“Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): The Omnibar extension makes Firefox’s awesomebar act like Google Chrome’s omnibar, collapsing the address bar and search into one single text box.
We’ve mentioned Omnibar in passing in a couple of posts, namely our guide to turning Firefox into a Google Chrome clone and our post detailing how to use the Firefox 4.0 theme, but it’s a useful extension whether or not you’re trying to make Firefox look like another browser. You can still switch your default search engines, you can still use keyword bookmarking (my favorite Firefox feature), and the extension features special shortcuts for searching non-default engines (try your query with @y, for example, to search Yahoo).
Omnibar is a free download, works wherever Firefox does.“
“Windows/Mac/Linux: VLC Media Player, the open-source solution to media players that can’t play your media files, reaches the 1.0 milestone today. What’s new? Support for HD and other new formats, finer speed controls, customizable toolbars, AirTunes streaming, and much more.
On top of new features, this 1.0 release has been, as software types would expect, given a serious bug scrubbing and annoyance reworking. Obsessive-compulsive playback types will appreciate the better live recording, instant pausing, and finer-grained playback speed controls, while those working in non-common formats may find VLC’s newfound support for AES3, Blu-Ray Linear PCM, Raw Dirac, and other expensive-sounding codecs enticing. VideoLAN’s front page (and just about every page on the site at the moment) has the full feature list; at the moment, we’re tinkering with AirTunes streaming to see how robust its support is.
VLC 1.0 is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems, though it may take a bit for 1.0 to be pushed out across Linux distributions’ repositories. Tell us what you think of 1.0, a.k.a. Goldeneye, in the comments.“
“Windows/Mac/Linux: The final version of the Firefox is starting to show up on Mozilla’s web site, and some readers are reporting update notices. Here are a few links and how-tos you should check out before downloading that browser.
Add-on Compatibility Center – See whether the popular extensions that make up 95% of add-on downloads are compatible with Firefox 3.5 before you download. It’s looking pretty green and good at the moment, with the notable exception of Tab Mix Plus.
Top 10 Firefox 3.5 Features – Breaking down the Private Browsing Mode, TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, little interface features, and bigger changes to the increasingly popular open-source web browser.
Disable location-aware browsing and tab tearing – If those features sound more like privacy invasion and mouse-clenching hassle, respectively, they’re pretty easy to turn off.
Make your extensions work with (Firefox 3.5) – Originally written for the big (bigger?) Firefox 3.0 upgrade, but this little about:config tweak should keep those extensions not yet upgraded working with 3.5 as well, assuming you don’t mind potential bugs.
Weave synchronization tool – Mozilla’s experimental synchronization project only works with Firefox 3.5—but, wait, that’s out now! It’s worth checking out, especially if you’re running Firefox across multiple systems.
Firefox 3.5 Overview – It’s both a video run-through of Firefox 3.5’s features, and a test of the new no-Flash-needed video powers of Firefox 3.5 (non-HTML5-compliant browsers will just get an .ogv video download link).
Tell us about your Firefox 3.5 upgrade experience, or why you’re holding off, in the comments.”
“Windows/Mac/Linux/Etc: XBMC has just released the first beta of XBMC 9.04 (codename Babylon), packed with several impressive new features and fixes.
New-to-this-release features include support for more filetypes, some crazy Karaoke features, improvements to the skinning framework, better music and movie scraping tools for artwork, and support for PowerPC Macs. The release is available on Windows, Mac, Linux (shortly), AppleTV, and original Xbox. It’s a hefty download, so get started! While you’re enjoying your new XBMC install, check out these five awesome themes for customizing XBMC.”
“Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Smarter Wikipedia adds a “Related Articles” box to the mass-edited encyclopedia’s left-hand menu, helping you quickly dig into and around a topic—or easily start a long spiral of Wiki-traveling.
Assuming you can responsibly break away from the big gray information machine, Smarter Wikipedia is a helpful navigational tool. Beyond the “Related Articles” box, the add-on can search Wikipedia (or Wikipedia’s pages via customized Google query) for any term you highlight and right-click on. The add-on is built small and light, too, as its author points out, aiming to put little drag on your open-source browser.
Smarter Wikipedia is a free add-on, works wherever Firefox does.”
“Windows/Mac/Linux: Free application Queued is a desktop application that manages your Netflix queue, whether you’re online or not.
Why would you need a desktop browser for Netflix, you ask? Well, you don’t need one, really. Netflix has a pretty good web site, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be better. Queued has an attractive, snappy interface. It’s fast, it’s well laid out, and it even works when you’re not connected to the internet—so you can reorder, add new movies, or browse your queue whether or not you’re online. It achieves this little piece of functionality by downloading and saving every piece of data it can while you’re browsing online—so it saves movie posters, descriptions, search results, and more.
The argument against apps like Queued is always the same: Why do I need a desktop application when I’ve already got the web site? If you’re in that boat, Queued is probably not for you. But if you like the idea of desktop and offline access, notifications, and more, Queued is a nice little idea. (It’d be even better if it could pull off better Watch Instantly integration.) Queued is a free, open-source app, requires Adobe Air.”
Engadget: “Mmm, do we like where this could go. Some engineering soul has managed to get the open-sourced XBMC onto a MID — Compal’s Atom-powered Jax10, to be precise. In theory, at least, this combination would make for a decidedly incredible portable media player if the price of these Mobile Internet Devices were to hit a reasonable level. Sure, many of the Cowon / iriver / Archos units support just about every file format out there, but you’re still limited by whatever ecosystem comes loaded in. Have a look at the demonstration vid after the break, but don’t blame us if you suddenly get the urge to buy a MID.”
“While
this may look like a photo of New York City, it isn’t. It’s actually a
shot of NYC taken from inside Google Earth, thanks to a new update that
introduces thousands of new photo-based 3D building models. And it’s
incredible.
Essentially, you can take a tour of NYC from your desk with Google
Earth now. And while New York is the first city to get such impressive
coverage, it’s a peek at what we’ll see in the near future with all
cities. A complete 3D digital atlas of the entire world will exist
eventually, allowing you to virtually visit any city you want anytime.
How incredible is that?”
“We knew this day would eventually come, but somehow we’re still misting
up a little — Linux has been ported to the iPhone and iPod touch. Dev
Team member planetbeing is the mastermind in charge of bringing
everyone’s favorite open-source OS to Apple’s handhelds, and while it’s
a little rough around the edges (read: no touchscreen drivers, sound,
or WiFi / cell radio support), it’s definitely the first step on the
road to hacking nirvana. The team is hard at work, and it even sounds
like they’re thinking about porting Android in the near future (!), so
hit the read link to try it out and lend a hand if you can — or just
head on past the break for a quick vid of the port in all its
text-scrolling glory.”
[Via iphone-dev.org; thanks to everyone who sent this in]
“All platforms: Clonezilla is an open source, Linux-based alternative to
commercial disk cloning tools like Symantec Ghost and Acronis True
Image. Unfamiliar with the process of disk cloning? In a nutshell, disk
cloning makes a copy of a data disk for future restoration. A perfect
time to create a clone would be after you’d installed your operating
system of choice, your favorite applications, and tweaked the system
settings to your liking. The next time you had to wipe your system and
do a reinstall you’d save yourself the tedious hours of reinstalling
and tweaking. From that point forward you’d have a customized
installation on hand. We’ve covered how to image your disk with the System Rescue CD, and how to “hot” image your PC using DriveImage XML. Clonezilla is more similar to the former.
Clonezilla
has support for a multitude of file systems such as ext2, ext3, xfs,
FAT, NTFS, and HFS+, ensuring you’ll be able to back up any Windows,
Linux, or Mac systems you have. Clonezilla images only the used data
blocks for increased efficiency on both the initial image and the
restoration. Clonezilla comes in two flavors: Live and Server Edition.
The Live edition is best suited for home and small business users, the
Server Edition requires additional setup for network based distribution
of disk images. If you have multiple machines to image the extra setup
is worth it—the example deployment on their web site is 40 computers
restored in 10 minutes via network distribution. Both flavors of
Clonezilla are free downloads.“
“Windows/Mac/Linux: VLC 
