Tools to study chinese

There seems to be a lot of cool stuff to help out with chinese learning. Some of it is hard to find/install if you don't have the last version of the operative system, you have a Mac or you only want to go for freeware versions.
So I ended up wasting way more time that I should have going through this... so here are my recommendations, hoping to save you some time:

- OFFLINE DICTIONARIES: yale has a great site with a compendium of many options here. from the ones i have tried, wenlin has an awful demo version and I cannot open clavis, so i recommend dimsum. (although it takes some time to get used to his weird way of organizing menus) but apart from a quite good dictionary, it has a really cool thing where it filters any site you want to read and creates tags for the words you don't know. The downside is that it has no sound.
- ONLINE DICTIONARIES: great online dictionaries are nciku. and this. but if you are in china with a slow connection like mine, you will probably want to kill yourself by the tenth word you need to look up. The good thing is that they have sound so it's a great complement to dimsum. This zhongwen is another one but I prefer any of the other two.
- PORTALS: there are multiple portals with a lot of applications, but i didn't bother to look throughout. Mandarin tools is one.
- TEXTS: a great source for texts and audio is the chinese voices project here. although i have to say i have trouble opening the java apps. or the chinese texts sampler here.

And I think this is the best I found, enjoy.