A few weeks ago we wrote about a free audio converter that was pretty nice, but when installing the app it tries to also put a bunch of third-party software on your machine. I made sure to point this out, but our readers stepped up and mentioned several other apps that are both free and clean. One of them, called winLAME, was recommended by Ian and really caught my attention.

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.

At work I use Outlook to manage my email and calendar, but I was looking for a way to sync my calendar with Google. It wasn't that long ago that Google decided to release an Outlook syncing tool so that you're able to do exactly what I wanted. Well, almost what I wanted.

So many people have unlimited SMS text messaging plans on their phones these days that a lot of services, such as Twitter, are using them as a way to notify users of updates. By doing this users get a simulated push notification experience without needing to have a push-compatible device.

One of the things that I really like being able to do on my MacBook Pro is monitor the temperature of various parts of my laptop, and also control the speed of the fans. Using the iStat Pro widget (review) I'm able to read the temperature of my hard drive, CPU, GPU, heatsinks, wireless card, and more. If you want you can take it a step further and even control the speed of your fans.

Have you ever been working on a project where you wish you had a copy from a few hours or days ago before you made some changes? Most people never think about being able to setup a system that manages revisions of files (a.k.a. version control) because they think it's too complicated, but it takes only minutes to do using the free Cobian Backup software.

VLC is one of the most well-known media players out there, and it's been almost 4 years since they've released a major new version. VLC 0.9.0 is on the horizon, and it packs in 2 years of development... so you can expect some great things. There's just one gotcha: Windows 98/ME and Mac OS X 10.3.9 are no longer supported operating systems.

On your computer there are probably just a handful of folders that you access everyday, and wouldn't it be nice to make them even easier to access? One way to do that is to assign your most used folders to drive letters on your Windows machine, which puts them just a click away from your mouse.

For me using a computer without keyboard shortcuts would be like trying to cut the grass with a pair of scissors. Sure it could be done, but it would take a lot longer to accomplish a task that should take no time at all.

Notepad++ is definitely one of the best text editors for Windows, and pretty soon it will be getting even better. The new Notepad++ 5.0 is currently in Beta, and it includes a feature I've been waiting a long time for: auto-completion! As you can see in the screenshot above I was writing a bit of HTML, and as I started to close the "center" tag it offered to auto-complete it for me.