Wednesday, May 26, 2010

TRF readers recommend basic software

And let me begin. Feel free to join.

Internet browser

Google Chrome 6.0 dev or 5.0 stable
Firefox 3.6

Chrome is used by 17% of TRF readers; Firefox by 44% of readers. Our Chrome percentage is way above the 7% all-market average, suggesting a high percentage of early adopters and geeks in our community.

Chrome Extensions

Find and download from the gallery.

Google Mail Checker Plus, Hotmail Checker, Facebook for Google Chrome, Chrowety, TwitterWatch, FeedSquares, ChromePad, Glyphs, Chromey Calculator, Countdown, Currency Converter, Frame Two Pages (LM), Forecastfox Weather, IE Tab, Your Favorite Radio (LM), Autopatchwork, Copy Without Formatting, Easy YouTube Downloader, Favorite Doodle, Gmail 2 Small Attachment Icons, Google Dictionary, History 2, Incredible Start Page, Note Anywhere, Search Preview for Google, Send Using Gmail, Ultimate Chrome Flag, plus 100 others I downloaded but disabled

Antivirus

AVIRA 10 free
Microsoft Security Essentials

PDF reader

Nitro PDF Reader (allows you to edit, Office 2010-like user interface)

Office

PowerPoint Viewer, Word Viewer, Excel Viewer

The original Microsoft products are fast and slick. The viewers are free. To edit, a free alternative exists:

Open Office 3.2

Computations

Mathematica 7.0.1 ($249 home)
Sage (free)

Media player

VLC 1.0.5: faster start than Windows Media Player, plays almost all formats including Real's and Apple's formats
XBMC: for hi-definition H.264 movies

Defragmentation

Auslogics Disk Defrag
Auslogics Registry Defrag (no longer free)

Notepad replacement

Notepad plus plus: decent ability to make various TXT-like formats readable, lots of functions: download (look around the green button, you will reduce your CO2 emissions, holy crap!)

Others

MikTeX with WinEdt, GhostScript, GSview, DOS Box, Google Earth, BumpTop (no longer free), BitTorrent, Emule, Skype, SpeedFan (thermometer)
at

6 comments:

  1. for computations, what about SAGE?

    http://www.sagemath.org/

    unlike Mathematica, SAGE is free.

    ReplyDelete

  2. A friend of mine just advocated it for me. ;-) I am not familiar with it.

    ReplyDelete

  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete

  4. Dear Ervin,

    I would love to return your polite message but I can't quite do it. ;-) Not only you wrote your comment under a wrong article but you have also completely misread the right article (many times, because the word you misread appears many times).

    I didn't use any minimization of *energy* but minimization of *entropy* of the initial state. Entropy is not the same thing as entropy and I surely don't assume any "equilibrium" of the initial state which would be silly. Quite on the contrary, a minimized entropy means to be "as far from equilibrium as you can get" and the newly born Universe was indeed very far from any equilibrium - which is kind of the very point of my argument.

    Best wishes
    Lubos

    ReplyDelete

  5. C'mon Lumo,
    1. what about Emacs?
    Full lisp system to do anything, including but not limited to text processing, email, TeX support, ..., and if your readers stress you out again, just type ESC doctor RET, to get your own ELISA driven doctor system.
    2. X1 desktop search. Not free (again, used to be, then under Yahoo, etc.). Does even rss search.
    3. jv16 power tools for the registry compactification and startup management. New version free again for all previous customers.

    ReplyDelete

  6. Consider

    If you use Google search, Google knows your search history regardless of what browser you are using,

    But...

    Unless you use Chrome, they do not know anything typed into your Address (URL) bar.

    With Chrome, Google knows your searches and what sites you visit.

    ReplyDelete