Net Sieve

Guest post written by Hope Schuster

I recently realized that my daughter has been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns on TV. Well, I used to actually watch the show back years ago. So as soon as I heard that Sarah Michelle Gellar had that new show, The Ringer, coming on TV I wanted to make sure that we would watch the show together. Granted the show is very different from Buffy and the reasons that I watched Buffy. But I really grew to love Sarah Michelle Gellar as an actress from watching that show and have tried to follow her career since then.

I also tried to make sure that I looked up all kinds of info on the show before watching it with my wireless internet Seattle. It seems to have gotten some really good reviews and I look forward to watching it for the rest of the season.

I think that The Ringer pilot started off a little bit slow, but the second episode seemed to really pick up at the speed that I’m expecting for the show to have for the rest of the season.

If you’re selling online you probably are familiar with PayPal – and the gouge they take out of your incoming income. With the PayPal Fee Calculator you can avoid the aftershock by knowing what your fees will be in advance. That way, you can adjust your price to have the buyer absorb some of the cost. Cool.

This is a free tool – so enjoy freely.

Since MySpace is drowning in a sea of spam and no relief seems to be in sight, now would be a good time to start looking for a new online meeting place. If you want to get in on the ground floor of a social networking site that offers chat, photo albums and mp3 downloads (that’s very cool), join 3gb community www.3gb.biz.

3gb is so new in fact, their TOS reads: “This is the terms of service agreement.” OK. I can deal with that. Expect the usual bumps in the road as the platform develops. This is the best time to become part of a new community.

Relax a little, will you? Get on your computer and kill something.

Nexuiz is a 3d deathmatch game project, created online by a team of developers called Alientrap. It is available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux (all the same archive). The game is meant to bring death match back to the basics, with fast paced action, perfect weapon balancing, and very excessive battles.

Version 2 of Nexuiz includes a single-player campaign with completely new advanced bot AI, five new maps, new particle effect system, weapon changes, and complete precompiled bumpmapping with GLSL shaders. The first version was released May 31st 2005, released entirely GPL and free over the net, a first for a project of its kind. Since then it has been downloaded over 1.5 million times, and the game is still being updated and developed, currently at version 2.4 and new releases being developed.

Download Nexuiz freeware.

Spring always reminds me of the need to care for the Earth – while we still recognize it. Here’s a free download that can help you in your efforts to diminish your carbon footprint. If you have one.

Calculate your carbon footprint with this easy to use calculator software. Enter in data to figure CO2 generated from activities including transportation, energy, trash or waste, recreation, purchasing habits, food, and more. Lear n where you can go green by calculating your carbon footprint and then focusing on areas where you can make the most positive impact on the environment. The software gives you CO2 footprint details from each category. For transportation you can enter in up to 6 different cars and their respective fuel efficiency, airline travel, bus travel, and rail travel.

To figure your energy use and carbon footprint, you can enter in your location, number of people in your house, as well as energy use from fuel oil, natural gas, and electricity. Also included are indirect carbon footprint categories like recreation habits, purchasing habits, waste, recycling participation, food, and more. Different units are available so you can calculate your carbon footprint in metric units or English. You can also print out a summary of your carbon footprint results.

Enjoy.

Tired of finding out you don’t have the correct codec for whatever application you’re trying to run? Goes without saying. Here’s relief in a free package: Windows Essentials Codec Pack

Windows Essentials Codec Pack is a collection of the most essential Audio and Video DirectShow Codecs and Filters for Windows, that enables you to play and view almost all music and video files downloaded from the Internet. It adds support for (S)VCDs and XCDs as well as 3GP, AAC, AC3, APE, AVI, DivX, 3ivx, DAT, h.264, x264, Nero Digital, DTS, FLV, FLAC, HD-MOV, MPEG-1/2, M4A, MP3, MP4, MO3, MOD, MKV, OFR, TTA, OGG/OGM, S3M, Vorbis, VOB, XviD, XM, WV, UMX and many other formats. Essentials Codec Pack also includes Windows Media Player Classic. An integrated auto-update can automatically check for updated codecs.

Gets 5 Stars from 5 reviews. No adware or spyware. Sweet. Download your essentials at Snapfiles.

Bitmap Font Writer is a free program that let you draw text using a font where each character is drawn in a bitmap file.

If you’ve drawn your own bitmapped font in for example Photoshop, you are forced to manually Copy & Paste each character in order to combine them into a word. This gets pretty tedious if you’re doing buttons for a website, as an example. The purpose of Bitmap Font Writer is to make this procedure smoother.

By arranging your font in ASCII order and put markers to define the width of each character you may load the image into Bitmap Font Writer which the combines the characters for you. Then you simply copy everything to the clipboard to get it back into your painting program.

Sweet! Download it now: Bitmap Font Writer

Can’t say I’ve seen this freeware before – hope you have some bitchin’ use for it:

The program “Satellite Antenna Alignment” is used to calculate the angles necessary for installing satellite dishes. The main difference from similar software is the possibility to calculate the position for all satellites at once. Thus, you get a clear picture about what satellites can be physically visible from the location where the dish will be installed. It should be kept in mind that the program makes a purely theoretical calculation according to formulas and in real circumstances a lot of additional factors should be taken into account when a satellite dish is installed. These factors include various obstacles (buildings, trees), the landscape, the altitude, transponder orientation, polarization, etc.

Anyone may use this software free of charge for private, non-commercial usage. Knock your satellite selves out.

Want to see yourself as others see you? Or at least how search engines see your pages? SEOmoz’s crawl test tool is open to the public.

This tool is used to test how accessible your site is to search engines and can help you quickly diagnose potential crawling issues and give you an overview of your site’s search friendliness.

To run the crawl test tool you just need to register for a free SEOmoz account. Basic members are limited to one report per 24 hour period and the tool will only test 5 pages at a time. Premium Members can run as many reports as they like and the crawl test will test 50 pages at a time.

Knock yerself out.

Problems with Windows programs refusing to go away. Yeah, we all do. Got your answer here – for free.

Revo Uninstaller helps you to uninstall and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from “Windows Add or Remove Programs” control panel applet.

With its advanced and fast algorithm, Revo Uninstaller analyzes an application’s data before uninstall and scans after you uninstall an application. After the program’s regular uninstaller runs, you can remove additional unnecessary files, folders and registry keys that are usually left over on your computer. Even if you have a broken installation, Revo Uninstaller scans for an application’s data on your hard disk drives and in the Windows registry and shows all found files, folders and registry keys so you can delete them.

Your prey awaits as you go into “Hunter Mode” Revo Uninstaller’s powerful approaches to manage (uninstall, stop, delete, disable from auto starting) and to get information about your installed and/or running programs. Go tiger!