I recently discovered Rosetta@Home and Fold it.   They are both ways anyone can help with protein folding.  I’m no expert on proteins, but according to the site protein folding helps scientists to better understand proteins which can aide in curing diseases.  Which is pretty darn cool 🙂

Rosetta@Home works by using your computer’s idle resources to fold proteins in the background, it has various settings that let you tell when and how much of your CPU Rosetta@Home can use so it doesn’t interfere with other tasks.  Rosetta@Home can also be set as your screen saver so whenever your system idles you can watch it fold proteins.  It also logs your progress and you can collect “credits” which it displays on the site and if you get enough you could end up on their leader boards.

http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

Fold it is a lot more hands on.  It’s like a 3D puzzle game, and I was very impressed with the renderings and how all the tools worked.  You can collect points and find your way to the leader boards in this application too.  It’s a free game that could help cure cancer – what’s not to like?

http://fold.it/

This is a very neat little time waster where you can create music right from your browser!  It’s very easy, just click on the squares to make your own sound loop.  You can choose from different sound patterns and control their tempo, pitch, and volume.  Sadly you can’t export your musical creations just yet, but according to their forums that feature is in the works.

http://www.inudge.net/
http://inudge.net/#/kcz8

Another interesting music maker P22 Music Text Composition Generator.  This nifty tittle tool takes any text and converts it into a tune!

http://p22.com/musicfont/

This is kind of random, I found out that you can play Quake from your browser for free 🙂  I can’t say I’m very good at the first person shooter games…but it was fun trying it out.  It’s in full 3D and you get to connect and play with other people online.  It’s pretty simple game-play, you pick up weapons and buffs and try to shoot everyone else before they shoot you.  They do have a few special modes like – team play and capture the flag.  You don’t need to download and install a full program, but you will need to download a plug-in – then you can play it straight from your browser!

It wouldn’t work in chrome at all, but I was able to install the plug-in and run it fine in Firefox.

http://www.quakelive.com/

When working with dual monitors I’ll often watch online programs.  Normally when I have the progra fullscreen and then click anywhere else on the other monitor it will break the fullscreen mode.

UPDATE 11/19/10: The below no longer works 🙁  Though, luckily there’s a newer and much easier way to solve the problem!   Just download and run Ignoflash find “gcswf32.dll” and hit apply, easy peasy 🙂  At this time you can find the latest version of the ddl for chrome on Vista here:

C:\Users\{user}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\7.0.517.44\gcswf32.dll

Like before you may need to turn on “organize>folder search and options>view>show hidden files and folders” to find the file

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It can be really annoying so I took a look around the internet and found this:

http://my.opera.com/d.i.z./blog/2009/04/22/watch-fullscreen-flash-while-working-on-another-screen

All you need to do it place the NPSWF32.dll file here (for vista, and make sure to backup the original file!):

C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\

For chrome you’ll also need to make some changes to file  as outlined here:

http://lifehacker.com/5560912/keep-flash-101-in-full-screen-on-a-second-monitor

Then copy the file here:

C:\Users\{your user name}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\6.0.408.1\gcswf32.dll

and you may need to turn on “organize>folder search and options>view>show hidden files and folders”

And you’ll have fullscreen awesomeness no matter where you click 🙂

I like arranging the icons on my Mac so their in groups like…”browsers,” “art programs,” ect. and I’ve always wanted them all to match.  So today I decided to make some new icons for them!  They’re all based on the Adobe CS3 icons:

I found a nice free program called img2icns for Mac to turn them into icons. You can use Converticon.com for Windows.  I also made a template for creating Adobe CS3 style icons based on a .psd from pshero, so if you want to make your own you can download my template.