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Tired of Guitar Hero? Beat all the songs and looking for something more? How about playing a real guitar?

TuxGuitar is a multitrack tablature editor and player. You can write, edit, and play tracks and songs. With its graphical interface, it's easy to add notes, rearrange them, lengthen or shorten, and so forth. You can use multiple instruments, allowing you to write and arrange for the whole band at once. With its ability to use both regular five-line musical staves or tablature to represent the notes, it doesn't matter whether you can read music or not.

You can vary the speed of song playback, so that you can play along on your own Strat or ES-335. The "speed trainer" function allows you to practice by playing back a passage that you're learning ten times, gradually increasing speed as you become more confident.

TuxGuitar is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.

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Juice Receiver is all about podcasts. Those little media-rich RSS feeds are a way of like for many of us. Juice plays the part of the aggregator of content.

You can set Juice to receive podcasts the way you want to collect them. Whether it's once or twice a day, or even every 30 minutes, you get to call the shots. You can also configure it to grab all back-episodes that you might have missed along the way.

Juice doesn't incorporate a media player, so you can use it in conjunction with your favorite player. It interfaces automatically with iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Winamp, or you can choose "No player" and have it use your default media player, or you can even handle the details yourself. Either way you will know that you have the latest and greatest and that you will get to listen and view the latest podcasts on your own terms.

Power users can even set Juice to run a command, batch file, or shell script after each download, making Juice even more useful as you get your fix.

Juice Receiver is available for Linux, Mac (OS X 10.3+) and Windows (Windows 2000+).

Download Juice Receiver

Are you an air guitar aficionado? Do you lust after that sunburst Strat hanging in the music store window? If you've got a computer keyboard, this may be your lucky day.

Frets On Fire is a keyboard-based guitar playing game. Using a combination of Function keys and the the Enter key, you play along with individual notes and chords to rack up a big score. You can start at Easy level to learn the moves; graduate to Medium as you gain confidence, and eventually you'll be at Amazing, shredding with the best of them. There are tons of songs available, or you can import from Guitar Hero, or even create your own songs.

It may not be time to quit your day job yet, but with Frets On Fire, you'll feel like that big recording contract is just around the corner.

Frets On Fire is available for Linux, Mac (x86 processors), and Windows.

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Your iPod is a favorite bring-along item no matter where you go. You can jam a lot of stuff into that little package, and be on your way. Music, podcasts, all kinds of stuff to keep you occupied. What about bringing something other than audio content along with you?

podLoadr is a neat little tool that allows you to easily add text to your iPod. Using the Notes feature that was introduced in third-gen iPods, you can jam text into your iPod and bring it along. Whether text documents, web pages, RSS feeds, or other content, it's easy to upload them to the iPod, and then you're off and running. To look at your additions, just choose Extras > Notes and then select the item you want to view.

Because of the iPod's architecture, there are certain limitations here. Large documents will be broken into 4k chunks, and you can't have more than about 2000 individual notes.

podLoadr is alpha-level software, so be sure you have a good backup of any data or media files on your iPod, in case the unthinkable happens and you have to reformat it.

podLoadr is cross-platform, being built in Java. That means you will need to have the Java developers' kit or runtime installed on your system to use it. After that, it should run on anything that supports Java.

Download podLoadr

Did you sleep through all the astronomy lectures in college? Do you still have problems finding the Big Dipper? Stellarium may be the answer.

Stellarium is an open source planetarium application available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Set your observing position and see the sky as it appears. Did you ever wonder what it all would look like from the moon? You can choose any moon or planet from which to observe, as well as any terrestrial location. How about a different time? Set the time and date, and you can travel back, or ahead, in time.

Now about that Big Dipper: turn on labels to show you what you’re seeing. Fire up the constellation overlays and see if that really looks like a goat up there (Capricornus), or just a bunch of stars. You can dig deeper and look at deep sky objects among the constellations.

Stellarium features over 120,000 stars, as well as all the planets and their moons. There is a scripting feature that allows you to record and play back your own shows, and you can even use Stellarium to drive a telescope.

It’s too late to improve your grade, but you still have time to find Orion’s belt.

Download Stellarium

Created by the folks who brought you Winamp, and built on the Mozilla UI package (like Firefox and Thunderbird), Songbird is an open source media player in the iTunes and Windows Media Player vein. Like with Firefox, there are add-ons available that allow you to extend Songbird's capabilities, or you can even build your own extensions. While it can't play DRM'ed content (yet) that's on their "to do" list.

You can play all popular music formats, build custom mixes, and more. Along with importing your own media libraries, you can use Songbird as a music search tool, looking for MP3s and other audio files across the web, or it will recognize media files on your current page, and present them as a playlist for you.

Songbird is cross-platform, available for OS X, Linux, and Windows, and currently in 39 languages and counting. It's still in "pre-1.0″ versions, so it's bound to have a few hiccups, but why not give Songbird a spin?

Download Songbird

Valentine's Day is coming soon. Remember gradeschool, when you got to make Valentine's cards for everyone in your class (and even had to give one to the kid that you really didn't like?) Giving Valentine's cards isn't just for kids — just about everyone appreciates getting a silly, cute, fun card on Valentine's Day.

FreePrintableValentines.net makes giving Valentines easy. The site offers 50 Valentine's Day card designs in PDF format, which you can download and print for free. The site includes cards for sweethearts, friends, children, and even (who knew there was a need for this?) Valentines for robots.

So you can print out 40 copies of your favorite card and give one to everyone in your workplace. Even the folks that you don't like that much.

Get Free Printable Valentines

Encyclopodia is a freeware project which brings the power of Wikipedia to your iPod. Encyclopodia can be installed on iPod generations one to four, as well as on iPod Minis and Photo iPods. The program is really quite simple and takes just a few steps, and while it looks a bit daunting to the non-iPod user, those of you who easily download songs will have no trouble installing the file for Encyclopodia. Installation files are available for both Windows and Mac/Linux users.

Once Encyclopodia is on your iPod, you can use it to import and unpack different languages of Wikipedia from your ebook library. Keep (mostly reliable) knowledge at you fingertips, by having Wikipedia to consult wherever you go. Maybe you could even impress a teacher.

Download Encyclopodia

A new web site offers hundreds of Bible-themed coloring pages for kids (and for adults who like to color as well. There's nothing wrong with that.) You'll find angels, religious symbols and buildings, animals, etc. There are Jewish theme coloring pages, too.

Of particular interest for the holiday season: there are lots of Christmas coloring pages and Hanukkah coloring pages as well.

Go to Bible Coloring Pages

For the advanced techie and movie watcher, there are all sorts of interesting problems to be solved along with all sorts of programs to solve them. One such is HandBrake. It creates MPEG-4 files from any DVD or DVD-compatible source.

The program is a GPL application which runs on MacOS X and Linux; an experimental build for Windows is also available. Output is to the hard drive, but an option allows for iPod-compatible files for those who want to carry their movies around with them! There are a number of online manuals, developed by users, and there is a developer forum.

As noted, input from any DVD (including encrypted) or compatible source is supported; these include VIDEO_TS files and TV signals (PAL or NTSC formats). Options include chapter selection, basic subtitle insertion, picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling, and grayscale encoding. The developer did the smart thing in creating this program: he used all sorts of GPL libraries which were already available: they are all listed and the authors are thanked. As a result, it took only a few weeks to get the initial version going.

A heavy-duty program such as this is not for everyone — so an easier "Instant HandBrake" version is now available, dedicated to making iPod/PSP versions of your DVDs with less futzing around with technical stuff.

Get HandBrake