Google's most ambitious project Google Wave has been launched as a developer preview to 100K developers around the world. And blogosphere is abuzz with lot of things to say about it. Even eBay users are selling Google wave invites.

Here in AbhiTech, I am offering 15 Google Wave invites to readers! All you have to do is to subscribe to AbhiTech (by email; see the form in the right sidebar) and leave a comment to this post stating why you want a Google Wave invite. Please note the following:

• Before you leave your comment, you must subscribe to AbhiTech by email. Don't forget to activate your email subscription. Or else email addresses won't be shown to me.
• Those who are already subscribed to AbhiTech by email, please state that you are already subscribed.
• In your comment you must include your email id (except the domain, i.e. if your email is user123@gmail.com, just state "my email starts with user123").
• In case the number of comments exceeds the number of invites to be sent, random comments will be selected. If so happens, Random.org will be used.
• You must state why you want a google wave invite. Incomplete comments will be rejected.
• Also note that since these invites are sent by users (not by Google), it takes a few days to reach you. To quote Google: "Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick."
• Contest will end on 20th November, 2009.

Microsoft’s not-so-famous cloud backup service Skydrive offers 25 GiB of web-space. Yet it has got less takers than Dropbox. That’s because it doesn’t have a desktop client even after more than 2 years of its launch. Dropbox gets an edge just because it offers a cross platform desktop client that seamlessly syncs your data.

Now, you can upload and download data from Skydrive without having to open your favorite browser, thanks to SkyDrive Explorer. It’s a tiny standalone Windows shell extension. All you have to do is to install SkyDrive Explorer and start enjoying SkyDrive features as a separate drive in Windows. After you install this program, you’d find a new drive under “Other” category. Double click on it and provide your login credentials. Once you are logged in, just copy paste files from your PC to this new drive, and they get uploaded to SkyDrive. But you can't view files right inside this drive — just copy the files to your local drives and open them.

SkyDrive Explorer works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows and runs on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows7. But I didn't have much luck in running it on XP. It worked fine in Windows7. Since it's in beta stage, future releases may address this issue.

Twitter today launched its much awaited and much hyped ‘lists’ feature. The blogosphere was abuzz with talks of Twitter working on lists. And Twitter indeed tested this in private beta. Today it’s open for everyone, although in beta.

Lists are groups of Twitter users you can create (and name) for everyone to see and follow. To quote Twitter, “Lists are timelines you build yourself, consisting of friends, family, co-workers, sports teams, you name it.” You can also create private lists which can be accessed by you only.

Lists are different from ‘groups’ since lists behave more like individual users — you can follow/unfollow lists. Once you start following a list, updates from the users in the list will appear in your timeline. But lists can be used as groups to sort people whom you follow and see what they are talking about.

So you are not happy with the pictures you have taken during the holidays and you just want to trash them. Wait a sec. What if they look great when you put them into the FotoSketcher? Well, it’s a tiny portable application that turns your photos into paintings. And that too in a just a couple of clicks.

FotoSketcher is simple in its use. You don’t even have to install it — just open an image file in FotoSketcher and select your own settings. There are various styles available: pencil sketch, pen and ink drawing, various painting renderings. There’s a gallery showing some creations by FotoSketcher users.

Most broadband users in the USA or Europe enjoy unlimited bandwidth. But not everyone is fortunate enough. In India, BSNL (the largest broadband provider of the country) offers various packages but most of them has bandwidth limitations. Once your bandwidth allocation is over, you have to pay more for additional usage. In such cases, it is useful to keep a record of how much bandwidth you are using. Here are some bandwidth monitors that comes handy to keep a tab on bandwidth usage.

FreeMeter

FreeMeter is tiny standalone application that runs on .NET framework 2.0. It requires no installation. Once you start the program it shows graph containing the usage details. You can change the update interval.

It also offers a ping and trace-route utility. You can view records of monthly, daily or weekly bandwidth usage. So much in just 118KiB!

NetMeter

NetMeter has a much more pleasing interface and offers more features. It can even generate a projected bandwidth usage on monthly, daily or weekly basis. You can specify which networks to track and which not to. This is useful if you are connected to several networks.

iTraffic

iTraffic is yet another application good at monitoring bandwidth usage. Apart from the graph showing network traffic, iTraffic also lets you select specific interfaces to monitor. You can even select IP addresses to ignore network traffic. (It uses WinPCap to do so.)

BitMeterOS

BitMeterOS is a cross platform bandwidth monitoring tool written in C. It can monitor or ignore specific networks only. You can also use it from commandline. BitMeter can be run as a Windows service, i.e. it runs in the background once your system is up. It also offers an audio notification every time a certain amount (to be fixed by the user) of data is transferred (uploaded or downloaded).

vnStat

vnStat is a commandline-based bandwidth monitoring tool which runs on Linux and BSD platforms. In ubuntu you can install it by:

sudo apt-get install vnstat

Once it is installed, just type vnstat to view traffic logs. vnStat can monitor specific networks only and it creates a separate database for each network interface. You can even view the logs in your browser. This post has detailed instructions about how to do the same.

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