Lifehacker has put out their "Most Popular Free" downloads lists for Macintosh, Windows, and Linux.

The field for all three platforms is generally boring, without much to get excited about. Mostly re-hashes of media-players and peer-to-peer apps.

There were a couple notable mentions for Windows users catching up to the GUI function of the MacOSX with DDExposE2. Don't let the funky name fool you, or the horrid website: the implementation of the software is pretty good and finally gives XP/Vista this great interface element.

this guy and this guy need to hang out.

I'm migrating from a MacBook (plastic, early 2008) to a MacBook (aluminum). Aside from differences in motherboard, chipset, video, display and chassis they're basically the same hardware platform, but even still I'm not concerned since moving Mac installations from one machine to another has historically and comparatively been very easy. Typically I do these transfers using Firewire but true to form Apple doesn't let standards get in the way of progress and the new MacBooks don't have Firewire (they also require yet another VGA/DVI display adapter).

Dear Google Online Documents & Spreadsheets. Please get your act in gear or else I'm going to have to switch (yet again) to the next new thing: http://lifehacker.com/5069999/first-look-microsoft-office-heads-online-w...

In an "unprecedented crisis" not only were the World Bank's internal servers breached, but it happened for a long time and they didn't disclose it. I'm sure they're one of the most-hacked organizations in the world, but even still: come on people! At least give people some heads up so they can all rush to withdraw their money and collapse the economy of the galaxy...

I received this lovely folder in my box at work today. It's about "making IT green", a full-color fold-out, with multiple copies of the same poster, and a CD of even more marketing paraphernalia.

Windows Blue Screen of Death wins the #1 slot in the top Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time. Notable BSoD moments include the 2008 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, and Bill Gates giving a Windows 98 demo.

A savvy geek perusing Microsoft's website for its new "I'm a PC" ad campaign pulled down some JPGs and looked at their meta data. Turns out they were produced on a Mac:

This was discovered by Flickr user LuisDS.

I can only assume the videos themselves were produced with Final Cut on Macs as well.

I'm penning this post from Google's new web browser "Chrome". So, far, I really like it. Seamless installation of the missing Flash plugin, good password manager, all my sites look OK in it, and it's got a fresh take on a number of things that I definitely appreciate.

But by far the coolest feature about Chrome is this Easter Egg:

Having been a web-developer since 1996 I can tell you one of the biggest pains-in-the-ass is getting layouts consistent cross-browser. Back then, we had to test on Netscape, IE, and AOL. Nowadays, things have seemed to settle on either Firefox or IE7.

Why can't we leave well enough alone people? Why do you need Safari? Why Opera? You don't! Just settle on IE7 or FF.

Google Gears may give us offline access to our Gmail boxes within the next couple months.

For those of you, like me, who haven't hopped on-board the iPhone band-wagon, it's OK to wait.

Two factors:

#1) I spoke with an executive with AT&T Alascom who told me they're pretty set on rolling out 3G in Alaska during the first quarter of 2009. Nine months ago this same exec told me "Q3 of '08", but this time around he sounds quite certain.

#2) Apple and Infineon are closing in on performance issues in the iPhone 3G, which will be fixed in a firmware update that should come out as early as September.

Who knows, perhaps rev2 of the iPhone 3G will be out by the time AT&T launches 3G in Alaska.

So you think you're open source? Are you this open source?

There's the technology, and then there's the under-lying ideology that inspires it.

Lately I've been paying attention to conversations about "social networking interoperation". IE: networking people between their websites, rather than under one roof like Myspace. Here's one such conversation:

Talking Social Network Interop @ GSP East from Brian Oberkirch on Vimeo.

Keyboards are so Lame. I mean, how ridiculous is it for us to physically type each and every single letter in a sentence, including punctuation!? Hasn't technology improved a bit over the last 80 years? Why are we still using keyboards?