Converting to a Mac was one of the best computing choices I’ve ever made, the beauty and simplicity of the OS X operating system is astonishing and always a pleasure to work with, making me cringe when I even have to think of turning my PC on to play Eve Online. Freeware on the Mac is a thing of beauty, with large amounts of freeware applications spread throughout the internet enhancing user experience and productivity in more ways than one can count. Today we’re going to list more of our favorite OS X freeware, applications we find crucial to our daily use and crucial in our obsessive need to be on the cutting edge.

Shrook - RSS feed reader
Vienna - RSS feed feader
Both are solid and free RSS readers with features on both sides which give them an edge. Vienna features a nice mini-browser, smart folders and flagged articles. Shrook however wins me over. It’s a bit more lightweight, going for simplicity, which is always admirable for application design. One of Shrooks major features is it’s sync abilities, allowing users to signup to Shrook.com (for a small fee) and then use Shrook over multiple Macs without having to carry your RSS feeds anywhere, open Shrook, log-in and bam, your RSS feeds are there waiting for you.

Deer Park web browser (Optimized Firefox 1.5.0.6 for G4, G5, and Intel Macs)
The official Firefox for Mac drives me insane. I want so badly to use it, but, the performance is so sluggish and unusable that it almost makes me miss IE 5.0. Thankfully there are Mac OS X hackers who’ve had enough and have begun distributing Firefox updates in a Mac-friendly form, under the name Deer Park. Deer Park isn’t a perfect solution but it’s a step in the right direction that’s for sure, taking the usual Firefox updates and puting a little more effort into optimizing them to run more smoothly on G4, G5 and Intel Macs, without the Firefox branding of course as it’s not an official Mozilla product. Switching to Deer Park is easy, you won’t lose any of your bookmarks or other user settings and I haven’t found an extension yet that hasn’t worked with the Park.

Dashalytics - Google Analytics Dashboard widget
A highly recommended Dashboard widget for any obsessive compulsive blog owners who leave a Google Analytics tab open at all time. Dashalytics is a handy little freeware widget which gives you a quick and clean overview of your site’s day, week, monthly and yearly page visits and page views, supporting multiple sites as long as you have them setup with Google’s Analytics service.

Letterbox - Widescreen plugin for Mail.app
Widescreen is the future of computing (and gaming!), you can take that to the bank. As more and more users switch to widescreen resolutions, the need for widescreen support in many applications will be a must. For instance, Mail.app, OS X’s ultra-powerful email application included with every version of Apple’s operating system. It’s not so friendly for a widescreen resolution, especially for those of us with multiple email accounts and thousands upon thousands of emails. But there’s hope in the form of a simple little Mail.app plugin named Letterbox. By rearranging the Mail.app interface into 3 vertical columns, Letterbox instantly transforms Mail into a widescreen users email heaven, allowing the user more vertical space for mailboxes as well as a large preview pane.

QuickName - File utility for renaming large amounts of files
QuickName is a program that I need only a few times a year, but still an important little tool to have. QuickName is as straight-forward as it gets, a small utility that allows you to quickly change the naming conventions of large amounts of files. For instance, you have 275 images in your blog that you were given the suffix .JPG, but you want them to be .jpg. Launch good old QuickName and let her rip, renaming said files in a matter of seconds.

Ventrilo - Group VOIP for OS X
TeamSpeex - TeamSpeak for OS X
VOIP is a godsend for gamers and businesses alike. Ventrilo and TeamSpeak are the standards for group-chat functions in the gaming world, with clans from Counter Strike to World of Warcraft to Eve Online using the applications to communicate during group activities in-game (and out). It took awhile, but there are finally stable OS X builds for both applications, bringing Mac gamers (or those of us who use their Mac for Ventrilo while playing on their PC) into the world of group VOIP communication.

Read more: 10 favorite applications for OS X

Did I miss something? I knew the how-to was one of the most overused stories to get a blogger more linkbacks and rankings, but where did all these how-to video sites popup from? I’m not complaining really cause I love these sites and love learning new and often times useless tricks and DIY. Instructables and Video Jug are both extremely useful video sharing sites with a focus on how-tos and distribution of knowledge, one of the many great uses of this here internet thingy we’re filling up pipes with. Both are social internet services, allowing users to sign up, download, rate and create video how-tos and share them among their similarly DIY-addicted friends. Quick hint fellas, over at Video Jub there’s a how-to on the front page for giving yourself a testicular exam!

Read more: Instructables - Step-by-step Collaboration | Video Jug - Life Explained. On Film

An interesting tool launched a few days ago via the German Wikimedia Toolserver which tracks the 100 most popular Wikipedia pages by visit count, charting them on a monthly basis. The Wikicharts tool allows a user to filter Wikipedia’s access statistics per month, giving us quite a bit of insight into Wikipedia usage patterns. Wikipedia’s top 10 pages accessed in August were:

1. Main Page
2. Wikipedia
3. United States
4. JonBenét Ramsey
5. List of big-bust models and performers
6. Irukandji jellyfish
7. Hurricane Katrina
8. Pluto
9. Wiki
10. Jeff Hardy

Read more: Top 100 Wikipedia articles per month

I couldn’t write a more descriptive title if I tried. In the mid to late 1970s Hong Kong action movies were hitting their prime and nothing proves that more than the aptly titled, “Kung Fu versus Yoga”. Two fighters are battling over who will win the heart of a beautiful maiden when they have to take on a yoga-fighter extraordinaire whose ability to contort his body is at first very difficult for the traditional Kung Fu style to overcome. All of the requirements for 70’s low-brow martial arts cinema are present, from the highly-choreographed fighting to the lighthearted banter between enemies, I hope this is a film that every serious Hong Kong action fan has in their collection (both the original and the Dolemite collection re-release!).

Watch scenes from Kung Fu vs. Yoga after the jump..

Read more of “Kung Fu versus Yoga“

Amazon has listed pricing on the various flavors for Microsoft’s next Apple OS X ripoff, Windows Vista with not much fanfare or surprises. Pricing for Windows Vista Home edition comes in at $199.00 USD, with the Vista Ultimate edition clocking in at $399.00 and various upgrades from Windows XP ranging from $99.00 - $259.00. To be honest, I don’t know why anyone would bother with Windows Vista now that Intel Apples are on the market (apple user alert!). I guess old habits die hard?

Read more: Amazon.com

An elderly man on welfare, who regularly searched through convenience store trash bins in the hopes of finding a winning lottery ticket hit the jackpot in October 2005. While searching through a local store’s trash he found a discarded lottery ticket worth $1 million, which he immediately claimed, sparking a fierce battle between the ticket’s original purchaser, who states he threw away the ticket by accident and was entitled to the money, rather than Edward St. John, the 83 year old pensioner who lives in subsidized housing in the Blackstone, Massachusetts area. The court battle was fierce, with an April 2006 decision of the Massachusetts Lottery Commission concluding that a lottery ticket is like cash, requiring only possession to show ownership. Shortly after, Kevin Donovan, the 49 year old who claimed ownership of the winning ticket passed away after suffering a massive heart attack. At this point, Donovan’s family took up the case, challenging the commission’s ruling and attempting to lock-up the winnings in court for as long as necessary to reclaim the winnings. This meant that the longer the court case was open, the chances of St. John’s passing grew, meaning there was a great chance he wouldn’t live to enjoy the payoff from his found ticket. This prompted him to settle with Donovan’s family for the sum of $140,000 or $7,000 annually for the next 20 years, with St. John getting $43,000 annually for the next 20 years, before taxes of course. St. Johns plans to share the money with his older brother and will have to move out of his house now that his annual income exceeds the maximum allowed for government subsidized housing.

Read more: Man finds winning lottery ticket in the trash, gets sued by the person who threw it away

Rumours are swirling among the Star Trek boards that the original Star Trek series will be remastered for a high definition DVD and eventual HD-DVD release, featuring enhanced CG effects worthy of a high definition premium release. Rumors had been going around since this year’s Comic Con in San Diego that a Star Trek remastered edition was in the works, but confirmations from sources are starting to appear from in and around CBS Video, who now owns the rights to Star Trek on DVD. It seems original series special effects will be re-done, featuring all new CG techniques, including all of the spaceship shots, similar to the recent Mirror Universe episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise. Let’s just hope the end product looks as good as it did in Enterprise.

Read more: Star Trek to be remastered for high-def DVD / HD-DVD release

Every year, Salon.com, an online magazine I hope everyone out there reads (ahem), presents it’s Buffy Award to the most under-appreciated television show currently on the air. The award, named after the under-appreciated Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is now in it’s third year of existence, having previously gone to HBO’s “The Wire” and to Veronica Mars. This year, the award is again spot-on, being given to Battlestar Galactica, probably one of the most under-rated television shows on the air at the moment and in the past several years. We’re huge huge BSG fans here and we don’t even use that “re-imagined” junk, BSG deserves all the praise it gets and then some, so, congrats BSG for being the most under-appreciated show of year, let’s hope season 3 is the year that brings you close to mainstream television market acceptance and glory.

Read more: Salon’s Buffy Award goes to Battlestar Galactica (Ad-supported news report)

Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne are the creators behind art project Celestial Mechanics, a brilliant experiment plotting FAA data, parsing it using the Processing programming environment, then compositing the resulting frames with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya. Resulting are beautiful and flowing animations displaying the flight patterns of commercial aircraft throughout the United States as flight upon flight arrives and departs America’s airports. Celestial Mechanics have been on display at many trade shows and conventions around the world, most recently at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria.

Read more: Digital visualizations of US flight patterns

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Free foreign language courses from the Foreign Service Institute
Free foreign language courses from the government-sponsored Foreign Services Institute. Diplomats and government employees stationed in far-away lands take these courses and now so can you. Lifehacker-approved!

Music video: “Just Briefly” by Daedelus
Music-hacker extraordinaire Daedelus graces us with the video from 2005’s “Just Briefly”.

Segways banned on the streets and sidewalks of Britain
Proving yet again that government officials just don’t quite ‘get it’, officials in Britain ban the use of Segways on public streets and sidewalks. Guess Bush himself has to endorse a Segway (instead of falling off of one) before Tony Blair’s government will pay any attention to it.

Game on you crazy diamond!
Our gaming brothers-in-arms are taking over our gaming coverage with a tan and orange theme and a boulder-sharp wit. Daily gaming industry news, reviews and gossip that might be old, might be new, might be borrowed, might be blue. Playthrough is only one in a short-line of new blogs joining our ‘network’, so keep those eyes peeled.

College students stumble onto the set of Lost, make themselves at home
A couple of college kids on holiday in Hawaii stumble-upon an un-secured set for television’s Lost, so they do what any dedicated Lost fan would, they make themselves right at home. Not only did they uncover what may be a secret for season 3, but they also lived to tell about it AND post a photo album to Flickr.