Under a promotion Sitepoint is giving away free downloads of eBook "The Photoshop Anthology: 101 Web Design Tips, Tricks & Techniques is the ultimate Photoshop compendium for web designers." for the next 30 days.

The book illustrates 101 tried and tested real-world Photoshop solutions that will add impact to your next web design project. If you’ve ever been stuck for inspiration, have puzzled over just how to create a shiny aqua-style button, or wanted to create that seamlessly tiling background image you saw on a site recently, you need to download this book.

Adobe today released beta version of its Adobe Flash Player 10 (code-named Astro), with several new features to help interactive designers and developers create special effects and cinematic Web experiences, Adobe Flash Player 10 now supports 3D effects, custom filters, text layout, and interactive Inverse Kinematics.

Key features of the new Adobe Flash Player 10:

3D Effects - Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity. Fast, lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users available to everyone. Complex effects are simple with APIs that extend what you already know.

Custom Filters and Effects - Create your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills using Adobe® Pixel Bender™, the same technology used for many After Effects CS3 filters. Shaders in Flash Player are about 1KB and can be scripted and animated at runtime.

Advanced Text Layout - A new, highly flexible text layout engine, co-existing with TextField, enables innovation in creating new text controls by providing low-level access to text offering right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.

Enhanced Drawing API - Runtime drawing is easier and more powerful with re-styleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line.

Visual Performance Improvements – Applications and videos will run smoother and faster with expanded use of hardware acceleration. By moving several visual processing tasks to the video card, the CPU is free to do more.

German PC magazine PC Welt is running a promotion giving away free genuine license keys for Winrar 3.62, The popular file archiver costs around $29 but can be downloaded and registered free using the special registration link provided by the magazine.

The registration is meant for German users only but the license key works well on both German and English versions of WinRAR,
I will also be sharing a simple hack at the end of this post to register Winarar 3.62 using a different approach.

To register follow the steps below:

1. Download Winrar 3.62 from here.
2. Visit the special registration promo link (https://covermount.win-rar.com/pcwelt0508/) using this german proxy site, as access to this page got blocked after non-german users started making use of it.
3. Fill in details according to the translation provided in the image below.
   
   
4. You should now receive an email from Winrar in German with few links, follow the second link having download.php in the url.
5. Now click on the link saying “Download des Lizenzschlüssels” to download “rarkey.rar” file, Open “rarkey.rar” file to get “rarreg.key” which will automatically get recognized by Winrar.

Another simple hack to get fully functional version of Winrar

Ono is a simple plugin for popular Bittorrent client Azureus to accelerate speeds upto 207% on average, according to the project developer team at Northwestern University’s AquaLab group:

For most P2P applications, the decision regarding which peer to download from is generally arbitrary. When most peers offer good download performance, the random solution works well. However, if most peers are in a different part of the world from you, your downloads can really suffer.

The Ono plugin avoids this by proactively finding peers that are close to you (in a networking sense). These peers generally offer better response time, which can lead to significantly improved performance. We identify those peers that are near you by reusing network measurements from content distribution networks (CDNs), i.e. without performing extensive path measurement or probing.

So does this work? In a word, yes. Using results collected from our participating users (well over 100,000 of them!), we have found that our system locates peers along paths that have two orders of magnitude lower latency and 30% lower loss rates than those picked at random by BitTorrent, and that these high-quality paths can lead to significant improvements in transfer rates. In challenged settings where peers are overloaded in terms of available bandwidth, Ono provides a 31% average download-rate improvement; in environments with large available bandwidth, Ono increases download rates by 207% on average (and improves median rates by 883%).

If you own a Palm OS based PDA such as Palm Zire, Treo, Tungsten etc, and looking for high quality free games for your gadget, PDAmill Game Studios is giving away there collection of fully unlocked PDA games for free.

The company is focusing on Windows Mobile platform and hence providing their range of PDA games for free, these games support 320x320 and 480x320 resolution Palm OS 5 devices, To install download the correct zip file for your resolution (320x320 or 480x320) from the direct links provided below

Long ago, I blogged on how to get Acronis True Image for free via Seagate legally without using any crack or keygen, Here is another similar opportunity to get your personal genuine registration code for Acronis True Image 8.0 Personal Edition.

Acronis True Image 8.0 Personal Edition allows you to make clone images of your hard-disks and partition's, and restore the backup image for 100% data recovery when disaster strikes, Acronis True Image 8.0 also features Bootable Rescue Media Builder to prepare bootable rescue media like live CD or floppy-disk which can be used to boot the computer and restore the system in-case the OS is unable to boot.

As a part of promotion with UK computer magazine PC Pro users can get free genuine license for Acronis True Image 8.0 Personal Edition,

Want to send your name to moon, Names will be collected and placed onboard the LRO spacecraft for its historic mission bringing NASA back to the moon. You will also receive a certificate showcasing your support of the mission.

The deadline is June 27, 2008 for the submission of names. LRO's objectives are to find safe landing sites, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment, and demonstrate new technology.