Loving “wordsquared.com“, and recommend everyone tries it at least once, very accessible and it’s such a simple, but clever idea.

It’s similar to Scrabble, except you play against everyone else in the world at once, on an infinitely growable board!

It’s hard to fully explain, but try it and I think you’ll be impressed!

(For the geeks amongst us it’s one of the first, large, applications to be created using “Node”, a new web application development platform, which specialises in realtime communications & rendering, which is how I stumbled across it)

You can have a real impact on DRM in music today, and cast a vote for a fairer, better, more environmentally friendly music industry, by ordering Radiohead’s new album “King of Limbs” today, directly from their website; http://www.thekingoflimbs.com

Furthermore, the MP3 version of their album is only £6 and the WAV version only £9!

In my humble opinion they not only make great, original, music, but they are leading the way to a better tomorrow for all fans of artist driven music!

Order now to get in on the day of release (I have!) & be part of the continuing music revolution!

http://www.thekingoflimbs.com

So how many password do you have? Or, more importantly perhaps, how many sites do you log in to?

If you’re reading this the answer is most probably “lots”.

But how can we re-engineer the increasing burden of the many different sets of usernames & passwords we must manage? The answer, obviously, is for someone to invent a centralised, secure & authoritative infrastructure for controling identity verification… and luckily… they have… welcome OpenID!

OpenID is an “open source” system / standard, which is both free and widely supported, allowing you to maintain one “identity” and use it with many websites / web apps. Notable providers of OpenID include; BBC, Google, IBM, MySpace, PayPal, VeriSign, WordPress, Orange and Yahoo!, amongst others. Users of OpenID are too numerable to list, but include over a billion users and some 9 million + websites.

So, stop the rot of you’re ever increasing set of usernames & passwords & start using an OpenID, chances are, specially if you already use one of the above sites, you’ve already got one!

If you haven’t yet got one, or if you’d like a neutral, third-party, one I can recommend myopenid.com who provide the leading, independent, OpenID hosting service. Once setup with them you can use your URI to login to OpenID sites (Basically your “myopenid.com” “profile” URI becomes your username; “bobsmith.myopenid.com” and your password will be requested by myopenid.com itself when signing into any sites that support OpenID (if you are not already logged in to myopenid.com that is, in which case you would login to them automatically)).

So why not get yourself an OpenID and support this excellent evolution in Internet authentication!

http://goo.gl

URL shorteners are very useful things in our modern world & I like Google.

Thusly, I hereby encourage everyone to use this new service from Google for all their URL shortening requirements!

It also tracks how many times your shortened URL is clicked and presents this usage data in a really clean & clear way. Bonus!

Penn State University’s Electronic Classics Series Site is a suprisingly comprehensive and clearly laid out resource for clear, high quality PDFs of plays, classical works, religious texts and stories from around the world! I’m envious of their impressive collection! There should be more resources like this!

Just been using “Quick Config” an excellent tool for managing different system profiles in any version of Windows (inc Windows 7). It allows you to quickly & easily change; System, Network, Browser, Application & Desktop settings by swapping between profiles. You can create any number of said profiles, changing anything from a single setting to large parts of your system’s configuration, for use in different offices / client sites / home.

http://intelloware.com

NOTE: If you do want to use it in Windows 7, make sure you run the application as administrator!

The sites below will help you find the free / open source replacement for that piece of paid for software you think you can’t do without; (Sites roughly in order of usefulness)

1. http://alternativeto.net
2. http://www.osalt.com
3. http://www.opensitesolutions.com

Have been looking for a fast, clean, simple large file sending / sharing service recently and my findings are below!

1. http://www.filedropper.com appeals to me, simple, clean, fast & 5GB filesize cap is huge.

2. https://www.wetransfer.com confidential file? Your covered! Up to 2GB filesize.

3. I was going to add a third option for the sake of fairness & impartiality etc, but I changed my mind, the other options just don’t compare to these two! Sorry!