Hot on the heels of Opera 9.5, the Opera team has released version 9.5.1 of their desktop web browser. The new version includes some recommended security and stability updates. But there are also some other handy changes. Here are a few highlights:

• Fine-tuned the new default skin
• Saved images no longer recorded in the file transfer window
• Fixed an issue that could be used to display arbitrary code
• Fixed a stability issue with Yahoo! Mail
• 64 bit Linux package now available

Overall you won't notice a ton of changes to the interface. But if you're currently using Opera 9.5, we'd recommend updating for the security enhancements alone.

Mario Paint Composer lets you do what you know you've wanted to do all of your life...compose music in the key of Super Mario. You'll remember this from the Super NES days, but everything is way more fun on the computer.

This baby is free and it's available for Windows AND Mac and it comes from unFun games. Yay.

Don't have any music writing chops? No problem, neither do we. It makes fun noises and has cool Mario icons. 'Nuff said.

The default song when you load up Mario Paint Composer is a jazzy version of your favorite video game theme song ever. But it's up to you to write the next masterpiece.

And not just any masterpiece, you get to use pigs and cats and hearts.

Best part is that when the app is loaded, everywhere you click on your computer, the sounds follow. I like hearing a nice Yoshi sound when I click on an email or on iChat.

unFun built an interface for you to lo in and download all the songs you want, for your personal listening and partytime enjoyment, but it took forever to log into the system, so we wouldn't hang our hats on that feature.

[via chris pirillo]

Contrary to marketing hype, Macs do crash and when they do you'll need to do some basic troubleshooting to determine the reason why.

If it appears to be a hardware problem, one thing you may want to remember is, well, Rember.

Rember is a front end GUI for Memtest and while you can certainly run Memtest in Terminal, Rember's GUI version makes it much easier to use.

The interface is broken up into 3 main parts:

• How much memory you want tested
• The number of times you want to run the test
• Preferences

Once you decided on the amount of ram and the number of loops let Rember do the rest. Once completed, review the logs to determine if your RAM is the reason why your Mac is crashing.

Keep in mind that Rember is a GUI app that runs on top of your OS so some of your RAM will be in use and will not be available for testing. Think of it has a small trade off for not having to deal with the Memtest switches.

One of the only features some of us here like about Windows is that you can alt-ctrl-del and look at the open tasks and programs running at any given time.

It's nice to know what's sucking up all of your memory (pr0n) and what's bogging down your processor (DVD burning).

Sloth for Mac OS X shows us exactly what's running, Windows style.

You can see which application is running which process, reveal the directory it's running out of, and kill it off if you want. If you're super geeky and/or bored you can even look at the IP and Unix sockets to see what application is connecting to the interwebs at any given time.

This is a really handy dandy tool, and the source is available too for monkeying...er, slothing around.

One of the better parts about Sloth is that it's a Cocoa app, and runs nice and slick on your Mac.

[via chris pirillo]

Do you know those cool art spinning booths at festivals and carnivals? Of course you do, they're awesomesauce aren't they?

Well now thanks to CosmicPainter from garageCube you can bring that to your Mac OSX desktop, minus the carnies and smell of funnel cake (booooo).

CosmicPainter lets you make designs from different pre-set shapes and colors, as well as from other images you already have on your computer. You can really dig in with the shading and depth choices on the pallette and make some really rad shapes and designs.

Why would you want to use this? Because it's hella fun and free.

We sat in front of this thing for hours and got completely lost. But Chris Pirillo, the tipster who sent this in to us, warned us that we'd get sucked in...and we're pretty sure you will too.

[via chris pirillo]

Cocoalicious is a really slick -- but, unfortunately, Mac-only -- dedicated browser for your Del.icio.us bookmarks. If you're a bookmarking junkie, and you have way more sites saved to Del.icio.us than you could ever hope to keep track of, this could be an ideal solution for you. It's laid out a bit like Apple Mail, with your tags running down the left side, your bookmarks on top, and a browser pane at the bottom.

You can put bookmarks directly into Cocoalicious -- it syncs with your Del.icio.us account -- or use the bookmarklet to add stuff to Cocoalicious straight from your browser. This way you can take advantage of autocompletion, tagging by dragging, and other features that make Del.icio.us easier. Cocoalicious also supports Spotlight, so you can search for your bookmarks straight from the Finder!


[via Lifehacker]

If you're not one of the 125,000 people who got a chance to try out the cross-platform note capture app Evernote during its private beta, don't despair. Evernote has launched an open beta, so now everyone can give it a try. If you were already in the beta, does this change anything for you? Yes, indeed it does: there are now two types of Evernote accounts, free and premium.

Free users keep all the features of the closed beta, with the caveat that you're now limited to 40mb a month of uploaded notes. If you're a power-user, or someone who's really sold on the Evernote lifestyle, go premium for 5 bucks a month or $45/year and get rid of that cap. Premium also comes with the option of SSL for all your uploads (for all those pictures of the enemy base, we guess) and priority access to the queue for Evernote's text-recognition features.

If you're like us, you have to read long blocks of text on a monitor all the time, and it's kind of a pain for your eyes. E-books and long PDF articles would be great if they could somehow get diced into neat, readable columns. Hey, it works for newspapers. Well, Tofu brings that pleasant reading experience to the Mac.

In a nutshell, Tofu cuts up what you're reading -- whether it's a PDF, a doc, or a chunk of text you've selected -- into columns. This is a good, because monitors are wider than the human eye is really comfortable with, and columns fit the text into your optimal scanning area for easy reading. Tofu's full screen mode and adjustable text size and colors are crucial, too. This app is good enough that we'll think twice before printing out something we can just read in Tofu.

Looking for an iTunes/Winamp/Amarok killer? No matter whether you're a Windows, Linux, or OS X user, you might want to check out aTunes. This media player uses the open source MPlayer engine and is built on Java, which means you can run it on pretty much any devices that supports Java. There's also a Windows installer which makes running aTunes on Windows a snap.

The program has all the features you'd expect from a modern media player, including the ability to play MP3, ogg, WMA, WAV, FLAC, MP4, RA, and RM files. You can also listen to internet radio streams. There's no support for DRM though, so if you've got restricted music files on your desktop, this might not be the player for you.

One of the niftiest features in aTunes is Last.fm integration. While you can't use the software to play music from Last.fm, you can sign into your account and submit your played song list to Last.fm. aTunes also takes advantage of Last.fm's audioscrobbling service, which means you can see a list of artists that are similar to the one you're listening to in real-time. When available, aTunes will also automatically display album art and song lyrics.

Update: It appears the web site is down, but you can still download aTunes from SourceForge.

If you've ever played a musical instrument the concept of playing in key is nothing new. But what about DJs? Are there lessons out there that go over majors, minors or even basic chord progressions? Having 2 songs mixed in key gives the impression that the songs were made for each other.

MixedInKey has developed a software for DJs that will analyze your songs to determine what key they are in. That way when you are building your set you can select songs that where performed in the same key or a complementary key.

In order to have your mp3s analyzed add them to MixedInKey. From there, the software will determine its key and display them according to their Camelot Sound keycode. Add songs according to their keycode using your favorite mixing software and start mixing.

We had our reservations about this program, fearing that all your mixes will be in the same key leading to one boring set. But the system itself, teaches you musical concepts and if you follow the system you can move from one key to the next to add chord progressions to your mix.

MixedInKey is available for both Windows and Mac and cost $58.

Whether you're a freelancer working on multiple projects with different billable rates or someone who just wants to keep track of the time you spend on different tasks, Klok can help. Klok is a cross-platform time-tracking application built on Adobe AIR. That means you can use Klok on Windows, Mac, and Linux machines.

You can set up sub-projects for each project. For example, you could have a project called "watching TV," and sub-projects for Pushing Daisies, How I Met Your Mother, and Rock of Love 2. Because we know that's what you'll really want to use a time tracker for.

Klok also has a nifty little reports tab that shows you how much time you've wasted spent on various tasks. And you can export your reports as an Excel spreadsheet.

[via Lifehacker]

One of the fundamental tools for developers is not just their development environment of choice, but also their version control system of choice. The debate over just which version control system is undoubtedly set to rage on for eternity, however one of the more popular systems is Subversion. On the Mac, up until now there's been a number of choices: Terminal (command-line) which is built into the OS and includes Subversion as part of OS X Leopard, svnX - another open-source graphical user interface, or using the built-in Subversion support in Apple's OS X development IDE Xcode.

For some of us here at Download Squad, a fear of the command-line, compounded with a little loathing of the svnX interface made the announcement of Versions.app - over a year ago - more than a little exciting. Promising an elegant and truly OS X interface to work with Subversion, it's taken a long time to come to fruition - however the betas to date do appear to deliver.

After having used Versions on a daily basis since its debut 2 weeks ago, it's certainly showing a great deal of promise - and makes version control far friendlier. As others have noted, the application not only makes working with existing repositories easy, but also has quick links to Subversion web-service Beanstalk, allowing you to easily create a new online repository and add it to Versions.

Pricing for Versions will be set 'when version 1.0 ships', and currently all (free-to-use) betas expire on July 1st.

Update: Looks like we posted too soon. As commenters at TUAW pointed out, the workaround is not 100% foolproof. If someone is logged in via SSH under the same user name as the logged in user, it is possible that they can kill the ARDAgent process and run the script before ARDAgent reloads. While this requires additional finagling and timing and is an unlikely scenario for most users, please be aware that the issue is still unresolved. If you don't plan on using remote desktop at all with your Mac, you can archive and remove ARDAgent.app, which will rid your system of the program that can open up the vulnerability.

Yesterday, an anonymous Slashdotter posted about a security vulnerability in Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 that could allow a maicious party root access to your system. The vulnerability, which works by running an AppleScript on behalf of Apple Remote Desktop Agent, which because of the way ARDAgent works, sets the user ID to root. From there, any subprocesses are running with root privileges, without requiring a user password, and in the wrong hands, the results could be very, very messy.

Taking into consideration that several additional factors would have to be involved in order for any damage to unfold -- either physical access to the machine or a remote login under the same account that is currently in use or the end user would have to willingly run a malicious application -- this is still disconcerting enough for us to want a quick and effective resolution.

Luckily, there is a very easy way to protect your system from being affected. It turns out, if remote access is enabled under the Sharing pane in System Preferences -- even if no other users are permitted to administer or access your machine -- you're in the clear.

TUAW has a visual walkthrough on how to apply this workaround for both Tiger and Leopard users, but the fix is pretty simple. In Leopard, simple enable Remote Management feature in the Sharing panel, don't select any of the options and then select "apply to only these users" without defining any users. Now, if the potentially damaging script is run, your system will report an error instead of setting itself as root. Plus, if you do have a system that is managed remotely, that person can still acess your computer (just make sure they are listed in the "allowed users" panel).

If only all security threats were that easy to fix!

Thanks Mike, Robert and Scott!

It's been a while since we've seen a compelling new browser start page. There was a real flurry of start pages a year or two ago when the likes of Google Personalized Start Page (now iGoogle), NetVibes, Pageflakes, and a myriad of other copycat sites launched. Strangely, even with such an amazing variety of start pages to choose from, we've never found any of them to be particularly compelling.

Then we were introduced to Feedly. Feedly is a start page that only works in Firefox, because it requires a Firefox browser extension to run. It's actually a locally hosted page that goes out and grabs information feed reader sites and social networks that you use, and presents it to you in a friendly magazine style layout.

Feedly can go through your Firefox bookmarks, as well as your My Yahoo! page, NetVibes, Bloglines, Twitter, FriendFeed, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail accounts to find relevant information to present to you. If we can offer one tip, it would be to choose carefully. When setting up our page, we checked every possible option, and ended up with far too many feeds, and too many feeds that we had lost interest in that were still in some account somewhere that Feedly found.

Feedly also has a very tight integration with Google Reader, and anything that you read in Feedly will be marked as read in Google Reader, and vice versa. This is cool, but it's also dangerous, since and feeds that you add to Feedly (or that it finds) are automatically added to your Google Reader account. So again, choose carefully what feeds you want to be seeing in Feedly, as they will affect your Google Reader account.

But once it's all set up, Feedly is a very useful and elegantly done start page - so much so, that we haven't been compelled to remove it. And since no other start page has captured our interest, that's certainly something.

Pidgin doesn't officially support Facebook Chat (yet?), but it can be customized with useful add-ons like the new Facebook Chat plug-in. Once installed, the plug-in allows Pidgin to log-in to a Facebook account, pull the buddy-list, and send/receive messages.

Adium, arguably Pidgin's counterpart on Mac, also received support for Facebook Chat in the recent 1.3 beta release, though, the feature is absent from the most recent official update. If you're a risk-taker who enjoys putting his/her computer in jeopardy for the sake of testing new software, give it a shot.

We've also covered a couple of other methods of taking Facebook Chat outside the site:

1. There's a Firefox plug-in that adds the social-network's IM service to a sidebar.
   
2. The social software/service one-stop-shop known as Digsby also added support for Facebook Chat earlier this year.

[via Lifehacker]