climarks, xmarks, and although not a freeby, you can try fo thirty days: ad muncher. works with all browsers and systems. my pages look so blank now w/o all them adds and other things it blocks.

Kiri (comment #48) mentioned getting a Kill-a-watt meter to see how much power your computer is using. They cost roughly US$30 (I bought mine at Harbor Freight on sale for $19.99) and can save you more than that in a month just by learning what appliances/gadgets are using power even when you think they are off.

Knowing your frugal leanings… it’s more accurate to describe the resources as “idle” rather than as “wasted”. Your CPU may not be running at 100% usage, but to get it up there, it has to consume more power. So by running BOINC to consume the idle cycles, you are also running up your power bill. If you have a Kill-a-Watt or other metering device, you might try monitoring your computer with and without BOINC running, and see how much total power is used over, say, a day. Depending on your own use of the machine, the difference may or may not be substantial, but you probably want to be aware of it.

Just wondering why you’re ‘begging’ people to try Firefox. If it’s a great product, then no begging is required.

@ Kevinf: I also use gnuCash and prefer it over MS Money or Quicken. I don’t think the importing of bank statements is as easy though so I don’t use it, but I prefer the “by hand” method so I can reconcile at the same time.

I also agree with adding Gimp to the list.

@Jerry – the folding software does cost a lot of money in electricity. Most modern computers have power management – so that if you’re not using maximum CPU, it sucks down much less energy. Since I have a four core CPU, I noticed it quite a bit when I stopped running BOINC. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_power_dissipation)

And I can’t stand iTunes. It’s bloatware. I have to use it because of my iPod touch, but it should not take 70 megs and 5 seconds of startup time for an audio player. Check out winamp.

Beginning to look forward to your emails . . . as opposed to most.

I also use, enjoy and recommend Audacity for audio projects and am trying to learn more about podcasting.

Your mention:”At times, I’ve recorded at my desk and on my laptop using a USB microphone.” leads me to a question.

I would like to invest in a moderately good and reasonably priced microphone and wondered if you have found something that would fit in that category? Would appreciate any suggestions and/or comparisons you might offer. So many podcasts that I have seen or heard online have less than stellar sound quality and this tends to diminish the overall listening/viewing experience.

Finally, do you have any podcasts online?

Thanks again for your insightful content, keep up the good work.

Option 1: Run iTunes with Wine (winehq.org). For those who don’t know, Wine is a program that allows Windows programs to be run on Linux computers. Fairly easy to do.

Option 2: Songbird (getsongbird.com), which is an open source cross between iTunes and Firefox. This program runs on all three platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux).

(I do realize that there are hundreds of other musicplayers for free, however, I do really like Songbird because there is little to no learning curve if you know how to use iTunes and Firefox.)

I’ve been using Firefox for quite a while and have been very happy with it. My two favorite add-ons are StumbleUpon and CoolPreviews.

StumbleUpon takes you to interesting websites nominated by other users. You set it up by choosing categories that interest you, then all you need to do is hit the StumbleUpon button to visit some website that you probably would never have encountered otherwise.

CoolPreviews makes surfing a breeze. Any link on any webpage can be opened in a smaller window overlaying the original page. (Think picture-in-picture) It takes some time to get up to speed with it, but it is really a Godsend.

I thought I would share that.