Apple has released verison 6.0.2 of Darwin, the FreeBSD core of Mac OS X…. for the x86 Platform.

Download link at Apple | Rate it and Comment on OSDir.com

Hours of enjoyment for the whole family, that is, if the whole family loves a tcsh terminal.

It appears that Google needs people afterall. It appears that over the weekend Google launched a new “small fee” service aimed at providing users with web research beyond “I’m feeling lucky”. From the Google-Answers site: “More than 500 carefully screened Researchers are ready to answer your question for as little as $2.50 — usually within 24 hours.”

Update: Let’s see if this works… I’ve coughed up my credit card & posted a question to the service at a grand bounty of $3.50 USD.

First, I put the bounty at $3.50 USD thinking this would be the most regular-joe would spend on such a thing before just doing the research him or herself, and I left the question a bit vague to see how they’d deal with this.

Better yet, let’s see how they compare to you. See comments below.

P.S. As a side note, Google may or may not do your homework for you, kids.

Well, can you beat “500 carefully screened Researchers”?

Related link: http://OSDir.com

From OSDir.com: TortoiseCVS, Graphical CVS for Windows Explorer with integrated SSH. Oh, how it eases the pain…

Related link: http://OSDir.com

From OSDir.com: A sweet little app that’s part of the OpenDarwin Project called XPostFacto will help you get OS X installed on your older (not OS X supported) Macs.

Dust off that old Mac and turn it into a webserver, baby!

Related link: htp://OSDir.com

OSDir.com is in search of Open Source applications that are shared among the medical and scientific communities and folks who’ll vouch for them.

Specifically we’re asking for insiders within these communities to share with us and with others in their field those indispensable open source apps they use to help save lives, conduct experiments, research, organize, etc.

Now it’s all fine and good for applications and projects to be underway, but we want to hear about those apps that are currently working, in actual use, and from the folks who use and can vouch for their stability in their everyday use of the software.

More here.

Related link: http://OSDir.com

Here’s a list of Linux Journals’ “Reader’s Choice Awards” winners for this year’s round. OSDir.com asks: “What would you have choosen?”

Related link: http://OSDir.com

Wow, what a busy week. With the total and utter self destruction of my ibook I’ve been a bit tardy on my OSDir.com entries. Until today that is! In no particular order of greatness, here are some great open source apps that flew past my screen this week:

Oggasm: turn you mp3s into ogg vorbis files!

Apache::MP3, turn your cruddy old computer into a wicked mp3 (now ogg) streaming server!

Mandrake’s new Linux: have fun with this serious new Mandrake distro.

Gimp: Find out what one windows user as to say about Gimp vs proprietary solutions for graphics.

Scoutplans: Get your scouting organization organized online.

Related link: http://OSDir.com

I spent the better part of this morning turning my drab, living under the stairs, backups server into a wicked mp3-streaming jukebox. I got a bunch of my HD space back too….

Apache::MP3 rocks. On my wireless home network it rocks even more.

I put together a linux box and stuck it under my stairs to have a dedicated backup server. One that would allow be to backup files quickly off my lappy and do nightly backups of other various files from cyberspace. But, I’m not happy unless something is being utilized. Backups really only use .001% of the machine’s time as useful as they are.

And I also had all these mp3 on my ibook’s HD. Why back them up when they could live elsewhere permanently? And now that the mp3s aren’t residing on my laptop the whole family can listen to radiohead. And isn’t that what it’s all about?

Related link: http://OSDir.com

In my second ‘ode to OSXCON‘ blog I’d like to show off a little app to introduce newbies to news-feeds. That’s RSS, etc, to you alpha-geeks.

No doubt you attendees are hearing much abuzz about blogging, news feeds, and references to RSS or RDF. Well, for those of you who like to get your news the old fashioned way (non-alpha way perhaps is better), but would like to find out what this news-feed and RSS thing is all about I recommend a wonderful application called Buddy.

Like a faithful pet, Buddy (Buddy’s logo is a dog) will “fetch” news headlines via RSS and RDF & put all the news that’s fit to print into a lovely newspaper style interface…it looks like a newspaper.

Don’t feel that this is a less than respectable entry to the news-feed world though. This interface is a neat-o idea for news-feed veterens too!

Wishing I was there,

The Gods may have taken pity on me knowing that going to OSXCON just wasn’t in the cards. They dropped a gem of an OS X app into my lap yersterday that I surely wouldn’t have been looking for had I been in Santa Clara, enjoying the weather and all-round OS X alpha-geekiness.

Let me share it with you fellow conference attendees (though not in the physical form I will be there in #osxcon on irc.freenode.net). Its name is simple and in combination with mail.app’s junk filtering it has reduced my inbox’s daily suggested spam intake by 3/4. Behold, it is Mailfilter.

This will be especially wonderful for those of you stuck on a dial-up connection in your hotel rooms for it will login to your pop3 account and delete unwanted mail there. Thereby saving you the pain of having to download it first to your machine and having mail.app do its magic.

Simply spark up Mailfilter prior to checking your mail, let it do its work, then download what is left over. There will also be lots of alpha-geeky folks there who can show you how to get mailfilter running at pre-selected time intervals via ‘cron’ if you’re not familiar with how wonderful the unix tools under the OS X hood are.

What makes Mailfilter in combination with mail.app such a wonderful combo is that at the end of the day you can look through your “junk” mailbox and add more deletion parameters to Mailfilter based on what got through the first time.

Those of you going wireless at the conference might save you fellow attendees some bandwidth too so they can blog the sessions for me.

It’s 4:30 Am in Santa Clara as i write this and there’s no one awake in #osxcon. I thought you guys’d be hardcore.