First off I wanted to say to all my readers: may you all have a wondrous and prosperous new year. As you can see, I have taken a two week break from posting during this holiday season. I would like to assure reader Stanley who emailed me with some concern that I’ve disappeared for good that I am now back (back!) in the swing of things.

I am kind of depressed at my dearth of postings, actually. In an ideal world I would like to post an average of 2 times per day, but that does not look like it will happen anytime soon, not with my full time job and kids getting first dibs on my time.

But now that the new year is upon us, here are my 12 Freewaregenius resolutions for the new year (which I might add are not a whole lot different from my personal new year’s resolutions). I will also include a probability percentage of what I think the likelihood is for each one of these resolutions to actually come to be.

This posting will describe how to change your default system browser on Windows XP to a portable version of Mozilla Firefox using a free program called DefaultBrowser, doing so reversibly and without installing the non portable version. The same process described here could be used to change your default browser to any portable (or non portable) browser.

[Editor’s note: this posting was contributed by Freewaregenius reader Elioz Hefer; to whom I offer my extreme thanks and gratitude].

There are many ways to check RSS feeds. Two of the most popular are using a local RSS client (such as RSSOwl) and using a web-based reader (such as Google Reader). This posting will present nine interesting (and at times unusual) free ways to check RSS feeds, including using dekstop widgets (KlipFolio), RSS feeds as tabs on the side of your screen (Stick), RSS feeds within a dockable desktop area (SideSlide), as desktop sticky notes (Note Mania), embedded in your desktop wallpaper (Chaos Wallpaper), as news-tickers scrolling across your screen (EasyDeskTicker), and delivered as emails in your inbox (FeedMyInbox).

This posting will describe how to split a very large CSV or Text file into a number of smaller parts by specifying the number of desired lines within each of the resulting pieces (for example, by 65536 lines for use with Excel 2003 or 1,048,576 for Excel 2007). The method described will use free software to do this and will work for very large files (even files larger that 4 gigs in size), will avoid loading the entire file into memory when processing, will maintain the format/extension of the original file, and will not add any additional information to the resulting files.

If you’ve ever encountered a blocked startup app in Vista and would like a work-around that can bypass it then read on. This posting will describe how to launch an app on startup as a scheduled task, which will circumvent the startup apps list altogether. Ultimately you will be able to get your app to launch without seeing the notice in the screenshot and without having to shut down Vista’s User Account Control security infrastructure.

Finally, a new theme. Although I liked the old Lightbreaker theme, I’d been wanting to move away from it for some time. After researching Wordpress themes for quite a long time (free and paid) I finally decided to go with the this one, Arthemia Premium (there is an excellent free version as well, which can be found here).

Appnews.net is a project conceived and created by Andrey from Rarst.net in collaboration with Freewaregenius and Ghacks.net. It’s purpose is present a stream of the latest freeware software updates with links to postings/reviews of the software published on Freewaregenius, Ghacks, and Rarst.net.

Five bookmarks you will like to add this week! BackupURL, Odee.com, Tagoo, Keyboardr, and PhoneArena.

AnAppAday is one blogger/programmer’s month long project where he created one app per day for 30 days straight. Using the pseudonym “The software Jedi” he did this during the period between 9/15/2006 and 10/14/2006 and published it on a blog.

Donationcoder is having their 4th anniversary fundraiser this month. Please support them.

You might have noticed that I’ve not been able to post for a few days. The company I work for flew everyone in the office from Seattle to NYC for a company function on Thursday, and it was an opportunity to take my wife and kids along for a long weekend in the big city.