CoolIris is a browser plugin for firefox that enhances the experience of image searching on the web.  Its a cinematic, 3-dimensional wall that you can scroll through endlessly in full screen.

The most useful thing about CoolIris is the image search.  When you do a search on Google images that yields a lot of results, you have to keep clicking “next” over and over, and it gets annoying.  CoolIris stitches all of the pages together into one infinite wall of images, and makes browsing through an image search much more pleasant, and way better looking.  You can use it to search Google Images, Flickr, Photobucket, or Picasa to name just a few.  It loads images quickly and runs smoothly.

CoolIris also uses RSS to display images from syndicated sites.  Most blogger.com sites work in CoolIris, and its an interesting way to browse a blog’s archives visually only by its published images.  The plugin supports video sites like YouTube and hulu too, and online shopping sites like Amazon.  I hope to make NineCents compatible with CoolIris in the near future.

They also make an iPhone app, available for free in the app store.  You just tilt the phone to scroll across the wall.  Unfortunately, the app doesn’t run as smoothly as its desktop counterpart, even over a wifi connection.

CoolIris is available at their website, www.cooliris.com.

I never really cared how the UI on my Windows XP machine looked before.  As long as it got the job done, I was happy.  But one day I finally decided that I wanted it to look cool.  So I put on my decorating hat and found some good looking, but useful items to spiff up the ol’ desktop.  All of this was done for free, and most of it was done without hogging up too many resources.

Also, I should get this out of the way now:  SUP DAWG, I HERD YOU LIKE TO CRASH SO WE INSTALLED WINDOWS ON YOUR WINDSHIELD SO YOU CAN BSOD WHILE YOU DRIVE.  Okay, here’s the sources on all the stuff under the hood:  Continue reading this post…

True Combat: Elite is a great first person shooter PC game that has been a favorite of mine for a while now.  Its a total conversion modification by Team Terminator for Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.  Now, I don’t play many shooters, but I really like this game, and the best thing about True Combat: Elite is that its FREE!

If you’ve played Call of Duty or Call of Duty 2 you are familiar with the iron sight aiming system.  Its one of many things about the modification which attempts to make the game play realistic, and this is really what did it for me.  There are no crosshairs in real life! Also, True Combat scraps the World War II weapons for a more modern arsenal.  Theres a good variety of modern assault rifles, submachine guns, shotguns, sniper rifles, pistols, and concussion grenades.  Only one of the guns is sort of fictional; The Remington SR8 is only a prototype and was never put into full production.  The game has some pretty open maps, but its meant to be a closed quarters type of combat with one team as terrorists and one as special operations counterterrorists.

You might say this is nothing more than just a free alternative to Counterstrike, but it definitely has its own feel and I much prefer the game play of True Combat: Elite.

Did I mention this game is free?  Yeah, pretty awesome.  I’d like to thank Trent at the Simple Dollar for first introducing this game to me in his list of 30 pieces of free software.  Download links and movie under the fold.

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