"If every additional user is putting money in the developers' pockets, then you're less likely to see the site disappear overnight." Yep. This is all quite sensible, and something I've long believed. (See also: Garrett Murray's pleading requests for Tumblr to let him pay for it).

Advance-Wars-inspired tabletop game.

Some of these are very nice; many are likely to end up on posters for dubstep nights in Shoreditch soon, I fear.

"In one sense, Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker! is a truly exotic bit of esoterica -- a game on the Columbia riots, printed back in 1969 in the pages of the Columbia Daily Spectator, and designed by James F. Dunnigan, one of the finest and most prolific designers of board wargames... In Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker! you play either as Columbia University's administration, or as the radicals who have seized control of Fayerweather Hall. You are attempting to influence the opinions of various stakeholders in the university -- students of different sorts, the alumni, and so on. Random event cards influence play. Ultimately, the side that gains the greatest sympathy on the part of university stakeholders wins."

Card-based dungeon-crawling game. Basically: card-driven roguelike. Should print it out and take a squint sometime.

"The following is a list of 99 free games (in no particular order) that I’ve enjoyed this calendar year, nearly all of which have been released in 2009 or very late in 2008. So why don’t you take a break from funding corporate overlords and see just what a feast there is out there in the wide world below the big ticket level—all you can lose, really, is just a little bit of time." Turns out I've played a lot of these. Many are good; some are excellent.

"Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software." Oooh.

Really rather good series of tutorials on the FCE4 basics.

Lots of free FCE plugins, including some to rescale D90 footage and make it look a lot better.

A quite nice monochromatic icon set, including both dark-on-light and light-on-dark options.

"MISO by Mårten Nettelbladt is a heavy duty typeface for the construction industry." Ooh, that's quite nice.

Almost Atari 2600-era platforming, but with a couple of (big) twists. Compulsive, and cross-platform, it's almost definitely worth an hour of your day.

"Thank you to everyone who emailed asking about a World of Goo Soundtrack. This is probably as close to an "official" soundtrack I'll ever make for the game World of Goo. I'm making it available here on my personal portfolio for free." No, thank you, Kyle.

"The US auto industry is on the verge of imploding. People are losing their homes to foreclosure. And, on the off chance that you had the nerve to try to buy something, credit is almost impossible to come by. It is against that backdrop that I would like to talk about working for free. Why? Because I think it is one of the fastest ways to make yourself a better photographer, whether you are a pro or an amateur."

"The Firefox add-on "Pirates of the Amazon" inserts a "download 4 free" button on Amazon, which links to corresponding Piratebay BitTorrents. The add-on lowers the technical barrier to enable anyone to choose between "add to shopping cart" or "download 4 free". Are you a pirate?" Almost certainly not the first example; perhaps one of the best realised.

Mirror's Edge 2D flash game - which look, by all accounts, to be an official spin-off. Can't wait to see the full version; it's a very impressive little game.

Jos Buivenga's font foundry, with many free faces (usually in a few weights - other weights are paid-for). Some beautiful stuff in here.

Beautiful, free, sans-serif font. Gorgeous - especially at 900-weight.

365 free games - download or flash or otherwise - collected by the PC Gamer staff, and now free on Games Radar. Only looked at the first page, but there's loads of good stuff. I mean, it *starts* with Kenta Cho...

"QTAmateur is a small, simple QuickTime video player. It can play any format that QuickTime can understand, handle fullscreen video playback, and export files to any format that QuickTime can write." Cheaper than QTPro for converting Flip video files.

"The infochimps.org community is assembling and interconnecting the world's best repository for raw data -- a sort of giant free allmanac, with tables on everything you can put in a table."

Lots of .flv tutorial videos. May be useful for my plans to do with learning Flash.

Homebrew Galactica Viper/Raptor fighter-combat sim, based on the excellent (and now free) Freespace 2 engine. As a huge BG _and_ FS2 fan, I'll be checking this out.

Can't believe I haven't bookmarked this already. Nice, neutral, 700-strong set of icons. Will come in handy for a few interfaces I'm building.

When I have a bit more time (ie, the weekend) I should probably check this out.

Simplelog hits 2.0 - nice going, Garrett. It's looking really polished, but resolutely maintaining its attitude of doing the bare minimum for a blog. In this day and age of spam and similar, that still means quite a bit - but it's a good philosophy.

Let's limit our attention to one application--any application--at any time. Let's make it easy to change focus when we have to. Let's allow ourselves to bring other apps up quickly if we need them, but put them out of sight again just as quickly.

"Mon.itor.us is the only external website monitoring service which provides commercial grade distributed monitoring services absolutely for FREE."

Tiny system-monitoring widget for OSX's dashboard

ImageWell looks like the image editor for about 50% of the work I do in Photoshop. Will look into adding this to my toolset for web work.

Another free osx cd burning tool

Freeware CD burning app for OSX. Finder sometimes isn't enough; Toast is expensive; Disco's getting some flak right now.

Delicious is a beautiful, free sans-serif. The Italic is especially gorgeous.

Awesome - animated Mignola to watch.

Ugh! Google release a cross-platform, free version of the awesome, awesome Sktechup. So cool. Want to gome and play with this NOW.

Not only tasteful, but also (by and large) in a selection of different weights.

A free icon set - with 719 different icons in it. Lovely and consistent, really usable (though they only come in small sizes) and covering almost everything you'd want to do with a web application.

Kontrapunkt is also free to download, and very beautiful. I'm there.

Funky, free, must look into sometime.

Some nice free fonts, mostly hand-drawn, very Pablo Ferro at points.

Free alternative to stuffit; will produce bzip, gzip, tar and zip files