All platforms with Adobe AIR: When you follow enough chatty people on Twitter, some days the noise can overwhelm the signal—that’s when you want TweetDeck, a full-featured desktop Twitter client that groups, filters, and searches incoming tweets for you. TweetDeck’s killer feature is its ability to separate the people you follow on Twitter into groups—like “Don’t Miss,” “Co-workers,” and “Chatty types.” That way while tweets by the prolific folks fly by in one pane, infrequent tweets from people you don’t want to miss stay bookmarked on top in another. You can add or remove modules from TweetDeck’s multi-paned interface to show you all tweets, tweets from groups you configure, replies to your tweets, direct messages, search results for a keyword, and more.
DIY web site Instructables posts a simple laptop prop stand that dual-purposes your laptop’s power brick as the stand. All you need is some sticky velcro strips, which you affix to the bottom of your laptop and the side of the power brick. Whenever you want to prop up your laptop, just stick the velcro together. Keep in mind that this could damage your battery life depending on the placement of your battery and the heat your brick puts out. This might not be the most impressive DIY laptop stand we’ve highlighted, but it’s certainly the easiest to build. For more, check out our top 10 DIY laptop stands. notebook/laptop stand from psu/power brick [Instructables via Make]
Mac OS X only: Free-for-now boot CD CampTune resizes your Boot Camp partition when the size of the Windows installation on your dual-booting Mac bumps against its limits. Without a tool like CampTune, you’d need to entirely reinstall Windows if you wanted to fiddle with the partition size of your secondary OS, making this a very handy app if you’ve underestimated how much space you need for Windows. CampTune is currently free to use, but their web site indicates it’ll cost once it leaves pre-release, so grab it while it’s hot. I haven’t resized my Boot Camp with this, so if you give it a try, let’s hear how it worked for you in the comments. Before you do, though, you may want to back up your BC partition with previously mentioned WinClone. CampTune [via TUAW]
Mac only: The iPhone 2.0 jailbreak utility for Mac, PwnageTool, has just been updated to accommodate the latest iPhone software update from Apple. Re-jailbreak your iPhone 3G, first gen iPhone, or iPod touch running the 2.0.1 software with PwnageTool 2.0.2. PwnageTool creates an alternate firmware bundle to install on your device, that includes an app called Cydia—and new to this version of PwnageTool—a new beta of Installer.app. Those two apps serve as gateways to software repositories you’re not going to see in iTunes’ App Store. Here’s a screenshot of just a few apps I installed via Cydia and the Installer.app post-jailbreak.
How-to web site Instructables has a step-by-step guide detailing how to repurpose your classic (but broken) NES as a lunchbox. All you’ve got to do is gut your Nintendo’s innards and add hinges (though a handle would be nice). You’ll also need a Sasquatch action figure if the guide is to be believed, but I’m guessing you can get away without it.
Nintendo Lunchbox [Instructables]Windows only: Lightweight application PDFMerge combines and splits PDF files. Specify page ranges from each document you’re merging and manipulate bookmarks, too. Preserve existing document bookmarks in a new bookmark tree or omit them altogether. Run PDFMerge from the command line or from the included GUI. PDFMerge is no-frills merging program so if you are looking to do more than merge files check out previously mentioned PDFill; Mac users want Combine PDFs. PDFMerge is a free download for Windows only.
PDFMerge 1.18 [via MajorGeeks]Leading design and user interface company Adaptive Path released a series of concept videos that show how they envision the web will work in the future called Aurora. Designed and narrated by Jesse James Garrett ( a.k.a. “the AJAX guy”), Aurora shows off some advanced tech in everyday life situations in four parts. If you missed our previous coverage of the Aurora launch early this week, get the full set of four video clips right here.
