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Posts Tagged Free
Free Mac Apps
Mar 1
Remote Desktop Programs
Apr 9
mRemote – Discontinued – merged with Visionapp
Visionapp Freeware – obsoleted by XP SP3 + Visionapp’s overpriced commercial version.
XRDP
RoyalTS old is free, new is $30
MS remote desktop client for mac
Hopefully we’ll find others to add to the list
http://www.easytousetools.com/md5_tool/download.php
Free Images
Mar 30
Websites are pretty booring without images of some sort. Professionals pay big money for world-class photos and illustrations. For the rest of us, searching google images is often the first place we look – however there is little guarantee that the images we find are ok to use.
Here are some links to various sites I’ve found that promise free photos, and by free, I mean free to download + Free to use*
* = within the intended use – for example, many pictures are free if you intend to put them on your website, so long as you credit the author, while almost no images are free if you intend to pack up a bunch of images and sell an image collection…
Sites that offer some free images:
Some of these grabbed from the awesome book: “How to Cheat in PhotoShop CS4″
Stockxchng (http://www.sxc.hu)
MorgueFile (http://www.morguefile.com)
Mayang textures (http://www.mayang.com/textures)
US Government public domain images:
Space images (http://www.nasa.gov)
Skies and Nature: (http://www.photolib.noaa.gov)
Military (http://www.defenselink.mil/photos/)
Free FTP software
Mar 30
I use Filezilla – seems to do everything I need
Free Disk Defragmenters
Mar 20
Hopefully one day soon, Solid state storage will make random access so fast that defragmenting won’t be necessary, but for now, here are a few free tools:
Cool jQuery Reference Site
Mar 20
if you use jQuery, you need to have a look at this interactive reference!
Network Monitoring
Mar 20
Network monitoring is critical if you want to know that your computer systems are working.
I looked into a few choices:
Free:
SmokePing: pings a bunch of addresses and graphs the response times http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/
Nagios: Nagios is a free, full blown network monitor for Linux. When I looked into it, it was a fair amount of work to set up – there are a few books available
Another app is Groudwork opensouce edition.
I am always leary of open source software that has a paid version. Seems like what could be a great free app usually ends up being little more than a demo for the companies paid version.
Another tool I found is ServerSentinel (http://www.jam-software.com/serversentinel/index.shtml) Server Sentinel isn’t free, but it’s not pricey either $65. Has a nice variety of sensors (you can do a lot more than just ping an address)
Network Storage
Mar 20
There’s a number of Free open source network storage OS’s or applications layered on linux.
http://www.openfiler.com looks to have done a nice job
Free OCR software
Mar 20
TopOCR
I use Subversion at home to keep my projects in order.
Subversion, being free, and lacking a marketing team, can be a real pain to get into -there are different versions of it out there, built by different groups etc…
The combination I’ve settled on so far is:
Server: I use the free VisualSVN server at www.visualsvn.com
VisualSVN server basically takes Subversion and turns it into a nicely packaged windows service and MMC management plug in. It takes 2 minutes to install, 1 minute to configure.
Client: For the client, I use 2 pieces: TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/) Tortoise adds shell integration to windows to support subversion – what this means is that any folder on your system can be added to version control. There are a few commands that took some getting used to, but overall a very nice experience.
Visual Studio integration: the VisualSVN folks make a nice Visual Studio add on, but unfortunately they charge money for it – a lot of money – $50. Now $50 isn’t bad if you’re just buying one copy, but one of the benefits of knowing and using open source free software is that moment at work when you give your boss a nice alternative to sourcesafe that won’t cost the company a penny. That whole sales pitch goes out the window if they need to buy 50 copies of an add in for $50 a piece. So I use AnkhSVN. (http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/) When I started with it, it was a bit rough going, the official release didn’t work for me, but the latest nightly build at the time did. I’m sure by now the current release works just fine, but if you have problems, don’t give up, try a nightly build.
If all the nice gui stuff isn’t for you, Coding horror has a nice article on setting up basic subversion server usng text commands:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001093.html
Gizmos freeware
Mar 20
this is a pretty big site with lots of links to free stuff.
Some good finds out there!
http://www.techsupportalert.com/
Free Accounting software
Mar 20
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-personal-finance-software.htm
Windows Vista Backup Sucks.
A co-worker told me about Cobian backup, I’ve been using it for a few months now and I liked it enough to send the author a donation (the software is free)
http://www.cobiansoft.com/
Test your memory
Mar 20
For years I’ve relied on Memtest after building a new PC.
the results: I’ve had stable PC’s that have gone for long periods of time without crashing.
Testing is critical when you’re using multiple sticks of memory. It seems there are a number of issues that show up with 4 sticks that get by just fine when only 2 are used.
here are a few links:
Memtest86+ is found at memtest.org – it’s free. Download an iso, burn to CD and boot it in your pc – wait 24 hours and see if your screen shows any errors – easy easy easy…
http://www.memtest.org
Memtest86.com is by the guy who originally wrote memtest. It wasn’t updated for a few years, so memtest.org sort of took over, but I see he had an update in Jan 09 so it may be worth a look. Free – he also sells a CD for $11.
http://www.memtest86.com
Microsoft has a tool, which is a nice start, except one tiny problem: it won’t test more than 4 gig of ram.
Online backup
Mar 20
Mozy offers an online backup tool with 2gb of free storage. ‘unlimited’ is $5 a month.
http://mozy.ccom/home
Here’s an interesting idea:
Google provides a good chunk of free storage with each gmail account – someone wrote a utility to turn that into a drive: http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm
I’ve used mediacoder – it’s a nice free tool to convert video files from one format to another.
Example uses would be converting a divx file so it plays on an ipod or zune.
http://mediacoder.sourceforge.com
another is handbreak:
http://handbrake.fr/
Adobe Training
Mar 20
There’s a few cool sites that offer some free Adobe product training: