Archive for the ‘M@'s Picks’ Category
Make your own PDFs
PDF Creator is an open source tool you can use to create PDF files. Using it is simple enough, it installs itself as a printer driver, so all you need to do to is change your printer in the print dialog box of any windows program.
I often use it as a print preview [...]
Free Photoshop
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an open source image editor that is comparable to Photoshop. By no means is it a drop in replacement. But a lot of the core functionality is there, including layers, filters, plugins, paths and channels. There is a bit of a learning curve, especially because the [...]
Video Transcoding
Media Coder is an open source video transcoding utility. It supports a large number of formats, and plenty of advanced options for tweaking all of the encoder settings. Fortunately, an extension that is included in the typical install makes it all very easy to use with various presets for small and large [...]
Image Management
Google’s Picasa is a simple yet powerful way to store your photos. Once installed, it will scan your drive for images and present the chronologically by folders. You can then add your own tags to any image, and create albums of images, photos can even exist in more than one album.
Once you’ve got [...]
On-Line Backup
Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) service coupled with Jungle Disk is an excellent, inexpensive solution for on-line backup.
The Amazon service is $0.15 per gigabyte per month, and $0.10 per gigabyte transfered. It’s pay as you go, so you’re never paying for more storage or bandwidth than you need.
Jungle Disk is a very user friendly [...]
The 1MB PDF Reader
Adobe Acrobat Reader taking too long to load. Foxit is only 1MB and loads lightning quick.
Convert units with Google
Google will covert units for you. Try entering “7920 ft. to miles” into the search box. You can even use it as a calculator, for example try calculating the area of a 2.5 inch radius circle like this “pi*2.5^2″
All-In-One Gestures
Have FireFox? You need the All-In-One Gestures extension. It allows you to make gestures using the mouse pointer to do things such as move forward and back, change tabs or close the current window.
FireFox
I finally downloaded FireFox and I’m impressed. Make sure to get your copy.
Get to your computer
Don’t have a static IP address, Direct Update will keep dynamic DNS services informed of your IP address every time it changes.
Convert audio
dBPowerAmp can convert between nearly any audio format on your computer. You can even use it to extract the audio from video files.
Convert videos
Bink Video from RAD Game Tools can convert between any video format that you can play on your computer.
TI calculator on your computer
Too lazy to dig out your TI graphing calculator? You can run it on your computer, and it’s a lot faster. Get VTI and follow the set up wizard that it comes with to make it possible.
Stuff for your calculator
TICalc.org has software for any TI graphing calculator, and some software that runs on your computer. Be sure to look thorugh the archives.
Photoshop Substitute
Can’t afford Photoshop? The open source GIMP has much of the same functionality and is completely free.
Measure Your Screen
JR Screen Ruler will allow you to measure the size of anything on your screen in pixels. I find it very useful for tweaking web site designs.
Twenty Questions
20q.net will guess just about any object that you can think of by asking you 20 yes/no questions.
Free, Quality Software
For internet and media utilities I recommend AnalogX. Their tools are all free and very high quality.
Check Your Email, Often
Need to know right when you get e-mail? {{link http://www.dectsoft.com/products.php Ease-E-Check}} Sits in your system tray and checks for new e-mail every two minutes and plays a notification when it finds new mail.
Faster Favorites
Got a lot of favorites? You can get to any one of them easily by typing the name of it in the address bar of Internet Explorer. You can make it even quicker by naming your favorites with only one or two letters. I use “W” to jump to a weather forecast.
