Download Squad

As I've mentioned before, I'm a fan of apt-get. It's an extremely easy way to get tons of new applications installed on a new Linux installation. Plenty of similar options exist for Windows, but one stands out.

GetIt combines the power of three Windows implementations of the system - AppSnap, AppUpdater, and Win-Get. Once you've got all your engines installed, use Get-it's GUI to set them up (just click the buton) and you're ready to install.

More than four hundred apps are currently supported, including Avast, AVG, CDBurnerXP, Firefox, AutoHotKey, uTorrent, VLC, OpenOffice, and Handbrake.

Applications can be installed a number of ways. When GetIt checks your repositories for updates, it creates installer files in its Install folder. After that, you can:

• Browse to the folder and double-click an installer
• Use the GetIt Gui or command line
• Index the folder and launch installers from Find and Run Robot (or your favorite launcher)

Installs run without user input, and GetIt also supports checking for updates to your apps. I'd like to see the GUI support multiple selections and would prefer not having to "press any key to continue" following an install, but those are minor gripes. For the average user, category listings would be a helpful addition.

GetIt is a simple, powerful way to download and install tons of great software and keep it up to date on your Windows PC.

Online photo sharing sites like Flickr, Photobucket and Picasa Web Albums provide a great way to share a set of images with friends, family, or the whole world. But what happens when you only want a select group of people to be able to see your photos?

Many sites allow you to hide or block photos from anyone who you haven't explicitly granted access to. But up until recently, if you wanted to hide images uploaded to Picasa from the general public, the best you could do was mark them as "unlisted," which meant that they wouldn't show up in public searches of Picasa Web Albums. But anyone who had the correct URL could still access those images.

Now Google has added the ability to restrict access to the people you've chosen to share an album with. You can set the permissions for a web album either when you're uploading images or after you've already created an album. Just click the edit menu, select album properties, and scroll down to the bottom of the screen where you'll find an option to mark photos as public, unlisted, or "sign-in required."

[via Google Operating System]

The latest version of the Opera web browser gets a perfect score on the Acid3 web standards test, which is pretty impressive until you realize that Firefox and Internet Explorer fall short of that score. And if the two most popular web browsers on the face of the earth don't fully meet these web standards, what good are they exactly?

That said, Opera 10 Alpha 1 includes a number of other tweaks that make this web browser worth checking out:

• Inline spell checking
• Automatic updates
• Updated Presto 2.2 rendering engine

Opera Mail has also been improved, as has the Opera Widget engine for the Linux version of the cross-platform web browser.

Having knowledge of more than one language (and to be clear, this is about spoken and written languages, not programming languages) is an increasingly important and valuable skill. The problem is of course, the older we get, the harder it can be to pick up another language.

This is why the Internet is so awesome. It can make the challenge of learning a new language or even picking up a few key phrases much easier and more intuitive.

In that vein, last week, Tokyo-based Cerego launched content creation tools for its open language platform, iKnow! to the public. These tools allow users to create learning modules in 188 languages of study and then collaborate with other users to make corrections, add additional items and discuss the process.

iKnow! isn't just about lists of words and phrases, flash card style. It also leverages the semantic web and lets you "remix" the web. You can add content from Google, Flickr and YouTube to supplement the items you are studying -- a picture from Flickr to represent a term, a video from YouTube to help show something in use -- making the process more engaging. There is also text to speech translation, so you can hear how something sounds and then select the correct context and usage.

There are also courses, although right now they are limited to English and Japanese, that let you study terms. You select what level language you are and what format you want to use and a number of items to study. The web app will then show you words, let you hear them, define them and then move on. After a few words, you will be asked if you "know" a word and you are quizzed and asked to choose what a word means and what it means in the context of a sentence. Very cool stuff.

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