Armchair astronomers and space freaks listen up! The amazing developers behind Stellarium have accomplished quite some amazing things. Used by many real planetariums for their projection showings, Stellarium is an amazing feat of open source software development, giving the user a realistic, 3D sky on a desktop environment, allowing users to enter coordinates, browse the night sky or even beam it onto your ceiling before going to sleep. The educational usage and possibilities of this is amazing and I for one am considering purchasing an HDTV projector simply to see Uranus on my ceiling at night!

Download: Stellarium - Open source planetarium for your computer

The desktops are alive with the sound of widgets and now more than ever thanks to Wigipedia, a wiki community collecting everything there is to know about desktop and web widgets for Windows, OS X and Linux computers. Wigipedia is attempting to catalog the development of all widgets and gadgets, across all platforms, allowing developers to upload their creations in order to collaborate with other developers and offer their small apps directly to end users. There’s also a comprehensive section with tutorials and code samples so you can learn to create your own desktop widget!

Widget more: Widgipedia.com

So your favorite band came through town, you missed the show and now your friends are all telling you how killer it was? Have no fear, a pair of grad students have gotten fed up and have developed a delightfully simple tool for keeping track of both your MP3 library AND your favorite band’s tour dates so you won’t miss the next killer do. The tool is iConcertCal and it’s a free iTunes plugin that monitors your music library and based upon your most playlist, generates a personalized calender of upcoming shows in your city. THe interface mimics iCal and is available for both Windows and Mac OS X.

Download: iConcertCal

So Twitter is our new fun obsession and what better way to enjoy a newfound hobby is there than to find all the free and open source software you can for it!? NONE! Twitterrific is a light and fun little application that lets you easily publish “tweets” to your Twitter account or read tweets from your Twitter contacts, all while stylishly occupying a small spot of real estate on your Mac’s desktop. Let your friends know what level your World of Warcraft character is or how badly you want the iPhone you’re reading about without having to leave your desktop!

Download: Twitterrific | Twitter

For many, using open source software is about equivalent to breathing, but for most, we need certain commercial software in order work, easy communicate with family or even to sometimes surf the internet. But that’s quickly changing. As the quality levels of many open source projects begin to soar and more and more developers are opening their software up, the need for certain commercial software is rapidly diminishing. Still lost? Well, let osalt.com help you find your way. Collecting links, descriptions and explanations to some of the best open source apps this side of the www, osalt guides you through the process of open sourcing your Windows XP, Mac OS X or Linux machine with ease, offering you open source alternatives to some of the largest commercial software in existence.

Read more: Open Source Alternative

Working in web development I’m constantly finding myself taking screenshots, which I am then manipulating manually, cutting and pasting here and there and back again, in an attempt to get the perfect shot. I knew of screenshot tools on the PC, maybe even used one or two here and there, but, for some reason they just never stuck. Now that I’m fully using OS X for everything I do, I’ve noticed the need for taking screenshots rapidly, with as little downtime as possible, and I think I’ve finally found the perfect piece of software for me. InstantShot! is a freeware piece of software (free as in beer, or bier) which creates a menu icon under OS X, assigning an easy to use UI for OS X’s screenshot functionality, allowing you to capture whole screen, partial screen and timed captures. All this for the low-price of nothing, but donations are highly encouraged.

Read more: InstantShot!

Thrasher, the highly influential skateboarding magazine started in 1981, is offering it’s first 12 issues free to download in digital form. The issues date from January to December 1981 and were given away for free to celebrate the magazine’s 25th anniversary. It’s amazing to see all of these old magazines again, when I was a kid I’d pour through every issue I could get my hands on, looking at ads, music reviews and the spectacular photos of dirty skaters destroying public property and preforming amazing tricks in people’s squatted swimming pools. The issues

See more: First 12 issues of Thrasher Magazine for digital download

MacLibre is a nifty little open source application for Mac OS X, developed at Google’s recent Summer of Code. Consider MacLibre to be the quality control of open source Mac apps, providing Mac users with a pre-selected list of applications available for quick and easy downloading through the use of MacLibre’s internal bittorrent client. More open source applications are being added quite often, naturally after passing MacLibre’s vigorous testing and quality assurance requirements.

Read more: MacLibre

Business travelers and consultants have been fans of portable apps for ages, rightfully so. Portable applications are computer programs that are small enough to fit on portable devices (USB thumb drives for example) and able to be launched from almost any (Windows in this case) computer without leaving your personal data behind. Carry your email, web broswer, calender and address book in the palm of your hand and never worry about having to use someone else’s computer to work with your data. Portableapps.com offers many portable versions of today’s hottest software, from Firefox portable to GIMP portable, allowing you to slim down your computing life and never worry about your private data being left behind anywhere (just don’t forget your USB stick in that internet cafe).

Read more: Portable Apps

The blogosphere is in a whirl as Mozilla approaches their 2.0 release of Firefox, which is continuing Mozilla’s focus on the individual user, web functionality and usability. So naturally there was a lot of chatter yesterday with the announcement that Firefox 2.0 beta 2 was available for public testing (see the download link below). A noticable step forward from beta 1, Some of the enhancements in beta 2 include an updated default theme, search engine manager, keyword suggestions in the search box, and major enhancements to RSS handling, extensions management, security and (supposedly) performance. Naturally this is just a beta release for testing purposes only, so don’t expect any sort of stability, usability or for your old extensions to work. Though there is a utility called the Nightly Tester Tool which will make some of your extensions 2.0 compatible. Happy testing all.

Read more: Firefox 2 project wiki | Mozilla Firefox 2.0 beta 2 download