Search giant Yahoo! recently bought Konfabulator and their first order of business was to get rid of the $19.95 charge and start giving it away for free. I've been using the Dashboard for Mac OS X, which is by all accounts copied from Konfabulator, and I think I like Konfabulator better. One reason is that it's available for Windows, too, so I can set up my widgets at work to match my widgets at home and have some sort of continuity. Another reason to prefer Konfabulator is that you can do all sorts of thing with the widget windows. You can make them part of the desktop, you can make them always on top or you can set them so they're only visible when you display the widget layer with Konsposé (press F8 and all the widgets become visible and the background is obscured). I've been trying out widgets, and here are some of my favorites so far:

Radar - Nice, resizable weather maps
systemDashboard - Memory Monitor - Monitor memory and hard drive free space
Multi clock - Who doesn't want an old-timey pocket watch on their desktop?
THCalc - Nothing special, just a calculator

Those, along with the weather forecast and calendar widgets that come pre-installed, are what I'm using now. If you have some other widgets you like, leave a comment and I'll try them out.

NewsForge | Five addictive open source games - I think these look pretty good. Would anybody be interested in trying out jRisk or netPanzer? They might be fun to play online. I submitted this link to digg.com, digg it here.

While I was setting up the Brendoman.com Guestmap, I noticed that Google Maps now has Adrian, MO, in high-resolution. Check out the Brendoman.com Guestmap and leave a marker where you live, along with your name, a note and a link to your website if you have one. I think it would be fun to see all of our readers mapped out.

Russia's Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered in Apartment - I don't know what to say. Murder is not the solution to this problem, but who can honestly say that they haven't ever wanted to whack a spammer in the head with a blunt object?

(via Slashdot)

When I asked which template would make a better evoskin, a couple of people said they liked Plain. I think I have it mostly finished. Take a look. Once again, if you're a Brendoman.com author, then you can use it on your blog by changing your default skin in the backoffice. If there are any design problems or bugs, then I want to find out before I submit this to skins.b2evolution.net, so please email me and tell me what you think.

I heard about Google Earth when it first came out, but I only recently downloaded it and tried it out. Wow. It's worth a download just to play with it. It could be pretty useful, too. It is to maps.google.com as Photoshop is to MS Paint. And keep in mind that I really like maps.google.com. Google Earth lets you fly around, tilt the map, get much higher detail (you can see my house), and overlay dozens of types of meta data. And you can get customizations for it.

I know I've recommended Skype in the past, but there's a new kid on the block and it's very nice. Gizmo is a free voice chat program like Skype. It has free voice-mail, built-in call recording and conference calls of unlimited size. These features set it apart from Skype and make it a good choice for recording podcasts. It doesn't have text chat, which is a nice feature of Skype, but since it's an open project, this and other features can be added by the community of developers. We used Gizmo to record some tonight and the quality is about the same as Skype, which is good. Download it and try it out. My id is personman and Brendan's is brendoman.

smash's world 6.8g: How to play the iTunes 500-millionth Song Competition without actually Buying anything

They're giving away several iPod Minis. Follow these instructions to enter without buying anything:
1. Go into the iTunes Music Store.
2. Click on any Album or Song or whatever.
3. Click on 'Tell a Friend' at the top.
4. Send the message to 'itunes500@apple.com'. (just leave a blank message)
5. And you're all set.

(via Digg.com)

I'm just about finished turning a website template called Uneven (from Open Source Web Design) into a b2evolution skin. I've been browsing the site looking for other templates that could make good blog skins. So far these two have caught my eye:

Plain 1.0

KDE Clean

Take a look and let me know which one you like better. Or maybe you can look through the other designs and find something better.

I've been spending a lot of time working on the B2evolution project lately. I upgraded brendoman.com to the newest version of it, then I had to reapply the hack I had made before. I'm working on rewriting it as a plugin that will be easier to install and will be able to survive upgrades like this. The project needed some help sifting through antispam reports and maintaining the central blacklist, so I volunteered to do that. And I submitted a skin to the skins repository. I have another one under development now. And I've been reading through my new book: Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP and MySQL by Kevin Yank.

That's the boring, geeky stuff I've been up to. Yesterday morning Sara and I flew with Dad to an airport in Kansas. We ate breakfast at the restaurant at the airport with some of his pilot friends that meet there once a month (including Private Pilot Magazine writer Leroy Cook). The day before that I went with my sister to the Apple Store to help her pick out an iPod Mini. We got an FM transmitter for playing music in the car, but the quality was really terrible and we could hardly find a place on the dial that wasn't getting interference from other stations. I think we can come up with something better.