With the holiday season pretty much in full swing, I’m sure many of you are sending gifts to loved ones around the country (and the world). If you haven’t sent out your gifts yet, chances are they won’t arrive on time (I sent a package Priority Mail recently and it took almost two weeks to arrive at its destination). If you’re looking to keep an eye on where your packages might be, then check out PackageMapper, a free service which will let you enter a tracking number for UPS, FedEx, or the United States Postal Service and map the shipping route on a map powered by Google Maps (of course, right?). This is definitely one of my favorite Google Maps hacks on the web, and I really hope that these shipping companies start integrating it into their own websites. Customers love convenience, right?

As the internet has evolved, setting up your own website or blog has become increasingly more simple. Many hosting companies offer packages which require almost no setup on the part of the user (Typepad and Wordpress.com come to mind). Setting up your own website isn’t terribly difficult, but if you’ve never done it before, you may not know exactly what steps to take. I thought about writing my own guide for TipMonkies, but came upon Site-Helper recently instead. Site-Helper is a fantastic resource to help you set up your own site and goes over pretty much all the important and relevant topics, from e-mail to scripts to databases and more.

Lately, it seems that the new popular type of web services are the so called personalized homepages which let users add RSS feeds, links, notes, widgets, search and more. These services usually also use AJAX (or Flash in the case of Goowy) to provide an interactive experience and move these widgets around. The latest entry into the (quickly becoming crowded) market is called Favoor. I had the chance to play around with it a bit, and enjoyed the ease of use and quick page loads, but was a little disappointed by the lack of widget types available. Basically, you can only add RSS feeds, links (and folders of links), and sticky notes currently, though I’m sure that in order to stay competitive, Favoor will add others in the future. One night feature which other personalized homepages don’t offer is the ability to change the theme of your page, though there is no option to select one from a list - you’ll just have to hit the themes button until you come upon one you like. Favoor is available for free (registration required) and in both English and German.

There are tons of services which help users shorten web address with TinyURL being one of the oldest and most popular sites of its kind. Another such services I came upon recently is Qurl which claims to create the shortest links of any other service. So what’s different about Qurl? The service allows you to sign up for an account and share your shortened web addresses with friends. By becoming a member, you can also password protect these links, and keep various statistics on them like how many other people have clicked on it, etc., making it one of the more social services of it’s kind. If you’re curious as to why you may want to shorten a web address, imagine those long, convoluted URLs many websites present and how annoying it may be to paste them into an e-mail and have them scroll for multiple lines. Qurl makes this a thing of the past, all for free, of course.

While I no longer run Linux as my main operating system, I did for many years and like to recommend it to almost everyone I come across. The one problem to getting other people to using an alternative operating system like Linux, is that many people (read that as nearly all non-techies) are not willing to get rid of Windows and try out something new. Sure, there are quite a few liveCD distros around which let you try an operating system without actually installing it onto your hard drive, but many people might not be willing to burn the CD and try it out. One other choice is using emulation software like QEMU or the recently released (and free) VMWare Player. If you’re looking to try out an alternative operating system, then check out this article for detailed instructions on how to acquire all the necessary software and running Linux (or any other x86 operating system) using VMWare Player. By default, VMWare Player will only run virtual images created by it’s commercial big brother VMWare, but the article will show you how to work around this little hindrance.

Since the introduction of the video-enabled iPod, we’ve mentioned a few different tools which help you convert videos to a format which your new iPod will recognized. If you found that those tools weren’t quite what you wanted or were maybe too difficult to use, then you should definitely check out iSquint.