The early developer milestone release of Firefox 3.0a1, codenamed Gran Paradiso, has reached Alpha 1 and is available for download for web developers, testers, and folks who like to risk their browsing experience for the sake of being an early adopter. This isn’t the official Firefox 3.0 alpha, so don’t get *too* excited, but this does give an early look into the next generation of Firefox. Builds are available for Windows XP (98 and ME no longer supported!), Macintosh OS X and Linux varieties. There are no major front-end improvements, but the back-end has been torn apart with Gran Paradiso now using Cairo for all of the graphics and text renderings. Cocoa Widgets are now used in OS X builds also! Padow!

Read more: Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 available for download

Windows users who want to be a little more like Mac users will soon have another application to install. Swift is a new web-browser currently in an alpha state (ie. don’t expect solid performance or stability) and is based on the WebKit rendering engine, which also powers many of Mac OS X’s hottest applications, Dashboard, Safari, Shiira, Adium Messenger and BBEdit to name a few. Development is currently well underway on Swift and the codebase is open source, so you developers get on over there and contribute some code to make Windows user’s lives a better place!

Read more: Swift browser for Windows

ScatterChat is a new multiple IM chat client which is created specifically for non-technical political dissidents and activists, workers requiring a high-degree of privacy and security in their business, or privacy advocates wearing tin hats. ScatterChat is based on GAIM, currently only supporting Windows XP, with OS X and Linux distributions coming shortly. The client offers support for most of the major world-wide chat networks from AIM and ICQ to Gadu-Gadu, SILC, Zephyr and Jabber, offering heavy-encryption methods for authentication, chatting and file-transfers. ScatterChat uses 2048-bit ElGamal and 1024-bit DSA for encryption setup and authentication. For each individual conversation, ScatterChat will generate a new 256-bit AES message key, a 256-bit SHA-1 HMAC key, a 256-bit nonce, and a 256-bit AES file transfer key. The client is also immune to replay attacks, supports PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy) and features limited message deniability properties. The creators of ScatterChat are currently looking for help with localization efforts, translating the documentation into Arabic, Chinese and Farsi as well as technical help with ports to various other platforms (openBSD, FreeBSD, Ubuntu packages, etc). Disclaimer: The use of heavy encryption is not exactly shined upon by many governments, so use of this software is most definitely at your own risk.

[ScatterChat | ScatterChat feature list]

Indie games outfit, Cogames, has created an exciting (and addicting) browser-based version of Asteroids, only removing the asteroids and replacing them with other players! Users enter an arena with, it appears, up to 4 other players and begins a hectic and exciting free for all match, including power ups such as health and weapons and a chat feature, all through your Flash-enabled browser window. I’ve been playing all morning and I find it even more addictive than the original, much more fast-paced and even plays well on my PowerBook!

[Multiplayer Asteroids]

Mega Games, one of Europe’s largest online gaming communities, is keeping a live and exhaustive list of free video games. 52 pages of games, covering years of game design and covering all genres and many platforms (from Linux to to XP to OSX), there are hundreds of interesting (and some not so interesting) games free to play and enjoy.

[Free Games at Mega Games]

The Participatory Culture Foundation has announced the release of the Democracy internet-TV platform’s latest and greatest version (0.8.4.1), addressing many stability issues, adding some new codecs, and cleaning up the interface a little more, among other fixes. But man, what a version number. For those who do not know, Democracy is an internet-television browser, using a built-in RSS reader to display and download video-based content channels using bit-torrent technologies. The ability to grab podcasts, videocasts, video blogs and bit-torrent video feeds are present, and the video player can also be used as a Quicktime replacement, so you can re-watch season 2 of Lost, while downloading the latest episode of Rocketboom in the background. Best of all, it’s free (as in speech, as the slogan goes), open-source and works wonderfully under OSX.

[Get Democracy]

The current trend in green-living is reducing your consumption and usage of resources. One of the many ways that we can do that is by tweaking the power consumption of our portable devices, laptop computers especially. How you ask, enter the ever inspiring Guide to Green Living with a useful How-To on reducing the energy consumption of everyone’s favorite mobile computing device, the laptop. From lowing your screen’s brightness, to disabling the auto-saving feature on Word, there are several easy changes that you can do to lower the overall power consumption of your laptop’s battery, which in the end lowers the amount of time you’d need recharging.

[Conserving your laptop's battery power]

UK software engineer Simon Sheppard has created a thoroughly exhausting list of command line syntax for the Oracle 9i, Windows NT/XP (including Win2K and 2K3), Linux and OSX operating systems. As we constantly hear down here in the Nerds closet (AKA: office), true nerds use the command line.

[Command line reference for Oracle, Windows, Linux and OS X]