According to an announcement email from Skype:
Calls to friends and family on Skype have always been free. Now we’ve made calls within the US and Canada to all phones totally free till the end of the year.
Starting from today it doesn’t matter if it’s a Skype-to-Skype call or a call to landline or mobile phone – it’s free as long as you’re calling from within the US or Canada to US or Canadian phone number.
Neat-O!
I do wonder how SkypeOut purchasers are taking this news, though.
According to a blog post on MSDN, Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition will be free permanently! 
From the blog post:
We are incredibly excited to announce that effective April 19th, 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual J#, Visual C++, and Visual Web Developer Express will be free permanently!
Prior to this pricing announcement, Visual Studio Express Editions were promotionally discounted to be free for one year, starting on November 7th, 2005. With this announcement, the promotional discount for Visual Studio Express is now permanent and Express will continue to be free.
The key reason for the pricing change was you. You’ve helped make Visual Studio Express a runaway hit, and we’re proud to announce that in the five months since its launch, Express has been downloaded over 5 million times!
Looks like Yahoo’s Widget Engine (previously known as Konfabulator) is going to get some competition: version 4 of Google Desktop now features Google Gadgets.
Here’s Google’s description of what’s new in version 4:
Want a clock on your desktop? How about a calendar, a WiFi indicator, a TV, or anything else you can dream up? Say hello to Google Gadgets. These interactive mini-applications can be anything from games to search tools to media players, and they can be any shape and size – use a weather globe to show you the latest forecast. We’ve got a lot of ready-made gadgets to get you started, but they’re so easy to create that you can probably figure out how to build your own.
You can also save your gadget content and settings online to protect your info from computer crashes and be able to access it from your other computers by logging into your Google Account with Google Desktop. For instance, you can now ‘synch’ the To Do list on both your laptop and your desktop.
Google Desktop will recommend new gadgets and can also automatically create a personalized Google homepage for you based on the subjects you’re most interested in. For instance, if you’re constantly doing searches on new movies, Google Desktop can automatically recommend a movies gadget to add to your desktop.
We’ve also integrated Google Desktop more fully with the rest of Google. For instance, you can now add Google Gadgets from your personalized homepage into your Sidebar, or anywhere else on your desktop You can also view upcoming birthdays with the orkut gadget, see what’s popular on Google Videos, or access your Google Calendar right from your desktop.
This sounds really cool! I’ll definately consider replacing my trusty Yahoo Widget Engine.
Oh, lookee there… I think I’m still running Google Desktop version 2. 
Definitely time to upgrade!
Microsoft recently published a helpful step-by-step guide to cleaning your computer.
From the article:
“Your computer could fry if you don’t keep it clean,” says Jonathon Millman, chief technology officer for Hooplah Interactive.
Dust clogs the vents behind your computer, which causes your CPU to heat up—and heat is the biggest cause of component failure in computers. Regular cleaning could save you costly maintenance fees down the road.
This is definitely something I want to add to my to-do list for this summer!
As you might know, I’ve tried Google AdSense on this blog several times before. For those who aren’t familiar with AdSense, it is a Google service that lets you put ads on your site (the same kind you see on Google search results). When people click ads on your site, you get a portion of the what the advertiser pays Google. Here’s an example:
I’m not sure how relevant the above ads will be, but every time that I’ve tried AdSense I’ve removed it because I have not been happy with what ads have been displayed.
For example, after I published the post Mr. Monopoly vs. The Deet, in which I described how some deet-containing bug spray ate the ink off my grandma’s Monopoly board, then my AdSense ads started showing advertisements for, guess what?, deet-containing bug spray.
About a month later I published a post called What is Bug Control?, in which I attempted to present a pun concerning the fact that a dead mosquito landed on the Ctrl key on my keyboard. But AdSense started showing ads for bug control, mosquito repellant, and pest removal. Even though my post contained the words “bug,” “mosquito,” and “control,” the ads displayed weren’t exactly relevant.
Then apparently, the AdSense algorithms saw the words “John” and “Catholic” and decided to put up an ad for John Kerry.
Frankly, that was the last straw. I removed those AdSense ads and haven’t put them back up since.
Until Google can increase the relevance of AdSense ads, or until I get enough traffic to the point that I’ll get clicks regardless of ad relevance, I probably won’t be trying to use AdSense again. Maybe lack of relevance is just a risk that advertisers have to take. But in addition, I didn’t get a single click throughout my entire site during the entire time I was displaying AdSense ads.
So in summary, I’ve decided that for now, AdSense for me doesn’t really make sense… or cents.