PDFCreator is a neat little program that lets you create PDF format files from any program. When PDFCreator installs, a new printer is created (called PDFCreator). To create a PDF, just print to the PDFCreator and the program will ask you what you want to name your PDF file. This makes it really easy to distribute flyers and letters that anyone can read, since the program to read PDF files, Acrobat Reader, is free from Adobe as well. Look for the PDFCreator on Sourceforge because there is a commercial PDF Creator (notice the space in the name) that will try to sell you a similiar program. Sourceforge is a place where people donate software for anyone to use. Much of the software is of dubious quality, but there are diamonds in the dirt.
Cygwin is basically Unix tools designed to run on Windows. It also gives some Unix functionality to Windows.
DD is a component of Cygwin that does a "data dump" of something into something else. This program is for the folks who want to dd things, but do not feel like installing Cygwin. DD is most useful for duplicating disks (floppy, CD, etc) because you can copy the disk into an "image file" that you store on your hard drive. Then, you can copy this image file back to disk using DD or some other authoring software. For instance, you can use this program to rip a CD into an ISO file. This ISO file can then be written to a blank CD using any number of tools (like ISO Recorder, below).
ISO Recorder is a simple tool to write ISO files to a blank CD or DVD. It does not have a lot of the fancy creation tools that the other guys have, but it is a lot smaller and does its one thing very well.
Virtual Clone Drive is a neat little utility that will mount an ISO image as a drive letter. So combined with DD for windows, you can take your CDs/DVDs with you on your hard drive. This is very handy if you do not want to carry around dozens of CDs with you. But you will need the space on your hard drive, which is generally not a problem these days.
Stellarium is a planetarium for your computer. You can use it to see what stars are out from anyplace in the world, at any time.
Celestia is a 3D space program that lets you view objects in space. You can fly from the sun to Jupiter and back at lightspeed, or hover above the solar system and watch the planets go around the sun. You can accelerate time and move beyond lightspeed. This program is a little more complicated than Stellarium, but you can do many more things with it. You can even add objects like the space shuttle or the space station, and visit them to see what their view of the universe is.
Firefox and Thunderbird are World Wide Web and Email clients, respectively. They are free to use, feature packed, and fast. But the main reason I like them is that they are really easy to back up. They save all their data into one folder, so if you back up the folder, you've backed up the program. Internet explorer scatters its data all over the place, making backup a pain in the butt.
You can even have these programs store your profile on an external USB drive, like a thumbdrive, or external hard drive. Firefox will only take up about 100 Megs, and Thunderbird depends on how much email you receive and store, but 100-200 Megs should be sufficient for storing a few thousand emails.
Filezilla is an FTP client.
PuTTY is an SSH/Telnet client.
The GNU Image Manipulation Program (The GIMP) is a paint program that far exceeds MS Paint. It is more on par with programs like Corel Draw and Adobe Photoshop. You can do the basics as well as many effects to your pictures. If your digital camera comes with a TWAIN driver (most do), then you can also import pictures directly from your camera into the program. This is a very neat little tool.
Picassa is a handly picture organizer for all your digital photos. You can import and rename them, as well as take care of the basic photo processing tasks, like rotating the image and redeye reduction. You can then create a Web page with the pictures to upload and share with your family.
JBuilder is a nice Java development environment. They give away the basic version and make money on professional developers who pay for extra features.
Microsoft has released "Express" versions of many of their populare development tools. They are generally good enough to get up and running and will allow you to build a program and learn the languages. Like JBuilder, they leave out a lot of functionality that is useful to professional developers, but the hobbyist can easily get by and write some nice programs fairly easily. Some of them are C# Express, C++ Express, and C# Express,
Crimson Editor is a text editor that is much better than Wordpad or Notepad. I use it to create these web pages.
Trillian is a multi-protocol text messaging client that connects to multiple services and can group user accounts under a common user.
Copyright (C) 2006 by Brian Rose, all rights reserved.