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.

In our WrapUp earlier this morning we talked about how a new build of Office 2010 Beta had been leaked, and in this build Microsoft included new icons for each of the applications. It didn't take long for someone to extract all of the icons from the release and assemble them into an icon pack, which is exactly what one DeviantArt user did (our download mirror).

I think that in the future we will be encrypting a lot of our data because, well, most of it probably won't be located on our own machines. When all our files are in the cloud encryption will be important to ensure the security of our data, but up to now most people have never worried about encrypting anything.

This is one of those apps you have to be careful with because the installer tries to throw some third-party software on your machine (details at the end of the post), but the end result is worth it. The Free MP3 WMA Converter from Koyote is capable of converting your entire audio library from one format to another.

A little while ago one of my co-workers convinced me to give the Miranda instant messenger a try, and at first I was reluctant because I had heard how much customization was typically needed to get it just the way you wanted it. Over the years I had downloaded it to play around, but it has a rather overwhelming number of options that you can mess with.

UPDATE: As some commenters have pointed out certain antivirus applications are flagging this application as containing a trojan. My antivirus, NOD32, did not find any virus though. So it's up to you whether you want to proceed.