I know many of you are big Google fans. I know I am, which is one reason why I use Google Talk even though I do not have many people on my Google Talk buddy list (as I’m sure many of you GTalk users don’t). One way to find new friends is signing up for a free account over at GTalk Life. Once you become a member of the site, you can browse through over members’ profiles and find people with similar interests as yourself and add them to your buddy list. The site is still small with only about 125 members, but I’m sure it will grow in the future. By the way, feel free to find me on Google Talk. My username on there is ferrettim.

If you work at a place where communication between different team members is essential, you may be using multiple pieces of software and hardware to get the job done. One pretty interesting application I came upon recently is called Verosee which dubs itself a workspace application for Skype.

One of my favorite media players to use, particularly for videos and DVDs is VLC, which is available for Windows, Macs, Linux, and a few other operating systems. It’s free, lightweight, and supports nearly any format you could possibly imagine. Because of the small resource usage and its ability to run even on PocketPCs, VLC makes a great tool to be able to stream video from one device to another. Imagine being on the road with a PocketPC, bored out of your mind…you could easily fire up your portable and connect to your PC using VLC and watch any movies or listen to any song you want, all for free. Engadget has posted a guide on how to stream almost anything with VLC which is sure to be very useful for a lot of you. If you use it, let us know how!

NonStopMac has a nice tutorial on how to give your Mac a hostname.

Here’s another tip for you XBox junkies (though you’re probably playing new console right now instead of reading this). There’s a free Windows application which has been around for some time now called XBList which lets you keep track of you buddies on XBox Live without ever having to turn on your console and check for yourself. XBList sits on your Windows desktop and constantly tracks your friends’ status, as well as basic gamer information such as what games your friends are playing, whether you have new friend requests, popup notifications when friends sign on and off, and more. You can find a full list of features over at the program homepage, and yes, it will work with your 360. Be sure to have the .NET Framework installed on your PC for the application to work.

Steve Gibson, of the Security Now podcast and many other things (like appearances of Call for Help on G4 and more, has introduced a new web-based service which automatically generates an extremely secure password you can use to encrypt your WEP, WPA, or VPN networks. The generated passwords are encrypted and completely random strings of characters and there is nothing to do on your part, just browse on over to the Ultra High Security Password Generator page and each time you reload the site, you’ll get new passwords generated. If you’ve been using weak, insecure passwords, you have no excuse anymore not to strengthen your network security. Check it out!

As voice instant messaging capabilities are added to more IM programs and voice over IP becomes more prevalent, we’re slowly starting to get more and more used to contacting people via voice instead of text. I know at least for me, I basically stopped using my traditional phone to contact people instead opting for IM or e-mail as a more convenient (albeit maybe slower) form of communication. The next obvious step IM and VOIP applications will take is the addition of video chat capabilities and we’re slowly starting to see that today thanks to an application called Festoon.

One prettty nice feature of iTunes is the ability to share your music library with other people by setting up a share name and giving it a password. This is especially useful in college campuses or around the office so you don’t have to burn CDs for everyone (not that you would anyways since it’s legally questionable, right?). It’s also a good way to have a neverending supply of music for your next party. The one thing that iTunes doesn’t allow is the ability to download the shares to another computer (for obvious reasons), but there is a pretty neat application called myTunes which lets you do it easily.