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Do you play air guitar when no one’s looking? Did you stay up all night last weekend perfecting your Guitar Hero skills? Do you secretly dream of being the next Jimi Hendrix or John Mayer? Is the only thing holding you back a serious lack of actual guitar skills? Have I got some applications for you. Check out some cool projects I dug up that will have you fingering the frets like a pro in no time.

If you’re just starting out, use chordziglia to tune your guitar and find chords. Then turn to Absolute Guitar Trainer to tutor you along. It recognizes the sounds of electric guitars, then uses that information to determine your skill level. For extra help and learning exercises, use GNUitarra/Guitar Helper, or GuitarScales to learn — as the name suggests — guitar scales.

When you’re ready to move past the basics, use GNUitar to turn your PC into a guitar effects processor. Options include delay, echo, wah-wah, sustain, reverb, and more. For a similar tool written in Java, try Java Stomp.

If you want to break free of the computer and take your hobby on the road, you’ve got several choices. Use Chord Database for Windows Mobile as a handy reference tool for your PDA, or Palm Tuner and Metronome for your PalmOS-based mobile device. Slap GuitarTuner on your Java-enabled mobile phone to make sure your Cs are always sharp, or use Funiculus to analyze notes and tune your guitar with an iPhone.

If it’s games you’re after, you can’t do better than Frets on Fire, a wildly popular, no holds barred, computer-based game that uses your keyboard as a guitar. It supports songs from Guitar Hero I and II, offers a song editor for creating your own tunes, and lets you compete with other players. When Nate Willis reviewed it over at sister site Linux.com, he said, “Frets on Fire is one of the best free software games in recent years. The learning curve is small, but the playability and the fun factor are huge. Add to that real professionalism in all the details, and you have yourself a winner.”

Want to team up with other like-minded folks who love the guitar and FOSS? Then get involved in the Linux Guitar Project, led by a couple of guys who want to make an electric guitar powered by Linux. Now, how cool is that?

I’m happy to announce we’re launching support for OpenID!

OpenID is getting tremendous traction and we’re happy to be jumping into it. it’s bringing us back in touch with fresh web (2.0) technology. as a decentralized open-source standard, it’s a perfect fit for us - it allows us to streamline more user interaction and participation with our site, and hopefully more for the whole OSS community.

we’ve spent the past couple weeks on it - integrating the Zend Framework OpenID component into our site code. we like the framework as a whole and I personally hope to use more of it in the future. we’ve been happy to participate, as a company, in the ZF project and have already submitted reports of, and patches for, some OpenID issues and enhancements.

while I’m giving shout-outs, I have to thanks the SF staff who worked on it - especially Paul Huff, Patrick Mee, John Hoffmann, Adam Voigt, Kathi Hutchings, and Wes Moran for tolerating my squawking while they did the productive work over the last few weeks. and Lisa and Ross have really helped me get out of my shell to tell the community about it.

we’re really hoping OpenID is good for our users, and we’re eager to have everyone try it out and give us feedback - both good and bad - here in our community forums, or out in the blogosphere, or wherever. so, go log in with your OpenID already! and learn more about our implementation on our OpenID site doc page.