CD Burning in Vista (w/ free software)

So my fancy new computer running Vista comes with a DVD burner, but no software that uses it (besides the very limited built in stuff) and I want to free up some disk space by offloading extra data to dvds; What's a geek to do?

Rather than simply use my Linux machine and the network (which is a totally reasonable solution by the way) I did some searching and came up with a nice package called InfraRecorder. InfraRecorder is a GPL2 app which burns data to DVDs and CDs quickly and easily on Windows machines (Those of you lucky users of older versions need not feel left out). It isn't Nero or K3B grade software but it has all the features a normal person needs from their burning software (and then some). It can burn arbitrary files and iso or bin/cue images to cds and dvds. It can (if the user seeks out the option under project properties) burn the common iso9660 and UDF filesystems, and even create images. The UI is fairly simple and the defaults are reasonable (though if you use multisession discs you might want to give the FAQ a look).

Read what the author has to say and download it here.

Zudeo

I saw on Slashdot today that BBC will be releasing some of their old shows on the Azureus network. Maybe I've had my head in the sand lately (I have been busy with other things) but I thought Azureus was a Java based bittorrent client. Turns out that Zuedo is a website hosting torrents of various videos. They show a screenshot of a "Zuedo" client on the homepage, but it is just a copy of Azureus 2.5 (despite the fact that the site is "powered by Azureus 3.0", which I don't think is out yet). This could be because I'm using Linux though, maybe you get something different on a Windows machine. Anyway, they have a bunch of video available right now, mostly trailers and open source films but it looks like there should be more soon. It does work pretty well, the torrents are automatically loaded into Azureus using javascript (On my machine Azureus has to be running when I click the link). You might as well give it a try, and hopefully we will see more content soon. I guess if this one got past me, it probably got past everyone else as well.

Open Source Cookbook

One of the great things about the internet is that you can find information about anything with it, for example how to make food. It came to my attention that my family didn't know about the Open Source Cookbook, so I thought I might as well mention it here. Having some dietary restrictions I haven't actually tried any of the recipes, but the introductory info seems sound. There are two versions available right now. The newer one is much shorter, so I would look at both. I'm not sure if the "preview" version is only some of the content, or is just shorter due to formatting changes (it seems like everything is there).

If you would prefer something written even more for the "Geek" crowd, I would suggest you look at Cooking For Engineers

IE7

If anyone is keeping track of Microsoft, it is worth noting that they released the final (if it can be called that) version of IE7 to the public. I have only used the version incorporated into Vista, but it is a vast improvement over IE6 (came out during the Win98 era after all). IE7 does most of the things Mozilla and Opera have been doing for years; the most significant? tabbed browsing. It also handles RSS and keeps track of some phishing sites. So, if you must use IE, I would go get IE7 here. If not, check out Firefox or Opera, or SeaMonkey, or any of the many other good browsers, and ditch IE6.