Podcasts are a good source of information and entertainment. While most take the form of talk radio or music shows, the audiobook is on the rise, although these are mostly amateur affairs. But slowly there are professional writers creeping into the market.

Hugo award winner James Patrick Kelly is podcasting his “On the Net” columns from the popular Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazines. In these columns, Kelly talks about time travel, faster than light engines etc, all the usual fare of popular science fiction.

The most recent episode was about copyright, science fiction, DRM, and the future of the Internet. Fascinating stuff. Subscribe to the show by following this LINK.

Do you love action games? If you do, you might want to try out this cool and free one, weird planet. Weird Planet is an action game in which you play as the main character who somehow finds himself in a strange planet and is looking for a way to escape. But you have to watch your step as you are being threatened by monsters.

Of course this is really a simple game so if you are not into simple games you may not find it interesting. But if you just want to have fun chilling out with this free and simple game, you’ll have a nice time.

Want to try it out, Click here!

If you need to back up your DVDs but you can’t afford the ridiculous prices most software go for; you’ll definitely love this. Have you heard of RipIt4Me, this is a freeware that beats most shareware in its class hands down.

RipIt4Me is a freeware utility that helps you backup your copy protected DVDs. Yeah “copy protected”. A lot of DVD’s, these days, are equipped with stronger copy protections – such as ARccOS and RipGuard DVD. A lot of programs even expensive sharewares cannot handle these types of discs. Ripping this files using RipIt4Me is an easy thing.

The beautiful thing about RipIt4Me is that it is fully automated, the wizard will guide you through all the necessary steps involved. And you even have an alternative of using a “1-Click” mode that will perform all the involved steps automatically for you.

A new updated version has just been released. This version, RipIt4Me 1.6.0.0 has these latest changes:

• This version works on Linux under Wine
• Better handling of multiple sets of buttons in a menu.
• Fixed a problem with DVDs that have a very large number of buttons. The cleanup no longer fails, but might take a bit longer
• Improved the analysis to handle DVDs that have large numbers of menus (Ice Age 2 for example)
• The “Next” button in Step 1 no longer can be pressed if a valid DVD isn’t present in the selected drive
• Now checks for CeEKey.exe on startup, and offers to kill the process. CeEKey.exe has been found to potentially create problems when the PSL file is imported

etc.

CLICK HERE FOR FREE DOWNLOAD AND MORE INFO!

BallDroppings is a free downloadable game. The object of the game is to.,.well, there isn’t any really.

Balls drop down from the top left corner of the screen and you’re able to draw lines with the mouse that they then bounce against. When they bounce they make a sound, depending on how fast they’re moving when they hit the line. Soon you have lots of ‘musical’ sounds playing as you continue drawing lines to catch and deflect the bouncing balls. You can also control some thing by keyboard such as deleting lines and clearing your balls!

It’s an unusual game: ‘experiment in sound’ depending on your perspective of this kinda thing, but amusing and strangely addictive for at least a few minutes!

Drop over to here for further info and to download it.

Money Manager Ex is a free open-source money managing and budgeting program.
Usually you gotta pay for decent personal finance software, so if you’re tryin’ to manage your money, you’ll appreciate that this ones free.

But how good is it? Pretty good! – You can manage multiple accounts and checking, savings, credit card, or loan accounts. You can even create your own categories and easily organise where your money goes into these. You can also track your bills and deposits and be reminded of upcoming bills and deposits so you won’t forget and lose track of them.You can import files from excel, microsoft money, and quicken, and also export to excel format. It also supports printing with inbuilt print preview.

Other useful features include viewing spending by category over a date range or by single category over time and viewing income versus expenses and how you’re doing on a budget.

Overall this is definitely worth checking out for anyone trying to budget and manage their finances better, its even free, which helps!

You can get more info and download it by clicking the homepage here.

Can someone please explain to me why this Line Rider game is so addictive? I can’t figure it out, all you do it draw a line and let some little sled rider loose on the curves you draw.

At first you draw lines which are impossible for him to slide down without either wiping out, smashing himself or his sled, losing the sled altogether, or worse still just sliding to a stop somewhere and not falling anywhere. You become devious, a student of the correct way to draw the perfect slope, but almost always something comes along to scupper the little chap’s chances.

Great festive fun.

Checking my email on Yahoo! not too long ago I came across an advert of this wonderful software that helps you keep your files and emails in sync between your PCs. If you have multiple systems in different places like work, home and your laptop you will find this software useful. It’s called BeInSync and like the name suggests it helps you to always be in sync with all necessary info from anywhere.

BeInSync seamlessly and securely keeps your files and emails in sync between your PCs, making them available where and when you need them. It ‘s a great alternative to remote access products. Unlike GoToMyPC, you don’t have to long into that computer to send a file to yourself. BeInSync runs quietly in the background.

Beinsync makes it possible for you to

• Have your data in sync at home work and on the move
• Travel light and get to your data using remote Web Access
• Share any size files with colleagues, partners and friends.

Want to check it out? Click here!

Despite the serious sounding name, Democracy Player is actually a very good video player. But it’s so much more too. Aside from the fact it claims to play virtually all video formats (Quicktime, WMV, MPEG, AVI, XVID, and more), you can also search for videos from inside it!

Your chosen video or videos then downloads to your computer where they are kept for a default of 5 days before being deleted, but you can choose to save them forever too. It even allows you to search YouTube, Yahoo Video, Google Video, and more, right from inside it!

I was a little confused by the interface at first until i realised how simple it was, the “My Collection” link to the left is everything you downloaded, “New Videos” is downloaded videos you haven’t watched yet, and “Downloading” is videos currently being downloaded. So it’s all pretty easy to use!

It has lots of channels built in and feeds from video sites, so you’ll never be lost for something to watch!

I have a feeling we’ll be hearing a lot more about this cool program! You can download it for free and find out more info by checking out the homepage here.

Feed validation doesn’t sound very sexy, does it? I bet you keep yourself awake at night, don’t you, worrying if your RSS feed is perfectly formed? No okay you probably don’t, but if you are podcaster or a blogger then you will at least be interested to know there IS an online resource which can totally debug your RSS feed code.

Just type the address for your feed into the Feed Validator and it will go off, load your XML file and debug it for any obvious code bloopers. Usually if it gets through Feed Validator it will pass muster with browsers, feed collectors, iTunes, you name it. Also a good thing to check if your code is not working for some reason. FV will usually get to the bottom of the problem.

If you love the game Need For Speed, then you are surely going to love this; Need For Extreme. Need For Extreme is a great Free Car Game. With a breathtaking variety of arcade races you get to enjoy the world of racing like never before. Thirst for speed and danger makes the car game more captivating.

You are expected to breeze through the obstacles in each level in a limited period of time. With the obstacles reducing your speed, causing your car to skid and if possible crash, you’ve got a real challenge on your hands. The opponents’ cars will stand in your way. The speed of your car reduces if you take an earth road. You also get to pick up bonuses like life, scores, speed, and a gun.

One really cool thing about this game is you get to compete with people all over the world. If your score is among the Top 10, you can upload it to the website and thousands of other players all over the world will be able to see your high score!

Ready for this kind of challenge! Click HERE!