Web-based music search tool Mix Turtle creates playlists of songs you find online. Working from an index of millions of songs, Mix Turtle supplies suggestions to your search terms as you enter them. Covering a broad spectrum of time and tastes, Mix Turtle returned impressive results for diverse searches such as Miley Cyrus, Robert Miles, and Miles Davis. Once you find songs you would like to listen to, you simply click on them to start playing or click on the plus symbol next to the song to add it to your playlist. Create an accoung and log in to save your playlists, but a login is not required to use the service. The playback applet has no control for volume or jumping about within the track that is playing, but otherwise the playback is clean and the quality of the tracks high. While not a replacement for more robust service like Pandora, song selection was easy and playback enjoyable. Mix Turtle is free to use. Mix Turtle [via Webware]
Our brothers in gadgetry Gizmodo make the case for why jailbreaking your iPhone is worth it even with the App Store. Here’s why we still need the iPhone app black market.
Windows only: Free, open-source application Halite is a BitTorrent client with a focus on a small memory footprint. With Halite running and actively downloading on my system, I never saw the memory usage crest 10MB of RAM—which, as BitTorrent weblog TorrentFreak points out, is about half the memory consumption of the popular-for-its-small-footprint uTorrent. Granted, Halite doesn’t have near the advanced features of uTorrent, but it does support most basic features, like encryption and selective file downloading. If all you want is a no-nonsense BitTorrent client that can grab your downloads with the best of them, Halite may be just what you need. Halite is free, Windows only.
Halite [via TorrentFreak]There’s a reason there’s still so much paper around in this hyper-connected, everything-online age: the stuff is cheap, portable, compatible with all your applications, and everyone masters the interface by the time they’re out of the first grade. Ingenious hackers and productivity thinkers, however, have taken paper to the next level in a huge variety of ways, creating templates for pocket organisers, super-handy calendars, thoughtful gifts, and even makeshift tools. Fire up your printer and let’s take a stroll through some of the best printable productivity tools out there. Photo by Cirofono.
Windows only: Backup utility Double Driver lists all the hardware drivers installed on your system and creates backups of both the actual drivers and lists of the driver names. While handy with any computer, Double Driver really shines if you have a computer that came with pre-installed drivers that are hard if not impossible to come by. With a few clicks you’ll have those archaic laptop drivers backed up and ready to put back to work after a fresh install. Double Driver is a free download for Windows only. Double Driver [via gHacks]
Firefox with Greasemonkey: The Google Reader for Wider Screens Greasemonkey script uses all the horizontal space available in GReader for better viewing on wide monitors. Install the script to take advantage of a wide browser window and scroll up and down less than you have to. The Google Reader for wider screens user script is a free download for Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension installed. Thanks, Andy!
Google Reader for wider screens [Userscripts.org]Windows only: Free virtual archive tool Pismo File Mount can help you cut down on unnecessary CD burning and folder space by mounting compressed and ISO files as virtual drives. There are lots of utilities and means to do this, of course, but Pismo offers the simple route. Just right-click on a disc image or zipped file and choose “Mount” or “Quick Mount,” and you can assign the folder to, say, drive Z:, or just have its contents pop up in a window. Grab what you need, close it down, and you’re done. Pismo File Mount is a free download for Windows systems only. Pismo File Mount [via FreewareGenius.com]
