Student web application Notely keeps track of your to-do’s, classes, lecture notes, bookmarks, and calendar in an attractive interface. Associate notes and tasks with classes, and even enter complicated mathematical formulas into your notes and upload related files. Notely also doesn’t lock up your data; your calendar is available in iCal and you can export all your notes and lists into PDF, Word, text or CSV (Excel) files at any time, as well as RSS feeds. Notely also offers a mobile version for easy cell phone access and a Facebook application. For the student looking to get and stay organised this school year online, Notely looks like a great option.

More companies are monitoring email automatically, using systems that analyse outgoing messages for red flags, like foul language, customer data and competitors’ names automatically.

It’s not spam, it’s bacn. A new email term was born this week — bacn, an intentionally vowel-less buzzword defined as:

Email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.

While techies don’t need yet another buzzword, bacn’s definitely a growing issue. As it is I route bacn to a “when I have time” label in Gmail, and often I never get the time. How about you? How much bacn do you get—and what do you do about it?

Listen to your iTunes library from any web browser using Anywhere.FM, a slick webapp that hosts and streams your music with its web-based player. The Anywhere.FM beta is almost too good to be true right now, with free unlimited uploads and listens (but the service may charge in the future). Download a free Anywhere.FM iTunes uploader application that will detect your library and upload all your songs to Anywhere.FM for you.

Reader Aaron keeps his computer on for easy remote access and for nightly scheduled tasks (like backups and defrags), but didn’t want to waste the energy an always-on computer would. So he hacked together a network setup that uses power-saving settings and Wake on LAN technology to get both energy efficiency AND constant availability. He estimates this new setup saves him almost $200 a year in energy bills and reduces his carbon emissions by 234lbs (!!). Here’s how he did it:

Windows only: Duplicate file cleanup utility DoubleKiller scans folders for identical files so you can delete or move them off your PC’s hard drive to free up space. Like Easy Duplicate Finder, DoubleKiller can scan more than one folder at a time, and compare binary files’ checksums. Exclude certain file types and set your own criteria for how files are determined to be the same (based on name, size, date and/or CRC.) DoubleKiller did a great job de-duping my music collection, much better than xiTunes’ built-in “Show Duplicates” feature. DoubleKiller is a free download for Windows only. Thanks, shankar!

You can download the entire contents of Wikipedia and run your own sped-up version locally. The Software Engineering Laboratory walks you through the process of downloading and setting up your own Wikipedia. The tutorial even includes building a customized JavaScript search capability. Don’t bank on getting this done in an afternoon —the entire contents of Wikipedia are approximately 2.9 gigabytes. If you’ve got a broadband connection, it will take anywhere between 6 and 10 hours to download the contents. The process uses only open source software and requires a decent knowledge of scripting.

The power hungry Pentium III Linux computer you have running in the closet is a perfect candidate for a virtual machine conversion. Fortunately, it is possible to convert that computer into a virtual machine and ditch the energy hog. The Windley’s Technometria weblog runs down the surprisingly easy (yet lengthy) process of converting a physical computer into a VMWare virtual machine. I could have just rebuilt the whole machine from scratch on a new virtual machine, but that takes a lot of time and the old build isn’t that out of date (one year) and works fine. So, I set out to discover how to transfer a physical machine to a virtual machine.

Mac users can virtualise and dual-boot the same partition — have your cake and eat it too!

Mac only: Freeware app WeatherDock is a lightweight application that provides one-click access to your local weather through the menubar or dock, updating the weather every 30 minutes. With an extremely light memory footprint and an unobtrusive interface, I’ll take WeatherDock over a Dashboard weather widget any day. WeatherDock is a free download for Mac only.

Consumer Reports’ crash test videos let you watch crash tests on several makes and models tested using the (American) Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crash test. Hearing that a car scores acceptable or poor on a crash test is one thing, but actually seeing a dummy’s head flopping around is another thing entirely. The videos are available for/applicable to vehicles as old as 1995, but most of the cars tested are newer than 2000. Looks like a good resource to check out before you buy your next car.