Some programs you might find useful
Jan. 9th, 2004 06:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerThere are a variety of computer programs I find useful, ones which tend to get installed on any machine I use pretty much instantly.
The first one of these is Firebird - the cut-down, browser-only version of Mozilla, which used to be Netscape Navigator, back in the olden days. I was never a Netscape fan, but Firebird is fast, smooth, easy to use, never has popups, manages to avoid most of the most hideous ads and is generally a nicer browser than IE. It comes in a basic version which you can then add 'extensions' on to, customising it with extra functionality as much as you like. The two extensions that I always add are 'Tabbed Browser Extensions' (because I've fallen madly in love with tabbed browsing) and 'Open in IE' which adds a right-click option to open a page in IE, for those sites that wilfully refuse to work with Firebird (I bump into about one a month).
Second is the Semagic Livejournal Client, which is my primary method of posting to LJ. It keeps track of my friends list (reminding me of people's birthdays, telling me when people friend me, etc.), shows me my history in a useful format and has all sorts of keyboard shortcuts for posting links, lj-cuts, etc. It's about 5000 times easier to use than the web interface to LJ and I just wish that it could also act as a reader.
Third is my email client, The Bat!. This has three major advantages over Outlook Express - (1) it's not vulnerable to all of OE's many security flaws, (2) it can send plain text emails easily and not get confused about HTML, etc. and (3) it does simple templates much better, including a random quote at the bottom of each email. It works with both POP and IMAP and the filtering abilities are very good. It also handles housekeeping well - for instance, I've set it to keep the last 100 emails I've sent as a decent compromise between space and utility. You can try it free for 30 days and I highly recommend that you give it a go.
Email leads us neatly onto program four, POPfile. POPfile is a Bayesian filtering system for POP clients. Which basically means it's a spam filter. You point your email program at it and give it a few snippets of information and it uses textual analysis to guess if an email is spam or not. It learns as it goes along, with you telling it what counts as spam and what doesn't. After a few months of usage it's now accurate around 99.95% of the time for me. You can also whitelist your friend's addresses to make sure they don't get caught. Oh, and it can handle multiple filters, so my mailing lists, friends, spam and other mail all come into different email boxes. Oh, and it's free.
Last but not least is metapad, a simple notepad replacement. It's not fancy or clever, it's just notepad, only a little smarter - it can cope with Unix text files better than notepad does, understand links and is generally just a bit nicer to use.
Anyone got any programs they can't live without?
The first one of these is Firebird - the cut-down, browser-only version of Mozilla, which used to be Netscape Navigator, back in the olden days. I was never a Netscape fan, but Firebird is fast, smooth, easy to use, never has popups, manages to avoid most of the most hideous ads and is generally a nicer browser than IE. It comes in a basic version which you can then add 'extensions' on to, customising it with extra functionality as much as you like. The two extensions that I always add are 'Tabbed Browser Extensions' (because I've fallen madly in love with tabbed browsing) and 'Open in IE' which adds a right-click option to open a page in IE, for those sites that wilfully refuse to work with Firebird (I bump into about one a month).
Second is the Semagic Livejournal Client, which is my primary method of posting to LJ. It keeps track of my friends list (reminding me of people's birthdays, telling me when people friend me, etc.), shows me my history in a useful format and has all sorts of keyboard shortcuts for posting links, lj-cuts, etc. It's about 5000 times easier to use than the web interface to LJ and I just wish that it could also act as a reader.
Third is my email client, The Bat!. This has three major advantages over Outlook Express - (1) it's not vulnerable to all of OE's many security flaws, (2) it can send plain text emails easily and not get confused about HTML, etc. and (3) it does simple templates much better, including a random quote at the bottom of each email. It works with both POP and IMAP and the filtering abilities are very good. It also handles housekeeping well - for instance, I've set it to keep the last 100 emails I've sent as a decent compromise between space and utility. You can try it free for 30 days and I highly recommend that you give it a go.
Email leads us neatly onto program four, POPfile. POPfile is a Bayesian filtering system for POP clients. Which basically means it's a spam filter. You point your email program at it and give it a few snippets of information and it uses textual analysis to guess if an email is spam or not. It learns as it goes along, with you telling it what counts as spam and what doesn't. After a few months of usage it's now accurate around 99.95% of the time for me. You can also whitelist your friend's addresses to make sure they don't get caught. Oh, and it can handle multiple filters, so my mailing lists, friends, spam and other mail all come into different email boxes. Oh, and it's free.
Last but not least is metapad, a simple notepad replacement. It's not fancy or clever, it's just notepad, only a little smarter - it can cope with Unix text files better than notepad does, understand links and is generally just a bit nicer to use.
Anyone got any programs they can't live without?
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no subject
Date: 2004-01-09 10:20 am (UTC)The most indispensable program to me, however, is PuTTY. With this SSH client I can connect from any Internet-enabled machine to one of my shell accounts, check my e-mail in mutt and to chat (via IRC, Jabber, MSN, ICQ or Yahoo) using irssi and bitlbee (as well as browsing the web with Lynx or w3m if I'm unwilling or not allowed to install Firebird).
PuTTY is simple to install and uninstall (just download the executable somewhere, then delete it when you're done), doesn't need to reboot the machine, and permits me to do all the things I just mentioned without installing any software whatsoever. Plus, assuming I trust the PC I'm using, I can send and recieve digitally signed and encrypted e-mails remotely, without having to carry my key around with me.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-09 11:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-09 12:25 pm (UTC)(personally, I use Exact Audio Copy to rip CDs to ogg)
no subject
Date: 2004-01-09 10:46 am (UTC)PuTTY, which lets me check my mail and irc from uni. Mutt is my mail client of choice and irssi for irc.
These make Windows XP use bearable :)
Somewhat sadder favourites:
I would also count the pager Most among my must haves on Linux and for any serious editing, I must have emacs.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-09 10:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-09 11:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-09 12:02 pm (UTC)I use TextPad for my text editing—syntax highlighting and search-replace with regular expressions—but some other program I use is going to start opening Notepad at me, so I needed your Metapad suggestion. Thanks for that!
I third the putty recommendation. I keep my ssh key in Pageant and wish the web browser could use it to log me into web sites. After having Trillian 0.74 installed and grudgingly opening it now and again, I bought Trillian Pro, and like it enough to have it launch on startup. I could live without foobar2000, but it would involve grousing at some of Winamp's shortcomings for a while. I seem to be one of the few people who rely on Winamp 2.9 for video playing, though.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-09 12:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-09 03:49 pm (UTC)Bunch of arse, really.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-09 12:55 pm (UTC)It's a little like Gator in that it saves information and fills in forms for you, except that unlike Gator, it's not evil.
I fill out a ton of online forms, and find it a lifesaver.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-09 01:45 pm (UTC)OK, I can be a bit more helpful than that:
On anything: MAME.
On the Macs: MacStumbler on laptops, SubEthaEdit (which is utterly outrageously cool in mixed groups of people you've never met before but suddenly, without any fuss, are jointly editing a document with; and it performs the 'better notepad' function, though TextEdit isn't bad anyway), Audio Hijack Pro (records output from any program at OS level, does timed records and post-processing -- mostly to record real audio streams, eg of BBC radio programs, to MP3 to listen to on the iPod), XPod (ooh, let me borrow your iPod for five minutes), Marine Aquarium.
On PCs, I've almost forgotten, but definitely NoteTabPro (that editing thing again), iTunes (again) and Zuma (most addictive video game ever).
no subject
Date: 2004-01-10 05:13 am (UTC)FeedDemon has to go on my list now, as I've become addicted to RSS feeds and I haven't found anything better that can handle the hundreds I'm following.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-10 04:16 pm (UTC)See http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/friends/news and http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/friends/comics
no subject
Date: 2004-01-10 06:34 pm (UTC)With FeedDemon I have them broken down into 15 or so different channels/folders by category, so I can read what I want when I'm in the mood to and still be able to very easily go back days later and read stuff I skipped. The last thing I'd want is for it to seem like a chore, which is something that made me fall out of the habit of reading Usenet.
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Date: 2004-01-11 01:05 pm (UTC)Personally, I kinda liked the way that Radio Userland did. You deleted ones you'd read, allowing you to keep ones you wanted to read later.
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Date: 2004-01-11 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-12 12:19 am (UTC)If it wasn't for the fact that I need that, I'd probably be using a piece of software of some kind.
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Date: 2004-01-10 05:37 pm (UTC)My critical progs are
My critical progs are <a href="http://www.willwap.co.uk/Programs/vbrfix.html
")VBRFix</a>, which repairs VBR mp3 files so that their header works right, and <a href="http://www.exactaudiocopy.de">Exact Audio Copy</a>, only the finest mp3 ripping prog around.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-11 01:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-11 08:59 am (UTC)I'd also add (though they're hardly unusual choices), Trillian for IMing, MUSHClient as a powerful, er, MU* client, Teleport Pro for offline browsing (or rather, snagging every image file on a page), and Xnews fer Usenet.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-12 09:02 am (UTC)I use eudora instead of the Outlook option, I do however have 100 or so different accounts attached to it, so it manages them very tightly.
Trillian, and in my opinion, well worth upgrading to the pro version, and i never pay for my software!
putty, but thats cos i spend too much time needing unix shells,
oh and Norton AV - but not home editions, cos paying yeary anoys me,, get a version of corperate from somwhere, thats the way forward!