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Freeware Picks |
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Most hippies contribute nothing to society except for body
odor. Fortunately, Internet Hippies are a different breed, with a desire to
help their fellow man (or possibly just a desire to piss off corporations).
Either way, they have performed a valuable service to mankind in the form of
free software, also known as freeware. Now, there are many benefits to
software that's produced just for the love, but there are drawbacks as well,
the biggest of which is that there is no legal liability or quality
incentive for freeware, and sometimes hippies produce software which just
isn't that good. This is where you need the help of someone who has already
tried things out and can recommend software to you based on personal
experience. Enter this page. All of the software here has been designed by
only the most outstanding internet hippies, and should give you no trouble.
Of course, if it should, I must direct your attention to an important
detail: I'm not legally responsible for any of this either. Enjoy! |
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Spyware
Protection/Removal |
A dual recommendation on this one, and please take
both, because spyware is a serious problem.
Spybot is definitely my
go-to program, because it has the ability to constantly block bad elements
on web pages you visit, because it can immunize your system against nearly
2000 known problems, and because it has such a wide variety of extra tools.
It also finds problems fast and gives you a lot of information about them.
A good partner for Spybot is
Ad-Aware, another
excellent tool that gets free updates impressively often. This doesn't offer
the expanded capabilities that Spybot has, but it does find things that
Spybot doesn't. Download them both and run them once a week, and you might
be surprised a how much they'll speed up your Netsurfing, improve the
stability of your browser, and eliminate many pop-ups. |
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Screen Capture + Graphic
Editing/Conversion |
XnView is
a great free program that will take quality screenshots, whether you want
the full screen or just the image from a specific program. It will also convert about every graphic file type known
to man. So if, for some reason, you have a lot of .jif's (Jeff's Image
File), XnView can convert it to a jpg or gif in no time. (I suspect the only
person who has a lot of Jeff's Image File's is Jeff.) But suppose you want
to publish a webpage, and your host only supports 4 or 5 image types, and
the format that most of your clipart comes in is not one of the lucky few (a
purely hypothetical scenario, of course). You might just find this tool to
be a lifesaver.
But there's more good news -
XnView is much more than a screen capture/converter program. This software is packed with tools and
extra features, including slide show creation and red-eye correction for
photos. Download the help files and start having fun. |
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CD Ripping |
There are a million programs that do
this, and many of them are free, but the best one I've found is
FreeRip.
This program is small, the interface is simple and self-explanatory, and yet
it provides a lot of advanced features like ripping at different volume
levels and .wav/.mp3 conversion. It allows you to rip to mp3, wav, or Ogg
Vorbis, and you can edit the ID3 tags or keep the info provided by freeDB.
An excellent tool at, of course, an excellent price. |
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Digital Audio Playback |
For years, the best software for
playing mp3s or other audio has been
Winamp. Version 5 offers
an expanded library for organizing files by most played,recently played,
etc. This is in addition to a good equalizer and a nice selection of
visualizations. I strongly suggest that you download this program now - the
parent company, Nullsoft, has just been acquired by AOL, so it's only a
matter of time before they start charging for the software and it sucks
anyway.
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MP3 Compression |
This one is for those of you who
suffer from THDS, or Tiny Hard Drive Syndrome. Whether you have too many
mp3s you can't bear to get rid of (or burn to CD), or you have a taste for
classical, classic metal, or some other genre that requires all the songs to be
10 minutes long, you can probably benefit from making your mp3 files
smaller. But do you have to sacrifice quality? Not really. The
Thomson
mp3Pro Encoder will convert your mp3s to a 64k bitrate, but keep the sound
quality you expect from 128 - 192. The latest version has the ability to
convert batches, so you can clear space quickly and get back to listening. |
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Zipping/Unzipping |
I recommend
ExtractNow for unzipping
- the interface offers drag-and-drop capability, which WinZip does not. It
also unzips rar, ace, and several other formats. However, last I checked
this program does not offer zip file creation. For those who need this
ability,
WinRar
(which does cost money) is probably a better choice. |
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Great Moments in the
History of Software |
"We may
have no lives. ...But they
can never take...our freeware!"
~ Wallace Williams, programmer,
expounding on his ideas about open source projects to his only friend, a
hamster named 0110010.
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