Creating a website is not too difficult.  Making it look nice, however, can be very time-consuming or expensive.  The default program for website design is Adobe Dreamweaver.  However, since that program costs hundreds of dollars, it is natural to look for a free alternative.  KompoZer is just that free, open-source option.

We have previously told about GIMP, the open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop.  We even mentioned GIMPshop, which is GIMP skinned to look like Photoshop.  However, Mac OS X users might want to take a look at Seashore, which offers a number of advantages over GIMP for free image editing.

The WikiReader is exactly what it sounds like.  It puts all of Wikipedia into the palm of your hand in a dedicated touchscreen device.  While this may sound a little pointless in the age of smartphones and wireless broadband, there is more appeal to this device than meets the eye.

Mac OS X users that have the latest version of Firefox are well aware that it has been a step backwards in terms of stability.  Those people looking for an alternative to Firefox should try Camino, a Mozilla browser designed specifically for Macs.

At work, I use a Windows machine and I frequently run into issues that wish I had TextWrangler for.  It did not take long for me to turn to Notepad++ to speed up my productivity.

We talked about VirtualBox before as a free alternative to Parallels or VMware Fusion.  The new version 2.0 makes it more compelling than before.

For the security conscious TrueCrypt is a must. It has several different encryption options, I’m not going to pretend to understand the difference between them but from what I understand they are all pretty ridiculous. Better yet it allows you to use multiple encryption layers at once, making your files super-secure. Best of all it works with Windows, Mac, and Linux, so if you have things on your computer you want to keep ridiculously private, TrueCrypt is the way to go.
P.S. TrueCrypt is also a good way to hide pornography …

Adium gets updated with new features. Click to find out more.

For Mac users out there who want to run Windows programs frequently, Boot Camp does not really cut it because it requires a restart to get into Windows.  Parallels and VMware Fusion both allow you to run Windows apps in Mac OS X seamlessly.  Those two programs solve the issue of constantly restarting, but they are also rather pricey (at least they are too expensive for my budget).  For those people, there is another option: VirtualBox.  VirtualBox works the same way as Parallels and VMware Fusion and has most of …

There are none.  I’m pretty upset about it, but the LiveCD wouldn’t even work on my desktop.