Computer Software you might not use but probably should

[Foo]

I've been waiting for this update.

No more coveting pointsec \o/

[E:v:O]

NTREGOPT

http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

"The program works by recreating each registry hive "from scratch",
thus removing any slack space that may be left from previously
modified or deleted keys."

In other words, Defrags your registry..and it's free

[bork[e]]

WinxpVirtualControlPanel

Very light program to mount images... every trial I could find finally expired and ran across this a few hours ago. Very simple to use, and setting it up takes all of 1 minute, just follow the read me it you have problems.

...Microsoft has a free, 60kb program that does the same thing! Of course, it is not supported...

[+JuggerNaut+]

NTREGOPT

http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

"The program works by recreating each registry hive "from scratch",
thus removing any slack space that may be left from previously
modified or deleted keys."

In other words, Defrags your registry..and it's free

the registry is a fucking joke. worst. idea. ever.

[obsidian]

Hard Drive Defragmentation Software:

Diskeeper
A few of you already use Diskeeper, so it comes as a highly recommended product, though not free.
Commercial application ($30-100).

O&O Defrag
Generally well recommended as well, but there has been a report by one of you that it introduced disc errors. Mileage may vary.
Commercial application ($45).

Ultimate Defrag
Looks interesting, allows you to manually stick more used files and applications on the outer, faster sides of the hard disc platter and other optimizations.
Commercial version and Freeware

JkDefrag
Freeware, fast, powerful. Only limitation is that it is a command line application but you can get the pretty GUI front-end as well.
Freeware and front-end GUI.

Sysinternals Contig
Most of you are familiar with Sysinternals, the wonderful little company that made all sorts of great utilities before being bought out by Microsoft. Their Contig defragmentor is still available from Microsoft though they have labeled it "as is" and unsupported.
Freeware and front-end GUI

[Dr_Watson]

CutePDF
Free PDF writer
been using it for around a year now, small, free, and works great.

-----------------------------------

Windows Installer Cleanup Utility
Microsoft has updated the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility. With the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility, you can remove a program's Windows Installer configuration information. You may want to remove the Windows Installer configuration information for your program if you experience installation (Setup) problems. For example, you may have to remove a program's Windows Installer configuration information if you have installation problems when you try to add (or remove) a component of your program that was not included when you first installed your program.

found this recently useful to fix issues with reinstalling photoshop.
handy little tool when uninstalls don't work correctly

[Underpants?]

Synergy desktop sharing utility. Share one keyboard and mouse among multiple monitors /systems (linux/bsd unix, win, mac compat).

[Captain]

Belarc Advisor

-builds high detailed overview of installed software and hardware on your system
-provides information about missing Windows hotfixes and outdated drivers
-information is displayed in a web browser and all data is private

[obsidian]

Digsby

I've been looking for the perfect cross-platform, multi-protocol IM client. Digsby is the closest one I've found so far. Previously, I was using Pidgin (Windows/Linux) and Adium (Mac), the two of which are sister products. Both worked fine, Adium being nearly perfect, Pidgin's interface looks rather like a donkey's ass. Neither supported webcams.

Still toying with it, but Digsby is cross-platform on Windows, Linux and Mac, looks good, supports MSN, AOL, Yahoo, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, Facebook Chat, email and various social networks. It looks like it also has webcam support.

[Fender]

Foxit PDF reader now works as FF plugin and can open PDFs in a FF tab.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader ... snew30.htm

[obsidian]

Evernote

Stores notes, information, pictures, snapshots, almost everything and stores them into an indexed, tag-able database for searching. Built in OCR software will recognize handwriting, even text in photographs, for example, taking a photo of a restaurant receipt with your camera phone, toss it into Evernote and you'll be able to later search for it by the restaurant's name printed on the top of the receipt. Currently works on Windows and Mac and a few other devices like cell phones.

Basically a free, probably more intuitive version of what Microsoft OneNote does.

Demonstration video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_ncr1Ee9e8

[Therac-25]

Since I just reworked my Linux desktop after getting a new 1920x1200 monitor on Friday, I discovered a bunch of things (and a few things that people need reminding of -- I'm constantly amazed how many people I work with who don't use screen). Unless noted otherwise, assume they are all either Gnome apps or non-commital, as KDE4 is still dedicated to classic canadian pop rock.

Deskbar Applet & Gnome-Do

These take on the role of Spotlight and Quicksilver respectively. There's overlap though -- Deskbar Applet has a bunch of addons that do things like post your query to twitter, and it's possible it might evolve to be more useful than Gnome-Do in the future. It can also do things like incremental google searches as you type, which is kind of handy. Having them both, and making sure to install beagle (the desktop search daemon, so Deskbar Applet can search your files) is recommended.

I tried Launchy, and "Meh" shows far too much enthusiasm. It's obviously something written for Windows, and has basic things wrong with it in Gnome (I tried to run a perl script using the command-tab-arguments format, and it just opened the script in gedit...)

Conky

Conky is basically a system monitor. It's just an awesome one. It has a bunch of builtin commands that access all the basic system resources (CPU usage, temperature sensors if you can get them working, hard drive space, network activity, etc, etc.) It can also just run arbitrary commands and use arbitrary fonts -- a custom weather font has been used for some really nice looking setups.

My setup can be seen here. A coworker asked me to link to everything I used, so that's why all the captions and comments are there.

screen

This is kinda basic, but if you don't know about it you should learn. It's basically a terminal multiplexer that stays around even if the controlling terminal disappears. Upshot is that you can have command line programs running (irc, etc) without an active terminal so that they can survive disconnections, restarting of windowing systems, etc.

Conduit

Conduit is awesome. I first started to use it at work to keep my google calendar (personal stuff) viewable through Evolution. It can do all sorts of synchronization. If you don't find it useful in some way, you're probably not doing very much on your desktop.

Kvirc

The only KDE app on here. I don't actually use this right now -- I'm going back to irssi in a screen session as soon as I can fix the backspace bug -- but it's a great, cross-platform IRC client that actually supports SSL out of the box. My meatspace friends have a private IRC server setup, and we've always used SSL for it since it was possible (before any clients supported it, we were creating ssl tunnels manually...) There aren't alot of graphical Linux clients that support SSL -- the only GTK2 one is X-Chat, and it sucks in several annoying ways. Actually, Pidgin is GTK2 and can do IRC w/SSL as well, but cramming an IRC connection into the IM UI paradigm comes off as incredibly clumsy.

XScreensaver's lcdscrub hack

In February, this guy came out with what amounts to a fancy screensaver for OSX that costs $18. It took less than a month to get it released as an xscreensaver display hack. I don't know how "useful" it actually is, but it's worth knowing about should you need it.

FUSE / sshfs

Godly. Mounting a remote directory through ssh. Nothing needs to run on the remote machine -- just sshd. It's all in userspace, too, so no sudo bullshit to share files. No more mandatory NFS or Samba bullshit fucking around ever again between non-Windows machines (obviously there's performance overhead -- so there are going to be cases where you still need to visit the NFS fairy -- but there's finally a reliable, simple way to share files that goes right through any normal firewall ruleset).

This Should Be Describing An Awesome Music Player

I've been stuck on this one. I used to be an Amarok person, but 1.4 is being end of lifed, 2.0 is ugly and has less features, and both constantly misbehave from having to start and stop KDE services all the time. I still haven't solved this one to my satisfaction. I'm currently using Quod Libet to organize my music. I'm considering a plan whereby I would use Quod Libet as an organizer, and mpd and some kind of simple client for playback. Haven't decided yet.

It's worth noting that Banshee was probably the best GTK-based one I found. If the tag editor wasn't so retarded when editing multiple files, I might not have abandon it.

[R00k]

Sunbelt Personal Firewall
http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/home-hom ... -firewall/

I've used this for years - it used to be called Kerio Personal Firewall. The free version is the best lightweight software firewall that I've ever used. You can use the simple blocking rules for most things, but if you're familiar with networking and firewall concepts, you will opt to use the packet filter to create advanced rules for all your traffic.

I've yet to find another free firewall that provides the same level of control, has such a low overhead, and has such an intuitive interface. Can't recommend it enough.

[Therac-25]

Dropbox
http://getdropbox.com/

This is a storage service that also provides a shell extension. The free account is 2GB, and you can pay $10 a month for 50GB.

The shell extension syncs your drop box between all involved computers. You simply copy the file into the configured folder, and it copies it to the servers, and then any other logged in instances of the extension copy it from that.

Awesome and convenient in many ways. Works flawlessly on Ubunutu, so I'd hope that they can manage to get the other operating systems done as well.

[xXEMANN_101Xx]

I didnt see anyone post this one. Its not the coolest of apps. but i like it.

John's Background Switcher
This app lets you choose from a folder of pictures or choose pictures individually, and lets you choose a time interval between pictures, then switches your desktop wallpaper accourding to the time interval you set.

http://www.johnsadventures.com/software ... dswitcher/

Hope you guys enjoy this as much as i do.

[Therac-25]

LyX
http://www.lyx.org/
Unix / Windows (cygwin not needed) / Mac

Classic application (it's been around for well over a decade) that acts as a word-processor like frontend to the LaTeX typesetting system (If you've taken math or computer science in uni, then you've probably encountered LaTeX, even if you never had to write it directly).

Anyway, I used to like playing with this program back when I was in college/uni, but it used a crappy toolkit called Xforms (no relation to the modern thing called that), and in general was lame and buggy and never quite worked right. It's all since been rewritten in Qt, and has every major feature that you'd expect from a word processor (with the only notable exception being spell-check-as-you-type), but still restricts your input based on the LaTeX document class you choose.

As someone who always violently wrestles with Word and OO Writer to get them to obey their format styling system, having a program where you don't have a choice but to use styles is so calming. It's like a cease fire has been declared between me and the software.

Going to see if I'm allowed to use this at work. Maybe create a corporate pdf template for it.

[obsidian]

WinxpVirtualControlPanel

You can also try:

Virtual CloneDrive

Lightweight, freeware virtual drive for Windows.

[Therac-25]

mhddfs (and other Union filesystems)
http://svn.uvw.ru/mhddfs/trunk/README
Linux Only

Rather than going on about how useful this is, I'll just quote from the README. The utility should be fairly obvious. To clarify, the source trees can be arbitrary directory trees, even on the same physical drive. There is no need for them to be the root of a specific filesystem.

Also, it's based on FUSE, so you don't need to have root permissions to do this. You obviously need write permission to the directories if you expect to write to them, but the mounting process can be done by your desktop shell if you want to set it up.

Code: Select all

Consider we have two hard drives with the content below:

/hdd1             /hdd2
|                 |
+-- /dir1         +-- /dir1
|   |             |   |
|   +- file2      |   +- file4
|                 |   +- file2
+-- file1         |
|                 +-- file5
+-- /dir2         |
    |             +-- /dir3
    +- file3          |
                      +- file6

mounting this tree with the command:

mhddfs /hdd1,/hdd2 /hdd_common

into the specified file system point we will see a combined tree.

In the united tree we can see all the directories and files. Note
file2 of 2nd hdd is not visible (because 1st hdd  has  the  file2
already).

/hdd_common
|
+-- /dir1
|   |
|   +-- file2  -> /hdd1/dir1/file2
|   +-- file4
|
|-- /dir2
|   |
|   + file3
|
+-- /dir3
|   |
|   +-- file6
|
+-- file1
+-- file5

[Unisaw]

SpaceMonger

Manage the data on your hard drive. I used this to free up space on my HD when I only had 150 MB left out of 70GB. Nice utility.

[Scourge]

O&O Defrag
Generally well recommended as well, but there has been a report by one of you that it introduced disc errors. Mileage may vary.
Commercial application ($45).

I want to add another experience where it introduced disc errors. After defragging my drive, it was no longer bootable and after fixing the boot it was unstable as well.

[Foo]

I think I should mention a similar problem with the Eraser tool. If you use it to wipe slack (free) space on RAID volumes, it may render the drive unbootable. A windows repair fixes it but, well, that's hardly a workaround

Eraser's still great, just don't try to wipe free space on your boot drive if you're running RAID.

[Foo]

VMWare ESXi 4.0.0

ESXi is VMWare's 'big daddy' enterprise-grade hypervisor. Think of it like a tiny operating system which you install on a physical computer, that then allows you to create and run multiple virtual computers within it. It comes as a bootable ISO and installs like any other OS (except it can't co-exist... the machines has to be dedicated to the ESX install).

It's useful if you're the kind of person who likes to try out a bunch of different operating systems, or the kind of nerd that likes to mess about testing applications. You can build an entire virtual network of machines within a single ESXi host and connect them together, copy them, take point-in-time snapshots... lots of stuff.

Aside from the obvious geek appeal of messing about with it as a toy.... I work with ESXi's commercial big brothers ESX 3.5 and vSphere every day... and I can tell you that ESXi is a barely-reduced version of the same sofware. So you can gain legitimate VMWare experience by messing around with ESXi, which might be good for your CV if you're in IT.

[U4EA]

Open source, light-weight apps:

WinCDEmu [ISO mounting]
Infra Recorder [Burning]

[Eraser]

Paint.NET

http://www.getpaint.net
"Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins."

It may not be Photoshop, but it's the next best thing when you're looking for something that's free.

[Silicone_Milk]

Would you suggest it over Gimp + Gimp-Shop?

BTW JkDefrag kicks much ass. I'd say it's at least 6 times faster than the Windows XP defrag utility and much more flexible/"intelligent"