Windows only: While old faithful Ad-Aware and Spybot are good to have, you can add Spyware Terminator to your arsenal of malware scanner and scrubber tools while you're home for the holidays.
Spyware Terminator does just what you'd expect: scan your system for everything from cookies to shady processes, instate "real-time" malware protection, quarantine items, and, ya know, upsell you on the pay-for commercial edition. When I ran Spyware Terminator on my presumably clean system, it turned up a bunch of web site cookies (not life-threatening, but ok) and an invalid entry in my PC's startup. Not bad. Spyware Terminator is free for personal and commercial use, and it's for Windows only. Thanks, jamiemartin01!
Adobe AIR for Linux graduates out of beta and catches up to the Windows and Mac versions. The Linux AIR version 1.5 fully supports Flash 10, which means all AIR apps across all three platforms now work the same way. For more on what you can do with Adobe AIR, see our top 10 apps worth installing Adobe AIR for.
OpenSUSE is out with an 11.1 release that rolls in the latest improvements to GNOME, KDE, the Linux kernel and more, as well as packaging OpenOffice.org 3.0 (which we've toured) and renovating the built-in printer and partition tools. Grab an live CD image or torrent link to try it out.
It's your last chance to save some money buying online gifts: today is Free Shipping Day, and over 250 merchants have promised to get boxes to your door for free.
While many merchants' ship-by-December-24th order deadline has passed, there are still a few you can hit up today for by-Christmas delivery. Retailers from from Dell to Macy's to Zappos are participating. Click on the merchant name from the Free Shipping Day site to get the last-minute deal.
You already knew that YouTube made some video clips available in HD, but now they've got a dedicated HD section that lists these high-quality clips. Oddly you still have to click the "watch in HD" link even if you click on a video from that page.
Residents, ex-pats, and anyone who appreciates New York City will love the latest Google Earth update, which adds thousands of textures to flesh out virtually every building in Manhattan. Take a larger look below.
To get to the updated Gotham, turn on the "3D Buildings" layer in Google Earth, then simply navigate to "New York City." Many of the buildings were contributed by community members, and they've definitely made an impact; hit the link below to see what this same section of Manhattan looked like in just under a year ago.
Like any wiki-style site, Foodista isn't the ultimate authority on any one recipe. But the collaborative food site makes for an interesting, helpful read on food.
The site's entry page has you search for food you're looking to make, or at least learn about, and you can edit instructions and add or subtract ingredients. Each dish carries related Flickr photos and related blog and WIkipedia posts, and you can embed auto-updating recipes into another page.
What makes the site truly useful is the heavily-linked ingredient lists. So if you're not quite sure whether white pepper can substitute for black, or just what star anise looks like at the store, you can quickly find out. As for the recipes, well, make sure they make a certain amount of sense before devoting time to them, but collaboration can yield some surprisingly great results, too. Foodista is free to use; advanced editing requires a sign-up.
Study Stack is a collection of study guides covering a wide range of topics that can be accessed in a variety of ways, including being exported to PDA and mobile phone friendly flashcards.
Studying for the GRE and need to know obscure suffixes? Worried you'll forget a medical term while studying for the MCAT? Everything from major standardized tests to the basics are covered in the archives of Study Stack. You can use the guides online in formats ranging from more traditional formats like virtual flashcards or word lists, to more novel like fill in the blank games and hang man. If you're looking for a way to brush up before a test, it's tough to beat the wide reaching and entirely free collection at Study Stack. Thanks Squealer!
Linux users with a GNOME-based desktop can modify how their time is displayed just about any way they want, and in any order. The Tips4Linux blog explains how, although the exact location of your custom_format setting may vary depending on your panel setup. Once you've found it, you can use any of the standard formatting symbols to arrange your time display.
No matter how clear you write it, some folks just can't grasp that you'll be out of the office for a certain period.
The Outlook development team's blog explains how you can insert a miniature, HTML-formatted calendar into your auto-replies. You basically email yourself an Outlook-formatted, date-selected calendar, copy it from that email, and then paste it into an Out of Office message. You could also likely paste that same calendar into any email service that supports HTML signatures, and if you give that a shot—or find another way of creating mini-format calendars—let us know in the comments.
Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): list.it combines the keyboard-tap availability of Firefox's sidebar with the helpfulness of always-there, synchronized text notes.
After installing the extension and setting up your shortcuts for the sidebar, note searching, and the quick-input bar (the defaults are, unfortunately, Mac-specific), you're pretty much set up to start tapping away. If you're frantically browsing and searching for gift ideas or last-minute work research, being able to quickly enter notes that get automatically backed up across Firefox browsers is no small help. If you're feeling generous and non-private, you can opt to let MIT's Haystack research team examine your notes and timing in their studies of productivity, memory, and the like.
list.it is a free download, works wherever Firefox does.
Windows/Mac/Linux: Remember the Task simply puts web task manager Remember the Milk's familiar gadget interface into a stand-alone Adobe AIR window, but maybe that's just what you need.
RTM's stripped-down, vertically-aligned rectangle is the same you'll see in its Gmail and iGoogle gadgets, as well as a Vista Sidebar widget and desktop embeds. But since Remember the Task is its own desktop window, you can minimize it to your tray, keep it on your second monitor, or simply have it available by hitting Alt-Tab.
Remember the Tray is a free download for all systems, requires the Adobe AIR platform to install and run.
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