Looking for a way to back up your old DVDs onto your hard drive? Want to watch your purchased DVD movies on your iPod? You're certainly not the only one. For some reason however, developers are not very keen on developing tools that do this. Luckily, HandBrake has stepped up to the plate with a free tool that lets you take control of your media.

SiteAdvisor started out as a really good idea. Whenever you went to a site, the SiteAdvisor label would turn green (safe), yellow (shady) or red (dangerous) to indicate the safety of that site.

One of my favorite features in Windows 7 has to be the redesigned Taskbar. The entire user experience is so smooth, and I think they really went down the right path with it. At work I'm stuck on XP, and I went looking for a way that I could get a lot of the same functionality as what Windows 7 offers.

I've been using Windows 7 Media Center as my dedicated media hub for the last few weeks, and it's been a nice upgrade from Vista Media Center. Some improvements include support for up to 4 tuners for each type (QAM, ATSC, etc...), a lot of interface improvements, and HD support to name a few. It can even play AVI/DivX files natively without needing any add-ons.

There have been a few themes that have been developed using the mockups Mozilla made for Firefox 4.0. What's funny is that while Firefox 4.0 is over a year away you can already get the same beautiful design without having to wait.

With Opera 10 one of the new features that was revealed was a "turbo" mode that sits in the bottom-left corner of the status bar, and is represented by a little speedometer.

Microsoft has always offered pretty good deals on their software for students as a way for them to encourage the use of their products, which the students will hopefully carry over into their jobs. That's why a lot of universities have MSDN Academic Alliance (MSDNAA) subscriptions for students, and that provides access to hundreds of Microsoft products free of charge. That includes Windows 7.

I'm sure many of you remember the "Power Toys" from the Windows XP days, and you probably have at least one of them installed if you're still running XP. My favorite was always the ability to quickly resize images with a simple right-click on the photo(s) from within Windows Explorer. It was fast, simple, and did exactly what you wanted it to.

There are some things I never understood with Microsoft. For example, why was it never possible until Windows 7 to have a keyboard shortcut for creating a new folder? Or for that matter why was there not even a toolbar icon you could add to perform that action? At least in Windows 7 they finally assigned Ctrl+Shift+N for creating a new folder, but that's not the only thing that's perplexed me.

There has been good number of turn-by-turn GPS applications released for the iPhone over the last few months including some from big names like Tom Tom and Navigon. Back when Apple announced that they were going to allow apps to offer turn-by-turn directions they said that there would be no limitations other than the fact that developers can't use Google Maps for that functionality.