If you want to convert ICO, PNG, GIF, and JPEG file formats and export to PNG or ICO, check out converticon. No registration, nothing to download, free–it’s a minimalist masterpiece, and handy for finally getting rid of that pesky cartoon silhouette in Facebook!

Here’s a list of nine media converters from Digital Media Minute listed by OS and price, emphasizing recent releases that are either freeware or at least with free trials offered. This list is by no means comprehensive, and I have not tried all of these; my intent was more to compile a list for reference. I’d welcome your feedback and your recommendations.

1) Very frankly, here’s what got me going on this list: a Firefox extension called Media Converter released just weeks ago. Once installed, it tells you when you are on a site whose video can be downloaded and converted to the format of your choice by the extension. Slick. There may or may not be issues with overloaded servers and blockages by video providers, but in terms of usability, it’s hard to imagine a less obtrusive conversion process with fewer steps. Free, premium version $15/month, $150/year.

2) Here’s an old favorite: Media-Convert. It’s a free and web-based online media converter with a very long list of file types that it can handle. Simply browse for the file on your computer, specify the file type, then choose the output file format.

3) Zamzar is another web-based tool with an extremely simple interface, also handles many document formats. It’s free for files up to 100 MB; the paid versions priced at $7, $16, $49 per month allow you allows you to convert files up to 200MB, 400MB, & 1GB respectively, with online storage of 5GB, 20GB & 100GB respectively. I use it regularly.

4) Switch Audio Converter 1.52 for Mac OS X: Free
Converts many types of audio files into many other kinds. Extract audio from imported avi, mov, mpeg video files.

5) Switch Sound File Converter 2.01 for Windows: Free
Will convert the following file types into mp3 and wav: mp2, mpga, m4a, ogg, avi, mid, flac, aac, wma, dct, au, aiff, ogg, raw, msv, dvf, vox, cda, atrac, gsm, dss, sri, shn, dss, msv, wmv. Version 2.01 has MIDI support.

6) Easy DVD Rip 3.0.8 for Windows: Free 7-day trial, $34.95
Enables you to back up DVD to VCD, SVCD, MPEG-1/2/4, AVI, DivX, XviD.

7) Ape Ripper for Windows: Free 15-day, 3-file trial, $29.95
Will split unwieldy APE files into file formats like MP3, WAV, MP2, VOX, G726, and G723, that can be played on your MP3 player.

8) AVS Media Player for Windows: Free
Supports MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4 along with DivX, XviD, AVI, Real Media video, Quick Time files, WMV files, WMV-HD, H.263, H.264, 3GP, 3GP2, MP4. Interface and support available in several languages.

9) The Easy CD-DA Extractor for Windows free 30-day trial, $32.87
Advertised by Poikosoft as ‘the Swiss army knife of digital audio’, is an extremely versatile music converter that rips Audio CDs, converts audio files from/to many different formats, edits the metadata of audio files and burns Audio CDs, MP3 CDs and DVDs, and Data CDs and DVDs.

Here’s a little piece of help. If you find yourself having to extract multiple zip files frequently, you’d be well-served giving ExtractNow a shot. It’s not new but I found helpful for a recent task, and it worked as advertised. Simple to use, and supports ZIP, RAR and other compression formats.

I’ve been doing my Flex development on both a Mac and Windows PC lately and one thing that has really been bothering me is the extra “Fn” key that I have to press to Run a project from within Flex Builder.  Enter FunctionFlip – a slick PreferencePane app for OSX that lets you customize the behaviour of each function key on your Mac keyboard.  You can choose which keys act as standard Mac keys (volume, next track, dashboard, etc) and which keys act as pure “Windows-like” function keys. 

You can easily covert ICNS to any image file format using a command line utility named sips.

Finder Sidebar Separators is a simple solution that allows you to insert horizontal spacers into the “Places” sidebar in OSX’s Finder.

Desktop 2 Login is a nice little utility that matches the Leopard Login Screen background image to whatever the current user’s Desktop picture is. This eliminates the visual transition from the login background to the user’s background (which is usually set to that ugly star field/time warp background).

I’ve always preferred to read documents on paper as opposed to on screen, but I know that the Earth would probably prefer that I not use my printer as much as I do.  Disappearing ink sound like an interesting green option for those of us who prefer paper.  Turns out Xerox is experimenting with a type of paper and a complementary printer that would produce documents that fade away after 16 to 24 hours.

Throwboy has some extremely cool pillows that can turn your couch into your OSX Dock.  Thinking of ways to talk my wife into letting me have some of these ;-)

Well it has been almost 2 months since my switch from OSX to Vista for my day job.  Overall, I’m liking Vista more than I thought – although I still get confused between the ctrl and command keys.  One little built in gem that I came across last week was a built in screenshot capture tool called Snipping Tool.  Essentially it is a little application that lets you drag your mouse across your screen to determine what area to take a screenshot of.  To get to the application you can click on the Start menu, choose All Programs, then choose Accessories, and finally click on Snipping Tools.

An alternate way is to use the Windows key on your keyboard (yes their is actually a use for it in Vista).  Pressing the Windows key now opens the start menu and place the cursor focus into a search field that work amazingly fast.  So to open this app, press the Windows key and start typing “snipp”.  The snipping application will be filtered in the list.  Press return to launch it.  Using the Windows key and the search filter, you can also search for files, emails, etc.