It might sound a little strange to say it out loud, but I like to see pictures of other people’s desks.  Thankfully though, this is the Internet – where people have other odd traits like odd obsessions with furry anime characters – so when you stop and think about it, checking out other people’s desk setups might not be that odd.  Deskography is a website dedicated to showing the world where you work and has tons of interesting desktop setups that might even inspire you to change your own corner nook around a little ‘bit.

At Deskography, you have two options.  You can either upload a photo of your own desk setup or you can browse through all the photos already submitted.  I like to organize things so seeing how others have set up their own desks makes me think, "Oh, maybe I could move X, Y and Z around to look a little better?".

Go check out this guilty pleasure of mine (desktop peeping?) over at Deskography.org.

Twitter’s search tools might be nice, however it does not really leave me wanting more.  Rather than it, I have turned towards Topsy.  If you want to know what other people are tweeting about, sharing with friend or anything else this search engine is the best of the best. 

Rather than indexing documents and content, Topsy does things differently.  It instead shows you the who, what, when, where and how when it comes to search terms out there.

You can easily sort search results by month, week, day, hour or choose to show them all.  You see the top authors on Twitter about that topic, the results themselves and how often they have been shared around.  The more something has been tweeted about, the higher rankings it gets.  You can also pull up results by user – here is my own Topsy page as an example:  http://topsy.com/twitter/mitchkeeler

Overall, I would say Topsy does Twitter search right.  Rather than shifting through junk, you get the best real-time results.  Give them a shot over at Topsy.com.

I really like it when any FTP program can give me better integration with my operating system, and WinSCP does do that and more.  You can create your standard shortcuts to it, add it to Window’s “Send To” context menu, and it can also be setup to be the default handler for SFTP and SCP URL addresses.

The WinSCP installer can also install drag&drop shell extension to improve WinSCP capability of downloading files using drag and drop.

Not sure where to start, after you downloaded it?  They have a plethora of guides and useful tutorials to help get you setup. So next time you are looking for a free FTP program, and you have tried the other popular names out there, give WinSCP a shot.  It might be the free FTP program experiance you’ve been looking for.

Bonus: Need more help? Check out the FTP FAQ from the Web Hosting Show!

Here is a screen shot of the program’s interface:

Here is a little more about the program from the developers:

Photobie is built upon .NET framework 2. It contains all general photo editing and painting features. It is a perfect screen capture tool for you to do screen capture and editing in one place. It is also a perfect digital scrapbooking tool that allows you to apply embellishment, masking and templating easily and efficiently. And it is a perfect animation tool that allows you to create GIF animation efficiently. It supports many embedded filters as well as Photoshop free 8bf filters. It supports user customized brushes, textures, masks and regions.

Now that might look like a lot of bells and whistles to play with.  Thankfully, they have a lot of tutorials too. Here a few of my favorite Photobie tutorials I have found thus far out there (I’m sure I’ll find many more later!).

• Photo Editing Tutorials
• Paint and Graphic Project Tutorials
• Screen Capture and Manipulation Tutorials

You can pick up this free image editing tool at Photobie.com.  How do you think it stacks up to some of the other free image editors out there?

By clicking on the bottom tab, or from File > Search, you can search for users on YouTube, you can select one of many feeds to check out, search by keyword and sort by several different methods.  After you have watched a video you can download it, mark it as a favorite or add it to a playlist.  If you have any .flv files you have downloaded, and don’t have anything else that will play them – FLVPlay HD will do that job too.  Just go to File > Open, and open it from there.

So if you are looking for a great lightweight application to browse online videos, or watch some that you have saved to your PC, PlayFLV HD is definitely worth downloading for free to see if it meets your needs.

Cinemassacre Productions

I got my first taste of the awesome content that Cinemassacre delivers by finding (and then later watching) a few episodes of the Angry Video Game Nerd.  By far, it is probably my favorite series from the web site – but some of the miscellaneous content like Board James and You Know Whats Bull Sh*t is just as funny and entertaining to watch.

Be sure to watch…

• NES Accessories
• Chronologically Confused About Zelda
• The Bad Things About DVD Packaging

ScrewAttack

How could a web site named after the famous Metroid attack go wrong?  It can’t.  Looking at both new and old school games, ScrewAttack has your classic reviews, top ten lists and even submissions from their fans that make it onto the site.  If you’ve grown up as an 80’s child, and still have a love for both new and old games – this site is definitely one worth checking out.

Be sure to watch…

• Top 10 SNES Games
• VGV – Zombies Ate My Neighbors
• Top 10 Fighting Games

That Guy with Glasses

This is the most recent one I have stumbled upon and started watching.  Once again, we kind of go to all of our loves of watching something old, with the most popular series from the site being the Nostalgia Critic.  The entire web sit though is filled with videos that are well thought out, well produced and will leave you wanting to watch more.

Be sure to watch…

• TMNT Making of Coming Out of Their Shells
• Super Mario Brothers Super Show
• Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

Might also be a good idea for me to point out that not all of these are family friendly “G” rated entertainment, so please keep that in mind. 

First Step?  Get Paint.NET!

First step was to pickup Paint.NET.  This is an awesome free image editor with all the bells and whistles of your hundred-dollar programs.

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It  features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help,  tutorials, and plugins.

Grab the Paint.NET ICO Plugin

Well worth having, just as a backup image editor if nothing else.  Since Paint.net does not have .ico support built in by default, I picked up this page:

http://paintdotnet.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1152

To use it, all you need to do is unzip and then put it in the “FileTypes” folder in the Paint.NET directory.

Startup Paint.NET and try dragging and dropping an .ico icon onto the canvas.  Thanks to this neat plugin, it will open just as any other image would open.  With saving as an .ico, I had a few errors at times but doing it again or changing the name of the file seems to have helped.

So there is a totally free way to edit and create custom desktop icons for your next design project or desktop redecoration.

To use it, all you do is type in your keyword into the search box, then select from these types of searches:  web, news, video, blogs, local, books and patent.  Hit the “Feed my Search!” button and away you go.  Next you are given a preview of the search results and you can subscribe using a variety of different services or just grab the RSS feed itself.

If you spend a lot of time watching Google and how the results come up, FeedMySearch promises to save you time giving you the latest results instantly.

Another awesome detail about these icons are they were all designed by hand by a fantastic Deviant Art artist, ph03nyX.  Download them for yourself and make your own desktop look like the Mushroom Kingdom!