I came across this list of 25 Free Mac Apps for Freelancers from Designer Daily . A lot of the apps listed are apps that I use, because I’m a freelancer as well and they do help a lot and don’t cost a dime.

Most of the apps listed are also very useful to the everyday Mac user. Apps such as Adium, Skype, Firefox, Handbrake, Quicksilver and Transmission should be essential tools for most Mac users as well.

Some of the apps on this list that I’d like to try for myself are AppCleaner, as a replacement to AppZapper. Another app I want to try is DeepVacuum, an app that will allow me to download local copies of web sites. This will come in useful if I want to try and deconstruct a site that I’m trying to learn from.

So if you’re a freelancer or a Mac user at that, try out the apps listed on this article. Most of them are great and best of all free.

Wikipedia, the world’s free encyclopedia, is celebrating its seventh birthday today. Even though it existed a little before Jan 15, 2001, it was formally launched only on that day. Wikipedia is a multilingual project with currently over 12 million articles. All articles can be viewed and edited by anyone who have access to the website.

I use Wikipedia as much as I use Google, and often visit the site directly for certain kinds of information, before searching it elsewhere. Even though it is constantly criticized for articles especially about various historical events and personalities, it is resourceful in succinctly providing valuable information about a multitude of concepts.

Not just Wikipedia, but many other sites that came after it, all under the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. Check out the Wikimedia Projects page to discover them.

Alexa, the website ranking site, ranks Wikipedia at 8. That is very encouraging for the only non-profit advertisement-free website among the top 10 websites of the world. However, it only gets around 8% of the Internet global traffic, compared to around 30% that sites like Google and Yahoo! get. It deserves more.

More people should benefit from this wonderful source. Start becoming a regular user yourself and tell about it to all your friends who are not about it.

Support Wikipedia.

Image Source: Wikipedia.

Number 1, we picked the name for the confessional — correction, you picked the name for the confessional — and it will be…

The IT Confessional

I know, you’re all surprised and excited. I know I am. The second piece to this post is what you’re all want to hear. Who won the contest?

The winner of this particular contest is Kevin Potter for his awesome, “Is that a big or little zero?” story! I will be contacting Kevin (or better yet, if he wants to email me at jesse.middleton at b5media dot com) to get him his KB.

I want to thank everyone who posted and emailed in their stories, they were a great read and many of them will be used to form some, hopefully, entertaining posts at That Damn PC.

Keep checking back for me and sending your stories in.

I came across a great post over at Vitalsecurity.org the other day (part of the awesome Security Bloggers Network) about when security goes too far. RapidShare is a great solution for sharing large amounts of data. It’s ad and premium-user supported and allows for an unlimited amount of bandwidth (free users have 100MB file limit while paid users get 2GB file limit).

There are a few limitations or annoyances if you’re not a paid user. You need to wait a certain amount of time before downloading (usually less than 2 minutes), you can’t download more than one file at a time and the zinger is that you need to fill out a CAPTCHA in order to download files.

CAPTCHAs are not usually a bad thing except when you can’t read it! RapidShare requires you to choose the graphics that contain a cat but they are both difficult to read and worse off, not everyone knows what a cat looks like. It usually takes me two or three tries to download. I understand that they want to make it so that people need to make sure they’re human before they can download but their CAPTCHA requires a user to be super-human. That’s not a good way to draw in more people.

Security is important but this type of security is ridiculous.