Perhaps you're familiar with Corel's natural media painting application Painter. If you've ever had the desire to play around with it, but can't justify the expense, check out Ambient Design's free Artrage.

There's been much talk of 'Web 2.0' of late, and how 'ajax' powered sites will change the way we intereact with web applications. Whether you think this is much ado about nothing or the transition to a new era of dot.boom, (or as I do, somewhere in between), you should check out Writely, a browser-based word processor.

MacOS comes with it built in, and if you've added a third party ssh client it is probably the wonderful iterm. On Windows I've been recommending putty for years, but recently I discovered a credible cross platform alternative, the java-based MindTerm.

Vienna is a very promising new free RSS reader for MacOS... it's small and fast and has two really great features - first, it's pretty simple to re-style the visual appearance of the feeds using html and css. Second and even better is the ability to create what it calls 'smart folders' - these are meta-feeds which are created by parsing the contents of all your feeds and creating a new feed based on a comprehensive set of filters.

If you're on a Mac, Ecto is the way to go, but the PC version of Ecto is not nearly as good as its Mac sibling. Check out Qumana, a free weblog editing client. It supports all the major weblog platforms, has a WYSIWYG editor, and supports image uploading and drag and drop. It also features a somewhat gimmicky 'droppad' that you can drop images, links, and pictures onto to initiate the creation of a new weblog entry, but you can deactivate it if you find it distracting.

Need a free, simple to use cross platform html editor? Check out Nvu. It's based on the old, oft-maligned Netscape Composer, but Linspire has done a ton of work updating the interface, adding features like a site manager, and improving standards compliance. This tool can easily replace Dreamweaver/GoLive in a lot of campus contexts - for simple student website projects, for lab machine installs, and even (depending on your campus web environment) for faculty and staff who have simple html authoring needs.

The bookmarkshomefirefox extension allows you to turn your default browser page into an organized, aesthetically pleasing presentation of your own bookmarks, including your 'live bookmarks' (ie RSS feeds).

Screen recordings can be a great teaching tool, especially for visual learners. If you've never seen one before, check out jot.com's collection of wiki editing tutorials. You may notice they're created with Camtasia Studio, which is an excellent screen recording authoring package. Unfortunately at $299 it's out of the reach of some budgets. If you're interested in screen recording but can't afford Camtasia Studio, or if you'd prefer to experiment before committing, check out Camstudio or Wink.

If you're using Firefox and are a heavy user of RSS feeds you'll find that installing the Livelines extension will make your life easier. It changes the behavior of Firefox's RSS widget (the orange symbol in the bottom right of the browser window which appears when a website has an RSS feed), allowing you to configure it to your preferences, automate adding your feeds to sites like Bloglines and NewsGator, it improves Firefox's detection of sites' rss feeds, and it makes the process of subscribing to them within Firefox more flexible.

There are a variety of wiki engines available (quite the variety, actually), but over the past year or so Mediawiki has emerged as one of if not the most popular wiki package. This is due in part to the popularity of the wikipedia and its sister projects, and partly due to the strength of their software.

Does your campus block Instant Messaging for security reasons, or lack access to the messaging client you normally use on its lab machines? Or perhaps you travel frequently and find yourself in an internet cafe or library without access to your IM client. If any of these circumstances apply to you, you may find Meebo useful. Meebo is an ajax-powered, web-based instant messaging platform that supports AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and MSN.

Ever need a temporary ad-hoc mailing list? Check out conversate.

Check out powerfolder, a free java-based file sharing and synchronization utility. I'm using it to synch the subscription list for my feeddemon RSS feeds so the stuff I read at work doesn't show up at home and vice versa. It takes a little twiddling to set up (and on the mac I had to use the webstart version, the download version failed to run), but it's worth the trouble for file sharing and synchronization and free is a great price.

Check out these excellent demos of javascript enabling drag and drop functionality in your web browser. Pretty cool stuff, and it works (with a variety of small glitches) across the major browsers. Use the link at the bottom of the page to see other examples of this at work. The slideshow you can rearrange and re-title is probably the coolest of the bunch.

My hate of flash intro animations and useless UI widgets knows no bounds. I have got nothing against flash in principle, but designers misuse it, and increasingly advertisers are using it, leading me to constantly re-jigger my adblock settings. I've been using flashblock to address this. Basically it intercepts any flash object and replaces it with a clickable link. If you need the flash, you can click on it and use it as the designer intended - if you don't, you never have to see it.

Got a USB thumb drive? Tiddlywiki, the clever little self-contained wiki that consists of a single html file, has continued to evolve and now has its own domain/website. A new version recently shipped. This is a handy way to carry data you have to have around with you - simply copy the file to your thumb drive and load it up at whatever computer you happen to be sitting in front of.

Check out the Mediagate MG-25. $130 plus the cost of a 2.5" hard drive gets you a fantastic, extremely versatile little media playback box and a remote control. It is only slightly larger than an Ipod, it supports pretty much every video and audio codec you would reasonably expect it to, and it is extremely cheap.

I have started using Panorama Factory to produce QTVRs and it's just fantastic... It's PC only but well worth a look if you're interested in creating your own QTVRs, or even just wide angle panoramic shot.

Check out Broadcast Machine, a tool that allows relatively easy video content publishing. This is php based. RSS + .torrents = the tivo-ization of your computer. Whether it's this app or another, this stuff is basically ready for primetime now for technically proficient folk. You'll spend more time figuring out how to get the appropriate video and audio codecs going than you would getting your pseudo tivo working.

Note: this is a publishing tool. It will help you to get your content out to the world.

Fetch, the venerable ftp client, has recently been updated and now supports sftp.

I'm a big fan of outliners-- a substantial portion of my life lives in shadowplan, the palm/windows/osx outliner--and I'm always looking at interesting new examples to play with...