A release version of Thunderbird 3.0 alpha 1 has been uploaded to the Mozilla ftp site yesterday and is available for public download. Currently only the US-Version of the popular email client is available on the ftp site which can be installed on all supported operating systems including Linux, Windows and Apple Macintosh systems.

Want to send a video to your friend that you found on Youtube only to find out that Youtube is blocked at his school or workplace or that the video is not playable because it is missing the needed codec and the installation of new applications or codecs is blocked ? Audio / Video to Exe might be the solution. I’m usually not very fond of executables send over email or offered on websites and very cautious before I even think of double-clicking those files.

Today I read the article about the Firefox add-on Brief which is an RSS reader for Firefox making use of Firefox’s dynamic bookmarks. I have never used the dynamic bookmarks before, always an external application or web service that would display the RSS feeds that I have a subscription for. When thinking about it it did make sense to integrate the RSS feeds into Firefox directly which would make them independent of any web service.

The concept of RSS or newsfeeds in general seemed quite appealing to me the moment I first heard (or read?) about it. But I never managed to find a possibility of utilizing them in a way I liked.

I’ve been quite fond of the Adobe Air environment for some time now, since it manages to achieve a lot I have been missing from traditional applications. First and foremost, many Air aps bring together your desktop and the internet, which is great if you don’t want to launch your browser for a task, or you just want a simple, clean site-specific interface.

Youtube addicts take note, 1-Click YouTube Batch Downloader (via ShellCity) provides access to download multiple videos from Youtube at once and even converts them into the desired format during that process. The standalone application can download from almost any Youtube page and supports downloading from individual pages, channels, playlists, favorites, users and group pages.

Learning can be fun. I would not have believed that sentence when I was young and had to go to school but nowadays I have to admit that it can indeed be fun. The Internet helped a lot because it provides interactivity which is excellent for learning purposes. Quizlet was only recently mentioned in my article about a vocabulary trainer by Grimskallen.

Windows 7 News posted an interesting video about some of the upcoming features in Microsoft’s next operating system Windows 7. The video is showing some of the new features that have already been implemented in the Milestone 1 release of Windows 7. Everything is obviously far from complete and it will take approximately between one and three years before Windows 7 will be released.

Backing up your email accounts regularly is a pretty important task and a safety measure in case something goes wrong and you cannot access the account anymore. Most users collect emails over the years and keep them just like they would keep letters that have been send to them by friends and relatives. Loosing those emails, apart from business correspondences, account information and recipes, would be an irreparable loss without a backup on another drive or media.

Firefox users will be pleased to know that Mozilla has now completed work on the first release-candidate of Firefox 3.0. Expect a late May release.