I just finished intergrating a new free Flash Video Arcade. Not many games yet but I'll be reviewing and adding the best ones from Mochigames over the next few days.

Check it out! >>

I added a new seamless 1024x1024 psd  'welded wire' texture, with a transparent background, to the Daily Download section (which section has not lived up to its name because of my computer problems!). You may find it useful as a pattern or to add as part of a more compex texture.

Here's a section of the texture. Hope you find it useful

Go get it >>

Google has several fonts and variants at the Google Font Directory that that are available under an open source license. You can link to these fonts from your site and Google will serve them up. There are other font embedding schemes but this is a fairly easy one. You can also download the fonts to use them for your mockups or in your own documents.

The fonts source files are available online but there isn't a simple zip of the ttf's for you to use. They have to be downloaded and extracted(?) or converted(?) in some way. Fortunately other designers were confused and someone put together an 'unofficial' zip file. I am linking to it here.

Please take a moment to read the README file included in the zip along with copies of the APACHE and OFL open source licenses. This file had the latest versions of the fonts as of June 2010 but changes and updates may have been made so if you know how to use those raw source files then you might prefer to download them there.

Download Zip

If you are like me you did -or still do- love comic books. The dynamic art work squeezed into those color filled pages captured a lot of my youthful attention. Not only did I love the art but I struggled with reading up to first or second grade. Comics with all their visual language got my atttention and provided a 'gateway' which helped me develop a love of reading.

So if you like to read comics - or want to study the art- check out these free digital comics (courtesy of Marvel Comics).

Browse Free Online Comics >>

I found this interesting Beta product via Paul Thurott and Leo Laporte's Windows Weekly Podcast. It simplifies the process of analyzing programs that run at boot time -something I have been doing with other programs like Autoruns by Sysinternals and by recommendations from places like Black Vipers Web Site.

It has an attractive and friendly interface with simple operation. It analyzes your boot process and then gives you a list of items and the times each adds to the process, broken down into 3 categories. Essentially 'safe to remove' , 'potentially safe to remove' and 'don't touch, essential file.'

You are also shown what other users have done and said via a crowd sourcing type process and then can choose to remove it from the boot, or delay it -so it runs in the background after boot.

There is also a 'History' that shows you how different software you have installed has affected your boot over time. Even though it is 'beta' software I still give this a 4 out of 5. It will be interesting to see how this continues to evolve.