I'm sure most, if not all of you reading this know what woot.com is.  Well, in addition to the normal "Deal of the Day" stuff they offer, they occasionally do something called a "Woot-Off."  During a Woot-Off, items appear on the site for a short time (sometimes a few hours; sometimes a few minutes) for extremely low prices.  Wooters in the know watch the Woot-Off obsessively looking for a great deal on cool gadgets.  For example, this past Woot-Off saw a refurbed Creative media player sell for about $100 that usually sells for $400+.

But the gadgets aren't the biggest prize of all.  Nay, the biggest prize is crap.  Random crap.  A Bag of Crap.  When you purchase crap, you decide how many craps you want in your order up to a maximum of 3.  Each crap costs a dollar, and it costs $5.00 flat to ship crap to you wherever you are.  So the natural choice is to get all three craps in your box.  So $8.00 +tax if you live in Texas, and you have an order of crap winging its way to you via Smart Post.  Wait, did I say winging its way?  More like limping.  Crawling even.  As in it takes 12 days for this crap to finally arrive.  That's not too healthy if you ask me.  And that's if you were lucky enough to get crap at all.  This past Woot-Off, crap was on sale for mere minutes, and 4500 craps were bought by the Wooting masses.  According to the site, crap was selling at a rate of $243,378.45 worth of crap per hour.  That's a lot of crap if you believe those numbers.

DC member Chris Hanscom (who runs veign.com) has a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio Team Suite (with MSDN Premium subscription) to give away, and has decided to let us host a contest to decide who should get it.

This is a prize worth over $10,000 (yes you read that correctly), and so should go to a programmer who is serious about using it.

To choose a winner, we've decided to hold a little programming contest.  The winner will be chosen by Chris and myself, and will be influenced by the votes of longtime DC members.

The contest entry deadline is July 14th.

Yesterday I installed a package of many small programs, and was reminded that I quite often have wanted a 'thingy' which could create and move a shortcut in one go. For this reason I wrote the author of Piky Basket ("Copy, Copy, Copy, Paste") and asked for a new feature: >"Create shortcut and put in basket" and several new shortcuts later: "Drop / paste  shortcuts here"<. He liked the idea and said it will "mostly" be added to an upcoming new version (the program has not been updated for several years)! I know users of some third party file managers already have a part of this feature, "stack", but I will like to have all of the feature, and to have it now, and to have it in Explorer - so I am asking if 'you' know of an application with such a feature for the standard Explorer, please?

 

The results for the Indie Procedural Game Coding Contest have been posted, looks like some pretty cool stuff.  You can download and play them all.

http://tigsource.com...-competition-results

Procedural Content Generation is just a fancy name for an old technology that was popularized by Will Wright's Spore media blitzkrieg (which seemed like they were trying to pretend they invented the concept) -- it refers to any scenario where rather than fixed human crafted content, a game employs some algorithms to dynamically create some content (environment, mazes, etc.) during gameplay.

FreeSnap 1.3 has been released, now with multi-monitor support.  The author has also released the source-code under the GPL.

what it does is to allow you to resize/move windows around via some hot-keys. e.g.
WinKey + Up Arrow:         snap top window edge
WinKey + Down Arrow:     snap bottom window edge
WinKey + Left Arrow:       snap left window edge
WinKey + Right Arrow:      snap right window edge

• http://blueonionsoft...re.com/freesnap.aspx

This is an update to my 2005 review that is titled "Casual User Review" and located at the following link:
Initial 2005 Review

I am still proud to say that I still use the program on a casual basis.  What I mean by this is that the program has a lot of features and options and can do very specific things, but I don't use them all.  MLO is essentially a fancy To-Do list.  That is the simplest way to describe it.  However, it takes the idea of a todo list and packs in a feature set that will allow you to really break free from the traditional checkbox task list.  So, I'll let other users comment more on the intricate features of MLO and I will stick to explaining, on a general macro level, why this program is so useful even for the casual user.