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RSS has made everybody's life easier. Rather than having to run around the Web to see what's going on out there in the world, you can let the world come to you. Whether it's news and politics, social networking, or the musings in the blogosphere, the world literally beats a path to your door through RSS syndication of content.

RSSOwl is a free newsreader that lets you read news the way you want to. Along with the expected subscribe and read functionality, there are extras that deserve a good look. Enhanced search capability allows you to find just the posts you are interested in.

You can also search for newsfeeds you haven't discovered yet, helping you to cover your interests even better. Once you find a site you like, RSSOwl will scour the site, looking for every feed that they feature.

There's an internal browser, so HTML content will be rendered correctly for your viewing pleasure.

You can minimize the app to the System Tray, keeping it out of the way until it detects new unread items. It lets you new when you have new stories to look at, keeping you right on top of things.

A new Version 2 is currently under development. It promises to add Usenet capability, allowing you to go old school and keep track of Newsgroups as well.

RSSOwl is a Java application, and is available for Linux, Macintosh, and Windows systems.

Download RSSOwl

VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) is one of the bigger deals out there for taking advantage of the Internet. Instead of using the phone company and its network of wires and switches, you use the Internet as the conduit for your phone calls to travel from here to there. Commercial services like Vonage allow you to make calls this way, although you still get to pay for the privilege. Free providers like Skype are out there, allowing you to call other members for free, while paying to call numbers that aren't part of the network.

The Gizmo Project is another free VoIP service. Like Skype, you can call other members for free, or for an additional fee you can call and receive calls from phones that aren't part of their network. There are differences, however, between Gizmo and Skype.

Based on the open SIP standard, Gizmo allows you to also talk with Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, and Windows Live users, as well as IM your AIM and MSN buddies. file sharing is available through the IM window. Free voicemail and conference calling further enhance your options.

If it's time to tell the telco to take a hike, you may want to hike over to Gizmo and take it for a spin.

Gizmo is available for Linux, OS X, and Windows, so just about everybody can use it.

Download Gizmo

Are you an Amazon junkie? How did we ever get along before having the ability to instantly order books, music, and video, to say nothing of cookware, patio furniture, and any of a zillion other things you can order from Amazon? Here's a tool to make it even easier to order from Amazon at the best price possible.

AmazonWatcher will allow you to watch for specific products, looking for changes in availability or price. Enter your item, and choose your criterion: an unavailable item becomes available, or the product price drops below a set level. When you get a hit, the app will alert you, and you can choose to bring up a web page, or send an email as well. You can even order automatically if you want. It's clever enough to figure out what the price is when you get one of those confusing "price too low to display" messages.

Along with the main Amazon site, AmazonWatcher can also watch several of the international sites, broadening your horizons if you're a fan of Region 2 DVDs, for example. The publisher warns that the automatic purchase option may not work with international sites.

AmazonWatcher is available in both Windows (2000, XP, Vista) and Mac (OS X 10.3.9+) flavors.

Download AmazonWatcher

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant–or on eBay. Never before in the history of humankind has so much stuff been available in one location. Unfortunately, the eBay interface isn't the fastest or easiest way to find things and buy them.

GarageBuy is a desktop application for Macs that allows you to search, bid, and buy in auctions on eBay. Officially certified by eBay, GarageBuy updates automatically during the final phase of auctions, so you don't have to keep refreshing your display manually to see the latest prices. Save your searches (and results) locally so that you can revisit them easily. The Gallery List shows as many relevant images as will fit on your screen at once. Growl support means that you don't have to spend all your time watching things either–notifications for newly found items or price changes can be displayed on-screen, as well as spoken or emailed to you.

GarageBuy is a Universal Binary application, so it'll run on your PPC or MacIntel box with OS X 10.4.

Download GarageBuy

Sometimes you're online, and sometimes you're not. Suppose you're not, but you really need to confirm some important info you saw on your favorite website just the day before. You're out of luck–until now.

Proxy Offline Browser is a slick little tool that lets you take the whole Web with you. Running in the background as a proxy server, Proxy Offline Browser keeps a copy of all pages that pass through it. That means that you are building a store of pages while you surf. Now when you need to re-examine that page from yesterday, you've already got a local copy of it. That means you can visit it again even when you're nowhere near your network, or your modem is sound asleep. When you're back online, visiting that page again will update the cached copy you have on your system, so you always have the latest and greatest.

Proxy Offline Browser Private Edition is a Java app, so it'll run on anything that supports the Java runtime or development kit, including OS X, Windows, Linux, and other flavors of *NIX as well. Best of all, it's free for personal use.

Download Proxy Offline Browser Private Edition

If you were able to score an iPhone the first day out, congratulations! For everyone else, here's the consolation prize: iPhoney.

iPhoney is an iPhone simulator. While it doesn't place calls, and you can't upload your iTunes library into it, you can optimize your website for display in the iPhone's web browser. Sporting a 320 x 480 simulated display–or a 480 x 320 display–you can see how your web pages will appear on the iPhone's screen. Rotate the display to see it both ways.

In addition, iPhoney simulates the iPhone's user agent string, so you can check your redirects and other browser-specific behavior.

If you're developing web sites for the iPhone and don't have one of your own, you really need to give iPhoney a spin.

Two year contract not required.

iPhoney is a Mac app and requires OS X 10.4.7 or later.

Download iPhoney

SightSpeed is a communications service reminiscent of Skype. The free Personal Edition allows you to make free computer-to-computer voice calls to other members anywhere in the world. With SightSpeed you can also make video calls as well–and the person you're calling doesn't even have to be a member. (Non-members must be running IE 6 or later.)

In addition to real-time communication, SightSpeed allows you to create video mail, allowing your recipient to view and hear your message when it's most convenient for them.

SightSpeed also has a built-in chat client, so you can be on a call with somebody and still IM-ing with someone else.

Sight Speed Personal Edition runs on both Windows (Win2k or better) and Mac (OS X 10.3.9 or later) systems.

Download SightSpeed Personal Edition

It's important that web pages be coded correctly. Not only can incorrectly written pages cause problems for your human visitors, but in some cases, this can cause problems for search engine robots in getting your pages indexed for Google and the other search engines. If you can't serve your visitors well-formed pages, there's no telling what benefit they'll receive from visiting your site, assuming they can find it or see it at all.

RightWebPage is an HTML validator, but it's a validator with a difference. Not only will it examine and give feedback on the coding for your pages; it will also fix many of the problems that it finds on those pages. RightWebPage uses W3C standards, so you know its validations are valid. It can add missing height and width attributes for images, for example, which in turn helps your pages to load faster, as well as missing attributes for meta tags as well.

The app will also verify links from your site, looking for broken hyperlinks to missing pages–the dreaded "404″ error. It's smart enough that it will even recognize missing page errors that are trapped and redirected to custom error pages.

RightWebPage is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Download RightWebPage

VNC, virtual network computing, is a technology used to remotely control another computer. While you can use Telnet or SSH to run another machine from yours, those only work with terminal applications. If you’ve got a GUI app that you need to run on another system, you’re out of luck, unless you use a VNC client.

We’ve looked at RealVNC in the past; today we visit Chicken of the VNC, a Mac VNC client for systems running OS X.

Chicken of the VNC can attach to any computer that is running a VNC server. Whether across the room on your network, or across the world via the Internet, you can connect to any machine. By entering the IP address or hostname of the target machine, you can connect with that remote system, running Windows, Linux, OS X, or virtually any other operating system.

Help your technology-challenged parent get online; run “headless” servers in your office (no monitor required); support your end users; the list goes on.

Chicken of the VNC will run on just about any Mac running OS X.

Download Chicken of the VNC

Web pages change all the time. While subscribing to RSS Feeds is a good way to keep on top of that changing content, it’s a fact of life that not every webmaster provides you with one, and even the ones that do may not be tracking what you want to look at. Going back and checking the site multiple times a day may drive you nuts. Isn’t there some way to have that done for you?

Take a look at ChangesMeter. You can configure it to check on your favorite pages, with each URL configured individually for the interval between checks; update as frequently as hourly, or as little as just once a day. ChangesMeter can also do something that the best RSS feed can never do: keep track of changes on your local system.

Just set ChangesMeter to watch your pages or files and walk away. It sticks a little icon in the menu bar to let you know when things are changing, but stays out of your way the rest of the time. It’s easy to add, tweak, and remove locations to monitor.

ChangesMeter is a Universal Binary, so it will run on PowerPC- and Intel Macs. It requires OS X 10 4.8 or better.

Download ChangesMeter