Here ye’, here ye’. Mac backgrounds. All shapes, sizes, colours and… um… colours. 16-a-piece, good sir. Free for you, dear lady. Get them whilst they’re hot and be the cool kid on the block.

They’re hip. They’re funky. They’re rad. Yeah. Or something like that anyway.

Please note: Ye’ kind peoples who choose to use these, be aware they’re released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike agreement. Basically, so long as you aren’t selling these and give us credit where due, you can use these however you like (provided not for any illegal activities).

You Know You’re A Geek When…

1 – You find yourself consoling friends by saying “When there’s a widget, there’s a way!”

2 – Your friends are sat around talking about how they’ve gotta get home for the “big game”, and you ask if they’re watching “Fatal1ty take on Sir n00binator” as well. Oh dear. Oh dear.

3 – You sell out your real friends for those on Xfire, and miss your best-friends birthday party due to a “long-scheduled scrim”. Me figures he was born before the scrim was arranged. Pitiful.

4 – You know the price of the Optimus Maximus keyboard, know that it’s also Shakespeare’s birthyear, and worst of all… think that dropping $1,564 on it is money well spent.

5 – You’re more likely to give a girl your Twitter name than your phone number. Worse, you think that makes you incredibly cool.

6 – You give a crap what people think about you in forums, but not in real life.

7 – When people ask you about your accomplishments in life, you’re more likely to tell them you’re a level 70 on Warcraft, than the fact… well. Rather than anything else. I mean, nothing can compare, right?

8 – When people ask for your address, you assume they want your IP address, or website address – rather than… you know. Your address.

9 – You have SERIOUSLY accused people during sport (when you actually get round to playing it) of using aimbots, cheats and speedhacks. Not cool.

10 – It’s not unknown for you to give dirty looks to little kids asking silly questions. Once or twice, you might have even screamed “RTFMNOOB!” (particularly if you’re a Linux user).

11 – It’s easier for you to count in binary, and like so… 1. 2. 4. 8. 16. 32. 64. 128. 256. 512. 1024. 2048. 4096. 10192. 20384. 40768. And no… of course I didn’t just type that off by heart. *shifty eyes*

12 – You refuse point blank to use computers other than your own – knowing you’ll end up in a state of mental distress by the end. The speed, the way they’re administered, and the mofoing fact that they all use Internet Explorer tip you over the edge.

13 – You build your own computesr (and hackintoshes), but point-blank refuse to buy the 10-quid “guarantee” that Scan offers on your parts – even when they cost £10k, knowing that nothing will go wrong with you in charge.

14 – When you make a comment in class, or to a fellow employee – you always start it with “rem”, which you find more pronouncable than “//”.  You also “talk\ like\ this”.

15 – Dual-booting is for sissies. Your thing octi-poople-boots.

16 – Your USB-stick pen-drive (whatever the fruitcake you wanna call it) is larger than most people’s primary hard-drives.

17 – You discover yourself laughing at, nodding along to and enjoying this post. You also understood it all. Shame on you.

I wrote this myself. Rip them off without credit and I’ll kick yo’ ass. Rip ‘em off and linkback to this post… that’s cool. Claim them as your own and hell. If you aint paranoid, you’re dead already.

Today we’ll look at some of the top-designed freely available (and most functional, I may add) Blogger.com (Blogspot) themes available for download…

#1 – Masinop for Blogger

Demo | Download | Original Author | Blogger Converter

Sleek, stylish, and slightly rainbow-esquent. Yes, made up words are the in-thing. Shizzlap.

First up is the ever-so-bewilderingly-named “Masinop”. It’s got a grey-theme to it, which we like. Sleek ‘n’ sexy.

We’re not totally sure what’s going on with the pimped-out rainbow-band around the top, but tone down the saturation in Fireworks or Photoshop, rasterize the layer, drag the contrast up a deal and then mess about with the hue to get a colour of your choice. Unless of course you like the rainbow-styling, in which fair dues to you.

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#2 – Color Paper for Blogger

Demo | Download | Original Author | Blogger Converter

A bit grungey, a bit retro... We like (mostly).

Next on the chopping block (again, no idea why I’m using these stupid pointless phrases… one may argue I’m attempting to mimic a real journalist, God help me) is the Color Paper theme.  A bit grungey, a bit retro… We like (mostly).

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#3 – Hello Wiki for Blogger

Demo | Download | Original Author | Blogger Converter

A theme that looks the part and plays it too... definitely suited towards the more "sophisticated" crowd.

If you’re a business or organization (or even just a 12-year old kid trying to start one out of your bedroom as I was not all that long ago), a quasi-swish looking theme can help in making the right impression.

Course, if you’re serious – you’ll spend $10 and get a domain, and a few more dollars will get you hosting. Enough to run Wordpress, but till then – y’all gotta start somewhere. HelloWiki is simplistic and effective. Approvalz from teh meerkat man.

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#4 – Glass for Blogger

Demo | Download (ZIP)

Tastes like chicken, looks like glass. That's real web 2.0 right there folks...

Call it Web 2.0 and I’ll have you shot. Get it right. It’s glossy. Something isn’t Web 2.0 because of how it looks, and heck – if such a thing as a “2.0″ of the web exists, I’d argue it’s not user-collaboration at all as most claim.

And even if it was – how does that relate at all to a glossy look, a tacky logo, and a big bad beta sign? I’ve digressed here from my point. It’s a sexy theme. Just don’t make it out to be something it’s not. Maybe you weren’t going to anyway.

We’ll shutup and let you download the damn thing, shall we?

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#5 – Dilectio for Blogger

Demo | Download (ZIP)

Dilectio... We'd make some joke about it being delectable but that would be lame.

A pretty theme, it goes for subtler colours and a more muted theme than some of the prior reincarnations of rainbow explosions featured above.

It opts for the soothing, smooth-fratal backgrounds above grunge or boldness and actually looks pretty darn good too, weighing in at number five.

Rated from “good” (5) to “best” (1).

Prices range from free, to… well. $29.95, to be exact.

Full gallery after the jump.

5 – OneButton FTP – Sadly development on this amazingly simple & easy to use application has stopped entirely, but it works, is very nippy – and whilst doesn’t have as wide a feature array as some of the other FTP clients, is perfectly suited to beginners. Best bit? It’s free.

4 – Classic FTP – Weighing in (the Mac version at least), at a (not so) whopping 944-kilobytes, Classic FTP is clean, free, functional – and very little more.

That said, the software works on PCs, and even Windows pocket PCs. Course, not the iPhone, which is a bit of a bummer – but functionally enough on the Mac to earn it a 3 out of 5 rating, marks being dropped only because the user-interface is darker than the standard-one of a Mac (the app being reviewed on Leopard as opposed to Tiger).

Classic FTP is not as quick as some of the more up-to-date offerings either and can lag whilst connecting to bigger, more populated servers. Also, you’ll be glad to hear, free.

3 – Flow – The new kid on the block, and the first of two paid FTP apps I’ll look at today, Flow isn’t all that bad. Heck – from the website, and given the feature lineup, you’d think it’d be the very best. Folder browsing is more responsive than any of the free offerings – and about par with Transmit. Upload/download speeds were unmatched.

The bugger? In our tests, files could get “mislaid”. Copy a folder with 1,000 files from one place to another – and one of three things would happen… It’d do what it was meant to do, super-duper fast. It’d copy 1,000 files, super-duper fast, only some of them would be blank (Wha?!!?). It’d copy 990-odd files, and hell knows where the rest went (super-duper fast, I should add).

In the same vein however, the same can be said for Transmit, strangely enough – the other paid app we review (conspiracy, anyone?) Cases are, however, in both cases, isolated. Handling of folder permissions wasn’t overly impressive, either. Despite the criticisms – the fancy features and über interface of Flow put it in a solid third place.

Bonus connectivity: Amazon S3 (FTW!)

2 – Cyberduck – Freeware? Hella. The BEST freeware FTP app, for Mac at least? We think so. Okay. I think so. Everyone else in the office uses PCs (I do too – don’t go thinking I’m a fanboy now… tut, tut). But anyhow, Cyberduck brings together most of the functionality found in paid apps such as Transmit and Flow, including (and the only free solution covered here that does) support for Amazon S3.

“So, great!”, you say. “Where’s the catch?” There isn’t one as such. Particularly when you consider how stable Cyberduck is in file transfers. Sure, it is slightly slower than others. But it’s faster than the other two free FTP apps covered and more stable than any of the others. Up until recently, in fact – it was my number one choice, only to be superseded by…

So what’s actually good about Transmit – and especially, what’s good enough to make it the “number one” FTP choice for myself, and thousands of others on Mac?

The ability to edit HTML files within transmit, for one. It takes a second or two to download, and rather than wait another 5 or 10 (or longer if you’re not on a souped-up ninja of a desktop), the program opens instantly and lets you make that “quick edit” you need to. You can still open it in any app of your choosing – but this makes for convenience. Big time.

PLEASE NOTE: Their website claim of “open any file in any app, instantly” isn’t true. We noticed you couldn’t open EXEs in Photoshop. Go figure, huh?

The upload queuing system isn’t great, but it’s a lot better than most. When dragging and dropping multiple large folders with files inside, it’ll tend to upload an entire folder in each thread/connection, rather than spread the load evenly. This can be annoying and result in files transferring five or six times slower than they need to (or faster if you tweak the bandwidth settings in the preferences panel).

One of my favourite features? Push-To-Dock notification of when a transfer is taking place, either an upload or a download – and when it finishes. Easy access to the need-to-know information.

However, my actual favourite feature rests in the optional tabbed-navigation. Open up one domain in one tab, a totally separate one in another – and drag and drop files between them. It couldn’t be simpler, and makes for a seemless transfer (besides when it screws the files up, very occasionally, but still often enough to be noticeable and annoying, particularly when you need every *single* one of those files… e.g. in a PHP script)

Bonus connectivity: Amazon S3 (See the recurring theme here?)

Final Conclusion

If you want the most reliable FTP app, go Cyberduck. If you want a lightweight, unobtrusive application – go OneButton FTP or Classic FTP. If you want… I almost consider it an “experimental” app with some funky-funky features, head for Flow. If you want a good all-rounder, with fast uploading, downloading and responsive browsing, we recommend Transmit.

If you got beef, you leave a comment, we war it out and see who’s mashed potato, really. Make a good point and we’ll give you free gravy.

On that note, adios amigos (till next time!)