, I can hopefully revert back to my old layout. A major item I do see missing right now is the ability to edit the raw HTML so that I can put some of my own custom elements back in, like my page count and other tags. When that becomes available, I'll add them back. Stay tuned.

Make a Life Poster Using Your Mac

Hello...this is the coolest project I've seen in a while using your Mac, iPhoto, and PhotoShop. With these tools, you can select up to 98 photos, lay them out in a poster-size contact sheet of 30" x 20", then ultimately use iPhoto's built-in Kodak Print Service to order your poster. Too cool -- looks like something you'd find in the techie DIY "Make" magazine, but for Macs. It's all thanks to Mike Matas.

How to make a Life Poster

Sketch Swap: Share An Online Doodle

For the artist in all of us...there is Sketch Swap. You sketch something, submit it, and get a sketch back! From the About page:

You can draw anything except: if it's only a writing with no sketch, or writing only your URL, or anything a child wouldn't wanna see, anything completely garbled, just a dot, just a line, just a stick man etc. If you want to write something, you also need to sketch a bit... also, please only write in English so we can understand & approve it.

What a fun little toy...it sort of reminds me of passing notes in school, except in an unknown, pen-pal kind of way...

Sketch Swap

Google Games

You may remember back in February when I blogged about a game called Fastr that used the Flickr website to have you guess what tags a series of pictures had in common (don't remember that? It was back here). Well, that was Flickr. Let's look at Google.

You know I'm a Google fanatic. Sure, you got yer A1 and Yahoo and Ask, but I always come back to the king of them all in my opinion, Google. Well, who's to say that all you can do with Google is look up search terms? With all the technology Google leverages, surely there must be some creative soul that has come up with a way to play games using Google in some fashion, right?

Oh yeah. Courtesy of the Google Blogoscoped blog, here are so many Google games to keep you amused that you may forget what you went hunting for in the first place. Have fun...

Google Games

Key Points from the WWDC Keynote 2006

As promised, Mac fans, here's a quick list of links to what Steve Jobs & Co. presented at the Apple WWDC keynote this morning...

• MacOS X 10.5 Leopard, to be released in the Spring of 2007. Partial list of features here.
• Mac Pro replaces Power Mac tower, features 2 dual-core Xeon Woodcrest processors.
• Xserve, also featuring Intel Xeon processors.

A link to the QuickTime stream of the keynote is now online! Find it here.

[Thanks Verne! :)]

Links to Apple WWDC Keynote Address

I wouldn't be a Mac blogger worth my salt if I didn't post links to on-line coverage of the Steve Jobs keynote at the 2006 Apple WWDC (World Wide Developer's Conference). MacDailyNews coverage is here. MacRumors coverage is here.

Enjoy the presentation! I'll be back to report some of my first impressions later on today, hopefully...start your engines!

[Thanks, Verne!]

Mac OS X Picasa Web Album Uploader

Google has had for a while now a service called Picasa that allows you to post photos online via Google, and organize them into albums, share them with others, etc. Very nice -- unless you were a Mac user. Well, that has been rectified as of today. The latest post to the Google Blog mentions, in part:

I'm happy to tell you about the release of Picasa Web Albums Uploaders (beta, of course) for Mac OS X. Picasa Web Albums makes it simple to share photos with friends and family, and now we've made it even easier on the Mac. This new download comes with two handy tools for uploading photos: There's a plug-in for uploading your pics within iPhoto. If you don't use iPhoto, or just want to upload the occasional picture, just drag your photos into the provided standalone app and click Upload. Either way, I can't wait for my fellow Mac users to showcase their talents.

Read all about it here. Links to creating a Picasa account (if you don't have one) and to the uploaders are contained within the article.