Halloween is over and Thanksgiving is coming up. Then comes Christmas.

Yes, it’s that time of year again: weekends are spent baking cookies, tempting Xmas treats, seasonal decorations in every store and cheesy songs on the radio.

If you want to get into the mood with music you enjoy or accompany your Christmas celebrations with a quality selection of songs, check out the following best websites to listen to free Christmas music online.

8. Jingle Bell Jukebox

Jingle Bell Jukebox allows you to listen to entire Christmas albums.

The archive contains nine albums, including Dean Martin’s “My Kind of Christmas”, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas”, and Amy Grant’s “A Christmas Album”.

You can skip songs and switch between albums. Each album is played in a loop.

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I wrote about a favorite application of mine called Texter last week. You can see that post here. A lot of readers wrote in asking about alternatives due to the fact that Texter sometimes interferes with people’s systems – especially when working with Portuguese and Japanese.

I guess I configured mine properly to stay out of my hair and not interfere with my other applications – and I do not work in Japanese, Portuguese or any other language other than English. But when I heard from Tamar Weinberg, she also expressed interest in a Texter alternative and MakeUseOf does not disappoint, so without further ado I bring you Phrase Express Beta 7.0.94. The download is available from their website at PhraseExpress.

For those of you who want to see it in action, there is an animated gif at the bottom of this post.

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Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For more cool websites and web app reviews subscribe to MakeUseOf Directory.

(1) useKit – New web service that can enhance your web surfing by integrating bunch of handy tools to your browser. Using these tools you will be able to add sticky notes to web pages, map addresses, translate and tweet any highlighted text, and bookmark pages to Delicious. Read more: useKit – Makes Web Browsing More Efficient

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The other day, a friend of mine got an e-mail from his Internet Service Provider (ISP) about a copyright infringement. He didn’t know what this was all about so he had me take a look at it.

What I’d like to do for you now is to break down the letter and address important things about it.

Then I’d like to explain what precautions you can take to prevent this from happening again in the future.

We are writing to inform you that we have received a complaint that alleges that your Internet Service account has been involved in copyright infringement. This complaint was traced back to your account based on the IP address used at the time of this activity.

Yes, this can really be done in cases of copyright infringement. Your ISP should be automatically making logs to track who they’ve assigned IP addresses to, as well as when. There really isn’t any thing that you can do about this. If you want, you could reboot your modem to see if you get a new IP address assigned to you. All that will do is make it harder for a copyright holder to establish a pattern of downloading. But they still can!

Please note that we have not provided any of your personal account information to the complainant. It is our policy to disclose such information to a complainant only if ordered to do so by a court of law, which has not happened to date.

That’s pretty decent of them to have that as a corporate policy. However, check the policy for YOUR ISP on this sort of thing. They may want nothing to do with dealing with copyright holders, and will hand over your information upon request if copyright infringement is claimed. If that is the case, you may consider changing ISPs.

There’s more in the letter, but it pretty much echoes what you see above. So, here’s where we get into making sure it doesn’t happen again.
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If you’re anything like I am, you’ve accumulated a great deal of photos of your family, your travels and everything else that interests you. Other than storing it away on disk or even creating an online photo slideshow with them, wouldn’t it be cool to make your own home movie using those photos, background music and creative scene transitions?

In this article, I’m going to describe how you can use Pinnacle Video Spin to take those photos that mean so much to you, and convert them into your own movie that really expresses the emotion that the photos represent for you. With special effects, a meaningful audio track and even a voice-over track if you wish, you can transform static photos into a movie that will impress.

Using Pinnacle Video Spin to Make Your Own Movie

You don’t have to pick up a video recorder to create a meaningful movie. Even if you only have photos, the Pinnacle Video Spin software has enough features so that you can use voice-over audio, special effects and music to make your movie interesting and fun to watch. In this article I’m going to guide you through the simple process to make your own movie from just the photos you may have buried away on some directory on your hard drive. Go ahead and dig those photos out, choose a cool soundtrack that expresses best how you feel about the people or events in those photos, and let’s get started.
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If there’s one thing that gets to me it’s wasting money. I know we all like to splash the cash a little and have fun – hell I’m known to buy the latest gadget, game or gizmo if my bank balance permits me. But it’s spending money when one doesn’t have to that gets to me.

Say for instance you’re buying a new iPod for almost 200 Euros. I’m always amazed by the amount of people (almost all) who’ll just pay it even through they could have put in 20 minutes work and saved themselves 30 Euros. That’s an extra thirty Euros you could have in your pocket for basically doing nothing.

As a younger person (although I know most people are affected by the recession) I’m kind of expected to be somewhat up to date with ‘fashion’ and of course technology. And that means expensive purchases. Many young people just bite the bullet not realising that they could easily save (and make) money by following even a couple of the steps I’ll outline below. I’ve compiled the following list of 5 ways to save money that you might not have considered before.

Go Open Source

Until a few days ago when I did a post about this subject on my blog I had no idea how much Microsoft Office cost. Not a clue. To be honest, I was a little shocked that Microsoft were charging a whopping $399 for the full version and $149 for students.

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Spread out over several articles, I’ve mentioned that I’m sort of a multitasker. Not a very good one though, I have to admit. And every Mac user will concur that aside from Spaces, Exposé is one of the most useful tools to help you triumph over the land mine that is multitasking.

From Panther to Tiger to Leopard and now, Snow Leopard, we’ve seen Exposé slowly maturing from a young cub to the ferocious beast it is today. There’s just so much more you can do with Exposé now compared to a year or two ago. And sticking with the multitasking motif, I’ll show you 6 different ways you can make use of Exposé in your daily workflow, shaving precious seconds off your regular routine.

Quick Look in Exposé

Quick Look is now integrated into Exposé, allowing you to preview a window without exiting Exposé. Invoke the All Windows Exposé view and while your mouse cursor is hovering over a window (highlighted by a blue rim), press Spacebar. You are now previewing that window in full resolution but wait, you’re still in Exposé. You may either press Spacebar again to return to the All Windows view or click on the preview (or press Enter) to select that window or the Escape key to exit Exposé.

This works wonders if you have a lot of windows open and they end up being generated as tiny thumbnails. There’s no more guesswork involved. You can now be sure of the window you’re selecting while still in Exposé.
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I personally love the Dropbox file sharing program, and it’s not hard to explain why — instant synchronization across all three major platforms is inherently awesome. Drop a file into your Dropbox on one computer and it shows up almost instantly on all your machines.

MakeUseOf writers have highlighted Dropbox’s virtues more than once. In 2008 Dave interviewed its founder, Drew Houston; Angelina suggested several interesting ways for students to use Dropbox; Jackson reviewed Dropbox’s iPhone app; and Jeffry showed Mac users how to remotely trigger a file download using Dropbox.

But as useful as the Dropbox file sharing program is on its own, it’s even better when used in tandem with the applications you already know and love. Whether it’s remotely starting a Bittorrent download, synchronizing your calendar and to-do list or making your video game habit instantly portable, Dropbox can make multiple computers function as though they are one.
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To accommodate the ever-increasing desire for startups and corporations to reach out to their audience and discover more about them, site analytics tools are evolving to showcase much more about the types of people that visit their online properties and how they interact with their content – and each other.

One such evolution in site analytics comes from a startup called Reinvigorate. Where Google has reigned supreme in delivering detailed statistics about site usage and traffic with their free analytics service, it’s fallen short on delivery of that information in real-time. Let’s take a look at the way Reinvigorate can be utilized to achieve a clearer picture of visitor behavior, and how it might work towards achieving the goal of increased awareness between website owners and their users.

Who Goes There?

While having the ability to see how many visitors you might have on a given day is helpful, being able to know how many visitors are on your site right now is valuable. It’s valuable for determining how and when to scale up your site’s infrastructure to accommodate higher loads of traffic. It’s valuable to determine if you’ve suddenly been linked from a high-profile blog or news outlet. It’s also the key metric Reinvigorate features at their core that set them apart from Google – showing exactly how many active visitors are on your site at any given time.
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Just a few days ago, Google announced the release of the Chrome OS source code. Within less than 24 hours, the web was littered with disk images for running the new OS on virtual machines such as VMWare and VirtualBox. I even managed to put together my own Google Chrome OS download in the form of a complete VirtualBox appliance. I’m pleased to announce that I’ve taken it a step further, and now you can easily try it on your own computer from a USB thumb drive.

Before You Get Started

Before you decide to download Chrome OS, there are probably a few things I should tell you about it. It is in the very early stages of development, so there is still a lot of stuff that doesn’t work. In fact, it may not work for you at all.

You should also be made aware that this operating system is very simplistic by design, as it is intended for use on netbook computers. By definition, a netbook is a small and inexpensive laptop intended for very casual use such as web browsing and simple office tasks. When you launch Chrome OS, pretty much all you get is a web browser. Don’t be surprised if you go through all this and say to yourself, “I did all that work just to log into a freakin’ browser?”

Requirements

First of all, you will of course need a USB drive you can use to try it out. The disk image is 2,988,442,112 bytes, so you’ll probably need a 4GB thumb drive to be able to use it. If you have any files on your USB drive that you need, be sure to back them up to a safe place because this will wipe all the data from your USB drive. Consider yourself warned.
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