Download Squad

Cooliris is a browser plugin that lets you search for and view pictures and videos from sites including YouTube, Flickr, and Google Images. It works with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Flock, all of which support tabbed browsing. But up until recent, Cooliris didn't support tabs at all. When you launched the plugin, it would automatically show you a full screen media browser. The only way to search for multiple items would be to launch separate instances of the browser and flip between them.

But the latest version of Cooliris lets you find and view media within a normal browser tab. And that means you can also open up multiple instances of Cooliris within a single browser session. You can look for pictures of kitties in one tab while watching the latest updates on YouTube from Iran in another.

One thing to beware of though, is that Cooliris can be a bit of a RAM hog. If you thought Firefox used a lot of memory under normal conditions, try launching 5 or 6 Cooliris tabs and see what happens. OK, I'll tell you. The browser locks up and you get a warning notice telling you to close Cooliris tabs or other "3-D graphical applications."

[via WebWare]

Sure, you know that your CPU heats up when you ask too much of it. But do you know just how hot it gets? Real Temp can tell you. This light weight Windows application can monitor the temperature of a wide variety of Intel processors including single, dual, and quad core CPUs.

You can configure Real Temp to show your CPU temperature in your system tray or just run the executable program when you just want a quick look at your system health.

The program also lets you run executable files when the temperature hits a certain point. So you could create a script that would allow the program to do things like shut down your system, kill tasks, or shoot you an email letting you know that your computer is about to explode.

Some of Real Temp's features are tied into bulkier system status monitors. But Real Temp is a light weight app that comes in a 170KB ZIP file and which uses less than 4MB of RAM when running.

[via gHacks]

Remember last year when New York passed a law to start collecting sales tax on items sold by online retailers with affiliate deals with New York residents? Basically stores like Amazon had been able to get around collecting sales tax in states where they had no physical retail presence. But New York decided that if John Smith posts links to Amazon products on his web site and gets a commission for any items sold, and if John Smith happens to live in New York, that constitutes a retail store.

Amazon, Newegg, and Overstock were having none of it, and Amazon even filed a lawsuit. It lost.

Now North Carolina is preparing to adopt a state budget that would similarly require retailers like Amazon to collect taxes if they have affiliate relationships with individuals living in North Carolina. And this time Amazon took a different approach. It canceled its affiliate relationships with North Carolina residents.

Search Engine Watch points out that North Carolina lawmakers have instituted tax breaks for a handful of other major companies including Apple and Google in an effort to convince the companies to build data centers in the state. The result could be that these companies will play by different rules than the ones that would have applied to Amazon had the retailer not severed its affiliate relationships in North Carolina.

Jake is a cross-platform collaborative file-sharing client that lets you create a folder and keep it synced for everyone you invite. It's built on open-source tools like Jabber, and seems to have a lot of features going for it. You can't really beat it for ease of use: setup is just adding a folder and inviting people, with no server-side fiddling to do. Even better, you can set Jake up on your intranet if you want to use it for work-related purposes.

The main difference between Jake and similar solutions like Dropbox is that Jake doesn't store files on a central server in the cloud. It just uses Jabber, XMPP and other open-source tools to sync the folder for users when they're online. Although Jake saves a log of the changes users make to the folder, it doesn't back up old versions of the data - again, no central server. This makes it slightly less powerful than some other, similar file-sharing services, but it makes setup a lot easier.