Time is quickly running out for you to join the Screencast 4 Cash contest for a chance to win big by teaching others via screencast.

To be eligible, entries must be submitted by 11:59PM CST on Monday, June 1st. So far, creative contestants have uploaded screencasts on everything from using MAME to being a Google search ninja.

Just as before, entrants can submit an original screencast to be eligible to win a Grand Prize of $1000, plus a copy of Snagit/Camtasia Studio. There will also be a People's Choice Prize, determined by popular vote, and the winner will get $500 and a copy of Snagit. The grand prize will be determined by a panel of judges including some of your favorite Download Squad bloggers.

Even if you're not the teaching kind, there's no excuse not to put on your own critics hat and vote for your favorites! Every vote puts a dime in the pocket of the Youth for Technology Foundation, so every click goes a little bit further in support of the geeks of tomorrow.

"Follow Friday" has become one of the most popular social conventions on Twitter. Users post the usernames of some people they want to recommend for their friends to follow, along with the #followfriday hashtag. It's a good way to find some new people to follow who might be relevant to your interests or part of your wider social circle. Now, some Twitter users have collected data from #followfriday tweets on a website called FollowFridays.com, that shows rankings of the most endorsed users each week, and lets you log in to send your own #followfriday picks.

FollowFridays.com bills itself as the official #followfriday site. I don't know the backstory behind its "official" status, but I can tell you that it's a pretty neat idea. It's easy to miss Follow Friday tweets, especially when you follow a lot of people, and this site lets you see who's gotten the most endorsements, and who the biggest #followfriday namedroppers are. Follow Friday isn't something I really get into myself, and I miss the days when it was less formal -- I think the tradeoff for a site that quantifies this stuff is that it can turn into a competition -- but it's often a better way to find people on Twitter than just looking at toplists and rankings that are crowded with popular users you either already know or don't really care about.

If you want to follow the Download Squad team on Twitter, you can find us at @downloadsquad.

Back in August I wrote about Screamer, a nice portable streaming radio app. KSoft's Icy Radio offers a similar experience with a couple of nice additions.

Icy Radio is completely portable - just download the zip archive and extract it to a folder. Apart from a large library of audio streams, Icy Radio includes several nice skins and streaming video support.

As with Screamer, you should expect some of the included streams not to work. After all, many of these feeds come from ad-supported sites and their owners probably aren't so keen on the idea of us listening to their music without having to view their banners.

The massive channel list is fully searchable and indexed by genre - more than 60 of them. Adding new stations is easy, and can be done one-at-a-time or in bulk from an XML file. Icy Radio's tabbed main window also sports a favorites list for your top channels and maintains a history of your recordings for easy playback.

Built-in recording supports MP3 and OGG (you'll need to download and unzip the plugin into your Icy Radio folder first). Unfortunately, video streams can't be recorded as of version 0.5.

Icy Radio is freeware for Windows only.

I had the most interesting conversation with one of my friends the other day.

Adam: "Whew... finally finished with my latest web project!"

Friend (in awe): "Whoa! That's awesome! How did you make that?"

Now, of course, this project of mine was a full-fledged ASP.NET web application; a simple question like "how did you make that" could easily end up with me not only explaining what I did, but how I did it, and which tools and technologies I used. That way, instead of wondering about the magic that makes all those fancy programs out there on the internet work, my friend could understand exactly what goes on to make that happen.

Well, that couldn't hurt, right?

Adam: "Do you really want to know? I'm warning you... this could get messy."

Now, at this point, my friend gives me one of those funny looks like I'm completely crazy. But being a web developer, I'm already used to that.

Friend: "Well, sure..."

And so it begins.

Making sure you've got a reliable backup solution is a must for any user - and more so for an administrator. Why? Well, mostly because your users probably aren't very good at remembering to back up their own files. And so it falls to you to provide the right software for the job!

Backup software is a difficult category to tackle nowadays as the distinction between backup and synchronization apps has become a little blurred. Prices being what they are, my personal choice is to use external or removable hard drives for my backup chores - my current favorites are Bonkey and Cobian.

To make sure you've got plenty of options to choose from, I've split this list into three different categories so that you can choose from the options that are best suited to your environment.

It's been about a week since Google launched the public beta of its open source web browser, Google Chrome. While the browser certainly ain't perfect by a long shot, it does render pages quickly and has a few innovative features like an unconventional placement for tabs and a unified search box/location bar.

Over the past week there's been a flurry of activity surrounding the browser. Not from Google developers, but by third party developers who have done their best to make Google at least as useful as Firefox or Safari. A few folks have taken a different approach and tried to make Firefox look and feel a bit more like Chrome. Here are a few of our favorite Google Chrome updates from week one.


Themes

If you like Google Chrome's layout but can't stand the bland light blue color scheme, you're in luck. It turns out that all you need to do to change the browser's theme is replace a single default.dll. Your first step should be to the ChromeSpot message boards where dozens of users have posted custom themes. You can also find custom themes at Google Chrome Themes. (Link removed due to allegations that the developers were stealing themes without crediting the authors).

One you find a theme you like, you should backup your default theme by making a copy of your default.dll file. It's located in \Documents and Settings\[username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\[version number]\Themes in Windows XP. Then just download the theme of your choice and unzip the new default.dll location to the same location.

If you're using Windows Vista the path should be \Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\[version number]\Themes\

Unfortunately since Google hasn't yet built a theme manager for Chrome there's no simple way to switch between mulitple themes from within the browser settings. If you're looking for an easier way to switch between themes you can try the Chrome Automatic Theme Switcher, but it won't work with the latest build of Chrome.

[via Lifehacker and Google Blogoscoped]

Holy hashtags Batman! Some Chinese Twitter fans want to make sure that even Twitter isn't safe from the deluge of Olympic tidbits you'll no doubt tire of in the next two weeks.

Steven Lin, one of the originators of the #080808 hashtag said it's "just for fun, a way to write down the day," according to the New York Times.

They even have a nifty buddy icon template you can download and personalize.

[Via ReadWriteWeb]

I'm a Windows user, and it has served me well. That being said, I play with a lot of Linux distributions and there are some applications that are just so much better than anything Windows can offer that I find myself wondering how long it'll be until I make the switch.

For starters, there's the APT and the Synaptic Package Manager. Microsoft has been promising updates and installs without reboots for years, yet Windows Vista still can't seem to deliver the goods. The Linux Mint beta I installed on my laptop recently, however, located well over a hundred updates to various packages upon completion and quietly downloaded and installed them while I finished tweaking Firefox and tooled around on some websites.

And unlike Windows' Automatic Updates, APT actually handles all the software on your machine, not just updates to the OS. What I wouldn't give for a Windows app that did this - and I know there are various apps that try, like Sumo, but none of them really work all that well. Rebooting to complete updates is crap. Get that trash off my PC.

If you frequent our site (and you do, because you're cool), you've probably read this article about the 5 most annoying apps on your PC. Well, it's time for another installment - this time with alternatives that offer the functionality you want without the annoying, fetid bloat that you don't. Note: before the gripes start, to compare apples to apples I'm only offering apps that need to be installed - no portable apps, no web apps.

Ahead Nero
There was a time when Nero wasn't an overblown pig of a recording application, but over the years it's been "improved" to the glorious state of excess you see it in today. What sucks about Nero today? Well, let's see. First, it tries to install the Ask toolbar during setup. Then there's the hundreds of megs of DVD templates it piles on (none of them particularly attractive). Last but not least, there's Nero Scout. Has anyone ever found this useful? I don't know about you, but click and drag or browsing for files has always worked just fine for me.

The Alternative: CD Burner XP
I want burning software to burn discs, not transcode video, play media, serve it over my home lan, print labels, and scour my drives constantly for files I may want to burn. Not only is CD Burner XP free, it's also miniscule when compared to Nero, installs in seconds, not minutes, and doesn't bring any excess crap along with it. Launch it, and you're given clear choices: data, music, iso, copy, erase. The dual pane view makes creating compilations drag-and-drop easy, as does the totally slick dropbox.

As expected, Twitter has purchased Summize, a search engine designed for the micro-blogging service. The pairing seems pretty obvious. While Twitter may have started as a means of individual expression, the service has quickly grown into a repository of news and opinions.

Want to know what people think of the latest blockbuster movie? Just enter the title into Summize and you'll get a whole slew of results. Want to see what people are saying about a politician? Summize can help. The search engine can also help you find other Twitter users who share your interests, making it easy to expand your own social network.

Twitter has launched a new site that looks and works pretty much exactly like Summize, at search.twitter.com. The only difference is that the new site says Twitter and not Summize. If you visit Summize.com, you'll automatically be taken to the new site.

Terms of the deal have not been made public, but Silicon Alley Insider reports that Twitter paid $15 million for Summize. It might have made more sense for the company to develop its own search engine in-house. But since somebody's already done the work, and since Twitter is sitting on a pile of venture capital, an acquisition was probably the easiest way to go.

There's no shortage of desktop clients for Twitter and FriendFeed. But Posty goes a few steps beyond popular clients like Twhirl and Alert Thingy by adding support for Jaiku and Tumblr as well as Pownce.

Posty's main window features a list of supported services with check boxes next to each. Just enter a status update and select the networks you want to send the update out to, and you can post simultaneously to all 5 places. You can also select the individual tab for each service to see recent updates from your contacts or from the public timelines if they're available. You can also respond to comments or send direct messages directly from Posty.

One of the only complaints we had with Posty is that while the window is resizable, it starts out at 550 pixels wide and there's no way to make it smaller. Bigger, yes. But smaller? Not so much. So it takes up a fair bit of screne real estate.

Like most applications built on Adobe AIR, Posty is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

[via Sarah in Tampa]

You've just downloaded that must have program only to realize that Windows has no idea what to do with it. After an hour of Google searching, forum posting, and being called n00b, you finally figure it out.

If only there was a guide that showed you how to get all those needed programs. We at Download Squad feel your pain and have put together a list of 10 free programs that will take care of those pesky "Windows cannot open this file" messages once and for all.

Note: See a blatant omission or oversight? Please add it to the comments. With your help, we hope to re-post a more complete list the future.

1. K-Lite codec pack
   
   File Types: DivX, XviD, AVI, Mpeg 1-4, AC3, AAC, FLAC, WAV, FLV, OGG, VOB, and tons you've never heard of.
   
   Description: Why there are 85,000,000 different audio and video types we have no idea. What we do know is trying to install codecs one at a time generally ends in a reformat.
   
   Thankfully, the good people from K-Lite (Koors Lite?) have bundled all the software and codecs you need into one executable. Cheers!
   
   
   
2. Real Alternative and QuickTime Alternative
   
   File Types: RM, RA, RAM, RPM, RMVB, RPX, SMI, SMIL, RT, RP, MOV, QT, 3GP
   
   Description: Before the days of Youtube, the Real Player and QuickTime were kings of Internet multimedia. Sure you had to deal with popups, reminders, updates, and bloatware, but that 1" video was so worth it.
   
   Fortunately, the Real and Quicktime Alternatives removed the real in Real Player and restored the quick to QuickTime. Enjoy your 1" video!
   

HelloTxt is a web service that lets you send out status updates to your contacts on a wide array of social networking and micro-blogging services. The site makes it easy to send identical updates to Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, Plaxo, Plurk, Tumblr, and other popular and not so popular services. But up until recently there was one major problem with HelloTxt: The communication was one way. You could send, but not receive status updates.

Now HelloTxt has added a new feature called Status Snap which lets you read updates from your contacts on supported networks. Right now, only Twitter and Facebook are supported, but HelloTxt plans to add more networks to Status Snap over time.

In order to enable Status Snap you need to login to your HelloTxt account and click the Status Snap boxes next to each network you want to enable the service for. HelloTxt has also added a lifestreaming feature that shows all of your recent activity on your main page.