free & open source

The Powder Toy is an awesome goal-less, creativity toy, originally created by Stanislaw K Skowronek and now taken to the next level by Simon Robertshaw. It reminds a bit of the classing falling sands games (1, 2), but much more evolved (much, much more). It basically equips the player with a huge set of materials (elements), building blocks and a virtual 2D laboratory in which it simulates a simple approach to electricity, pressure, heat, wind and fire.

The player may save creations on a server or just in a 'stamp' library, to reuse certain design elements. Creations can also be proudly published to the community, which will rate it and eventually develop it further. All of that is solved in-game, without any browser being involved.

Standard creations in powder toy are nuclear bombs, flamethrowers, and basically all stuff that blows up. It is good for a start to get a rough idea. But advanced users build clocks, calculators, collections of logical gates and pixel-by-pixel creations of sub-miniature logics and electronics.

There are currently only videos of the old version like the one below, which will give you a first glance of what this is about, but if you keep looking for 'The Powder Toy' on youtube, the new version should show up pretty soon.

The powder toy includes an auto-update to new versions, which currently show up on a near-daily basis. The development process is fast and open to suggestions of users. There is a forum, that is closely reviewed by the main developer himself.

You can download The Powder Toy from the website http://powder.hardwired.org.uk. While you are there, create an account to enable saving from The Powder Toy. It is all free and the forum and development is very active. The powder toy is available for Mac, Windows and Linux!

I should issue a warning, though:  The Powder Game is a serious health threat, it is highly addictive. Once your first creations get mostly-green ratings, you will find yourself worrying over single pixels/particles for serious amounts of time, just to improve your creations.

Edit: The Powder Toy recently opened its gates to other developers.

Edit: The Powder Toy's website is now: http://powdertoy.co.uk

In the last weeks I stumbled over one of my new favourite applications:

The XBMC Media Center.

The name comes from XBox Media Center. It was first developed for the Xbox and is now also available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. XBMC is best described as a media hub, and it is free!

I usually tend to more spartanic software like MPlayer without GUI, but this one is great. It is simply built for your comfort. You can view Pictures and Movies, listen to your Music and all that over your home network or you can use plugins and scripts to view YouTube videos, read your favourite RSS feeds, get the weatherforecast etc. And all that with a fluid and sexy interface that is even skinnable!
Since XBMC comes from the Xbox, a great way to use XBMC is a gamepad or nearly any other input device. You have a wireless gamepad? That's perfect. Even the integrated filemanager works with it.

You have to look at it yourself. Start or download it at the XBMC homepage, or go directly to the XBMC flickr page to get an impression.

Reading for free?
With Project Gutenberg that's possible with over 25.000 books. You can download classic books, ranging from Homer's Iliad to Bram Stoker's Dracula, Edgar Allan Poe's Raven, or H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds in a variety of formats. Usually plain text format and HTML-versions are available, but often even additional formats like the plucker e-book reader format or even audio books in mp3 format are available.
The main languages are Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish and Tagalog, but alltogether there are books in over 40 languages between Afrikaans and Yiddish.

While the media world whines about it's loss of sales, the open source movement produces more and more excellent content. Using up-to-date open source 3D tools, two beautifully rendered movies went public:

The 10 minute animated movie Big Buck Bunny is a must see. It is available on its own homepage in a variety of formats and sizes and completely open source.

Another, older open source movie you should have a look at is elephants dream ( (c) copyright 2006, Blender Foundation / Netherlands Media Art Institute / www.elephantsdream.org), released under the creative commons licence.

PortableApps is a very nice software suite for the ultra mobile windows user. You can download many applications that have been made portable, which means they can be run from a USB pen drive or similar devices, storing their data on the stick and (ideally) leaving no traces behind on the host machine.