I started to use Wunderkit to manage some personal projects and I found it interesting. The tool is still in Beta and is available for Web, iPhone and Mac.

Freeware Genius provides a review here: A new way to organize your life – Wunderkit

I stumble upon ReadtheWords.com service this week. And it’s really a cool service to create podcast as summarized below:

Read The Words via kwout

I tested the service submitting a ReadWriteWeb blog post via an URL. The result is quite good. Once created the podcast can be downloaded, embedded in a web page or listened directly from the ReadtheWords.com site. Actually English, Spanish and French are supported.

Tabs and extensions in Firefox are great functionalities. But when both are used thorougly, Firefox memory usage grows in an exponential way: Firefox Memory usage can be several hundred of MB and growing quickly. I listed below some tips taken from a ThinkTechno post  that can help to reduce and control Firefox memory consumption.

1. Use Firefox portable edition instead of the standard edition: This Smashing magazine article states that portable edition uses 35% less memory. I copied the screenshot for Firefox 2.0.0.3 from Smashing Magazine below:

• Standard Firefox:

         

• Portable Firefox:

         

2. Remove extensions that generates Memory leaks.

This page contains a comprehensive list of Firefox entension’s bugs and some fixes.

3. Clear the download history.

This can be done manually, clicking on the Clean-Up button of the Downloads Window. But this can be done automatically navigating to Tools > Options > Privacy > and Uncheck Remember what I’ve downloaded.

4. Restart Firefox periodically

The service conv2pdf.com is really useful to quickly convert documents to PDF format. I used it for instance to convert some Words document to PDF. And I found the results very good. There are other tools like FreePDF that can be used to produce freely PDF file. But they require the installation of additional softwares (including Ghostscript).

This web page display in a very concise way an awesome collection of links covering all a Web-Developer need to work. There are listing for:

• Creativity
• CSS
• Color management
• Free Stock Photos
• Web_Design magazine
• Tools
• SEO
• Web 2.0

Business Week published a slide show listing the "Greatest Givers":

Twenty-five philanthropists who made a difference, and changed the way we think about giving

We found in this list, well known philanthropists like Bill and Melinda Gates or Warren Buffet but also organization like kiva.org. There is also an item for the web site Charity Navigator:

 Charity Navigator, America’s premier independent charity evaluator, works to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace by evaluating the financial health of America’s largest charities.

According to this article from eMarketer, Facebook is now the fourth web site worldwide in terms of traffic. The graph below is taken from the article:

Found via FaceReview.

GmbmG or Give me back my Google is a custom search engine that cleanup Google search results, removing the annoying affiliate links (kelkoo, …). This is useful when searching information on a product. By default Google results are bloated with those links which are most of the time irrelevant. Here is a extract from the about description:

Searching for products on Google™ can be annoying: nothing but Kelkoo, Pricerunner et al clogging up your search results. Now don’t get me wrong, these sites have their uses, but sometimes you really don’t want them in your search results.

The popularity dialer is a web service designed to simulate phone call:

With "The Popularity Dialer", you can plan ahead. Via a web interface, you can choose to have your phone called at a particular time (or several times). At the elected time, your phone will be dialed and you will hear a prerecorded message that’s one half of a conversation. Thus, you will be prompted to have a fake conversation and will easily fool those around you.

This is very useful to avoid or delay a meeting for instance. Of course this service will not improve communication. Here is a video demo:

This article describes the new conditions to access the New York Times Web Site:

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight tonight.

…

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.