Here's a question for all our elderly readers: Do any of you remember the primitive era affectionately called 1995, and hearing your college professors speak hopefully (or possibly lament) that soon all the information and media ever created would be up on this web thing and easily accessible and available free of charge? Do you remember how many people went out and bought those state of the art 486s and bleeding edge Pentium I computers, and signed on with AOL or Compuserve or Mindspring to fire up Netscape, stumble on to Yahoo! only to discover the truth.

Even back then, there was a lot of stuff online that was technically information or visual/audible media. It was free, much of it, anyway, as well. I spent way too many hours watching an oddity called a webcam update at shockingly fast one minute intervals, as it delivered grainy black and white stlll images of some forgotten webmaster's painted turtle in California to my desktop in Northern Virginia.

As far as exotic, fine art work or rare, priceless tomes of great knowledge went -- it wasn't all accessible online, or necessarly free if it happened to be available. But for a good portion of the '90s, people who hadn't been online much, or were in denial, insisted it was out there.

There dawns the new century, and the myth of "it's all there, free" started to fade away with the old beige Pentium I and II computers. Things went the other way, though. Every day there was more information on the internet from all sorts of sources, and some of it (shock, awe) was free, or at least accessible to some degree. Is it irony or karma? Who knows? Many people are floored, now, to discover how much useful, cool, credible information is available online free of charge.

So just in time to go back to school (or to impress your friends with your innate intelligence), I've found a few sites and tricks for getting really great information online without additional tuition fees.

Lower your geek radar detector. You got me. I am a tech blogger. I also have a degree in library science. Guilty as charged, just put me on a cell block with wireless and a supply of graphic novels.

I am a librarian who is really okay with wikis. Would I accept every entry in one as gospel? No, but questioning is good in print, too. I believe wikis are, by and large, a decent starting point for further research, like any encyclopedia. If you're writing your doctoral thesis using only wikis, we seriously need to talk. Now.

Wikis, online open encyclopedias, I can deal with. The Kids Open Dictionary Builder makes me fear the future, and not because of all the talking monkeys and flying robots, either. Yes, I said The Kids Open Dictionary Builder, and I typed it just as the name appears on the Creative Commons blog. The blogger there typed it as it appears on the project's home page. Grammatical structure is not the writing skill that comes to me most naturally, but, guys, when you're educators pushing an open dictionary, it is comforting to see the name punctuated correctly.

Even if you have a computer at home, on occasion you'll find you need to use the public computers at a library, internet café, or your local copy shop. Traveling, technical glitches at home, or the sheer convenience of checking on something right now brings almost everyone to a public computer once in a while. It brings a few people -- whether they own computers or not -- to public computers daily.

I have a confession to make. In a former life, I was a systems librarian. I know what's on public computers. No, I don't have your personal information. I removed that from the public computers, along with a lot of keylogging software, viruses, and spyware. What I do have is a few little tricks to keep your private information private.

The cardinal rule of public computing is the most obvious. It's also the one most often broken. Sometimes there's no avoiding breaking it. Sometimes, though, it seems there is a digital variety of the "belief in immortality" that's usually attributed to young adults. This digital immortality seems to affect people of all ages.

So you have a nice playlist growing in your iTunes library, but what happens when you're out on the road and all you have with you is your mobile phone? nuTsie is here to help.

nuTsie is a music client that streams in your iTunes library. Well, as our friends at EngadgetMobile have pointed out, the nuTsie system actually reads the names of your tracks and matches them to whats on nuTsie's server. With this in mind, your main computer does not have to be left on, and the nuTsie application does not require you to upload music anywhere. All you have to do to get started is upload your iTunes Library.xml file to nuTsie's server under your account.

Performance for this service is said to be pretty good, with extremely good connection speeds. Just watch out when you close your clamshell phone, some have been reported to shut the nuTsie applications right off. The service is free to use during the public beta period, but the list of compatible mobile devices is pretty slim at the moment.

In Warren, Ohio the public library is allowing their patrons to download digital copies of audio-books in an unabridged format so listeners can get the full "text" of the book they want to listen to. Listeners must have a valid library card to download the books, that patrons can listen to for 21 days. At that time the books erase themselves. There are currently 1100 titles in the library's archive available for download. To listen to the audio-books you have downloaded, you must have a Windows Media 9.0 or higher compatible device. The citizens of Warren will benefit from the library's advanced digital book-borrowing service, that should increase by about 30 titles a month. Here is proof that Libraries and the Internet are not enemies, or at least don't have to be. They compliment each other quite nicely in fact.

Vancouver-based ACD Systems International this week released version 9 of their popular ACDSee Photo Manager software for both the consumer and Pro lines. The big news is the Quick View feature, which allows for almost instantaneous opening of pictures in your library, both in ACDSee and in Explorer. Neat. I'm not quite sure how they're doing it, but I assume it involves storing a screen res bitmap somewhere. Also included are Showroom, which allows you to view slideshows from the desktop with various effects, and a Shadow/Highlight tool that promises to "save photos you would've probably deleted."

Of interest to Pros are three new features: Calendar Events View organizes shots based on the date and time in the EXIF/IPTC data so you can quickly find pics from certain jobs, Auto Categories tags photos based on embedded data, and Private Folders allows you to password protect photo sets. Great for hiding the porn on your work computer or making sure your girlfriend doesn't accidentally find out what you've been doing with the camera phone while she sleeps. No word, though, on whether the password protection involves encryption, so if you're carrying the prototype pics of your company's next super secret product around on your Thinkpad, you may want to look for something stronger.

BookMooch does exactly what their tagline states and helps bring new life to old books. BookMooch is similar to a used book library online, making it easier to search and locate books that you might not have wanted to pay full price for, but are totally worth reading.

BookMooch is also trying its hand at social networking by creating a community for exchanging books online, and have developed a points program for listing and buying books. Being that the site is extremely simple to use, and from my searches on it, they have a nice selection listed, BookMooch just might have a nice swapping community. The exchange process is simple. Search for the book of your choice,save the search or mooch the book, then buy it. Users can also check out the Amazon info on the book.

Microsoft has released the MSDN library as three ISO images you can download and burn. Previously this was only available to developers who subscribed to the MSDN service. The May 2006 edition is out right now, and Rob Caron has said that future editions will also be available as they are released. Microsoft doesn't look like they will charge $1.50 for this one (which remains to be seen), and it isn't a beta either. They will have considerably less demand for this than for Office 2007 I suppose. This is great news for developers everywhere who would benefit from the library on their PC. Microsoft, thanks for making my job easier. For once.

Yahoo! has released "a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, HTML and AJAX" and they're calling it the Yahoo! User Interface Library. Included in the library are components for animation, DOM manipulation, event handling, animation, and AJAX, as well as a a few widgets like Calendar and TreeView. It's distributed under the open source BSD license, and there's also a new blog to accompany it: The Yahoo! User Interface Blog.

[Via Simon Willison]