Pavatar is a service much like Gravatar which allows you to provide a personal avatar of yourself that can be used on sites that support the service.  Unlike Gravitar which hosts your picture for you,  Pavatar relies on your personal picture being hosted on your webspace.  There are plugins available for most blogging platforms as well as libraries that you can use to incorporate pavitars into your own applications.

22 Free Essential Icon Sets
from DHTML Site is a great list of links to some high quality free 16×16 icons that would look great in any web application.

Yummy FTP has quickly become my favorite FTP/SFTP client for the Mac. I like it so much, I even bought it! This client is packed with some great features like fast threaded transfers, failure auto-recovery, uploading from finder, auto-upload folders, directory synchronization, scheduling and remote editing.

CrossLoop is a free, secure screen sharing utility designed for PC users of all skill levels. Screen sharing is a useful utility when try to troubleshoot PC problems from a remote location, like those times when your friends need help removing viruses and spyware!

Mac only: Textmate Shortcuts Desktop Wallpaper is a handy wallpaper for those of you who are just beginning to learn the powerful code editor for OSX. If you want to add your own favorite shortcuts, the author has made the PSD version available.

During my recent trip to SXSW, Dustin Diaz introduced me to a new and powerful editor for Windows. E-TextEditor is a TextMate clone for Windows that shares many of the features found in its Mac father. Features like support for TextMate bundles, commands and bundles could make this a nice option for those of us who have to develop on both Apple and Windows platforms.

This video was making the rounds shortly after Apple announced it’s new iPhone device. It is a quick video where Jeff Han demonstrates his intuitive, “interface-free,” touch-driven computer screen. The computer can be manipulated using gestures made by your fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure. If you haven’t watched this video before, it is really amazing.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a Windows Textmate clone called Intype. I recently came across an add-on named Intype Project Manager, that gives InType a much improved project manager pane. It’s nice to see that this project is gaining an active community of users!

Tumblr is a new hosted web application that lets you create a Tumblelog. What is a tumblelog? Well if a blog is a journal, a tumblelog is more like a scrapbook. Tumble makes it easy to create and share quick posts about the things you find online.

Stan Schroeder from Frantic Industries recently listed the Services he’d keep using if they weren’t free. His list was in response to Google’s announcement that Google Apps Premier Edition was being provided as a paid service. So it got me thinking about some free apps that I use on a regular basis that I would pay for if they were no longer free.

In the category of web-based services…

1. Wordpress - I’ve been a Wordpress user for almost two years now, and in my opinion it is the best of the three blogging tools I have used.
2. Google Reader - helps me manage and keep up-to-date with the 300+ feeds that I subscribe to. Being web based, I can check my feeds from any one of the three computers I use.
3. Pageflakes - My custom homepage/widget service. I find it easy to use and has a good selection of widgets that I find useful.
4. Feedburner - Serves all the feeds from this site and hundreds of thousands of others. On top of serving your feeds, they offer other great services like analytics, feed promotion and optimization.
5. Techmeme - One of the only sites I visit multiple times per day, it constantly satisfies my need for the latest and greatest technology related news.
6. PopUrls - An aggregator that lists top items from most of the popular content aggregation services like digg.com, del.icio.us and slashdot.
7. MXNA - Adobe has a great news aggregator that aggregates 1273 feeds from user’s of Adobe’s software. If you develop or design with Adobe software you can monitor specific products like Apollo, Flex and PhotoShop. Note - Adobe has a newer product called myFeedz. I haven’t used it too much yet, but find it to be not quite as targeted towards development as MXNA.
8. Text Link Ads - although technically not a free service, I have found that this service is the easiest service to help monetize a blog. In fact this service works so well, I wish I had started using it long ago!

In the category of free desktop software…

1. Aduim - (OSX only) I love this IM client! Handles most IM protocols and has some nice features for logging chats.
2. Firefox - (cross platform) Well I would probably never pay for a web browser, but if I really had to, Firefox would be my choice!
3. VLC Media Player - (cross platform) Even on the Mac, I have yet to find a video it couldn’t handle.
4. Aptana - (cross platform) If you do any AJAX development, you must check out this Eclipse based editor. Take a quick peek at their screencasts to quickly discover why this tool is so great.
5. Jungle Disk - (cross platform) A great client for backing up your data to Amazon’s S3 storage service (note - S3 is not free but is relatively inexpensive for online backup).
6. MediaFork - (cross platform) A simple tool for ripping DVD’s to MPEG-4. Ripped files can be played on your laptop or iPod.
   
7. MySQL GUI Tools - (cross platform) Very capable suite of cross-platform tools for working with MySQL databases.
8. The UnArchiver - (OSX only) My favorite free file compression tool. Has great integration with Finder and handles every compression format I have ever thrown at it.

So what would make your list? Please leave yours in the comments.