free software recommended by rusl

OK,

I'm going to write something useful here because I'm tired of nonsense at the moment. It may be because my school is all nonsense at the moment. Speaking of which, probably I should post my school assignments here. Why the hell not!?

OKay,

software that I recommend...

...Please note, software changes fast and I may change my view in the future. Make up your own damn mind:

P2P file sharing. I recommend using Bittorrent [BT] technology to get big files such as movies or discographies [all the music published by a certain artist in one bundle]

I use to use ABC because it is open source and written in Python which is a way better language than java. Azureus is written in java, it is the most popular P2P for BT out there but java crashes my computer. I think java is more stable on Mac or Linux so use it there] But then I learned about µtorrent. It is a very small program. You don't need to install it, you just run the .exe. Very decent for windows and crashes a lot less. So I definately recommend µtorrent [aka utorrent because people don't know that if you hold down 'Alt' then numbers 0 1 8 1 you get 'µ'] Even though it is closed source, which sucks, it is currently free.

The only downside of utorrent is that is makes the filesize for incompletely downloaded files to report as the final file size. This means that I run out of space artificially sometimes and is annoying. ABC was better in that it didn't do that. However, utorrent is superior not just because it is a smaller .exe, but also because it has features like DHT which mean you can keep sharing torrents without a working tracker, meaning torrents which are dead on ABC may be alive and well on utorrent.

For BT of any sort, you need to download the .torrent files themselves. I find mine using isohunt.com. It is a big commercial site with sketchy pop-up ads that would be dangerous to click on, however isohun has the best selection because it searches all the other search engines too. I have never been able to find more results with another search engine. utorrent comes with a list of other search engines. The only one I really know about is mininova.org. Other than that there are various topic specific websites which are better if you know what you are looking for such as Southpark, the Simpsons, Electropunk music or indymedia torrents. There are many others. Sometimes you have to sign up with a 'tracker' in order to be able to download a torrent they are hosting.

Besides BT there are lots of ways to file share. Napster was the first most famous. Popularity is signifigant with these things because it determines selection. Then there was KaZaa and WinMX. These programs have their own internal search function. A lot of those old ones are dead because the RIAA killed them because they want to make sharing illegal, because sharing is dangerous to a system of greed. Currently the program I use that is still working great is called Soulseek. It is an established system of the KaZaa/WinMX era. It was not, however, shut down because it mainly is for trading independantly produced more local community type music. One of the best features is the 'rooms' where you trade with users of similar interests. So I definately recommend Soulseek.

There are lots of great music download websites out there, or just sites which give you the titles of good music that then you can then plug into a torrent or P2P search. Some of the music sites I like, and of course it all depends on your taste, are CiTR radio show pages for These are the Breaks and Radio Zero, Nardwuar's site, Electropunk hitlist, Evolution Control Commitee, Negativland, Chumbawamba, Shirley and Spinoza Internet Radio, People Like Us, wobbly, cutcopy, chicks on speed, peaches... I could go on an on.

Speaking of Internet Radio. I'd recommend you use realalternative or winamp for that. Winamp has an OK list of stations. I'm not really into Podcasts at the moment.

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OK OK, I'm getting tired of writing this. Now I will just list software with minimal discription.

ubuntu
is the new slick way to run linux. It's an African word meaning "I am what I am because of who we all are." They are super awesome. I have yet to install it but all I've heard is gread things. It's debian, meaning, pure free software, no tricks. There is also edubuntu, which we totally need because big dumb institutions are most of what props us Micro$oft. Another good way to us a Linux OS is with knoppix, which has a liveCD. I have used it and it works awesome. You boot the computer off of a CD and it is so smart it automatically sets up everything you need. The only thing i couldn't figure out was the wireless card, but that's because I don't use that and it was my sister's computer and probably if I understood wireless it would have been easy.

winavi is a thing I use for converting avi files to DVD format so I can burn them. It is a commercial trial. I've never sucessfully burned yet. However I beleive it is a decent program. Since it is a trial it has this annoying message on the converted video right in the centre of the screen, so it's a useless demo. However, I managed to find a password for it on this winavi crack website. Now for the past few years cracks have all been on sketchy malicious websites, but this site seems to be pretty decent so far for me. It just has a java popup that tells me a code and I click if it works or not. And lo and behold it did work!

Burning in Linux is going to work better than windows winavi whatever. I hope. Well it can, the question is will I be able to figure it out.

Gspot
despite the sexy name, this is a program for .avi video files. You run it to find out what codecs you need, or if you already have them

VLC
this is the most robust video player. it is open source. it has powerful features but I don't know how to use them all that well. it is good for weird formats like .mkv and bin/cue played right on your computer. Many video formats you would have to get a codec for in winamp are native to this program. Everybody should have this at least as a backup if you do video.

free-codecs.com
this is a good site which tells you all about video and codecs and all that. And you can download many of the programs for free from this website. I was suspicious of this site because of the expensive sounding URL. However I have yet to see any problems on this site. I think there are ads but's not popups and crap. I'm not sure if it's nonprofit or what but it seems a lot of people use it, it's linked on wikipedia, so that's what I trust.

Spacemonger
this is a visual way to look up how space is used on your hard disk. You can more easily see which files you ought to delete. Rather than going through tiny files one at a time. Quite useful if you, like me, want to feel in control of what is going on inside the box.

Undelete
Undelete was a standard feature in DOS but since the 'recycle bin' you need to specifically get a seperate program to do this. It's necessary when you mistakenly delete things. Recycle bin sometimes helps but really isn't a replacement since I empty the recycle bin quite often to free up space.

In case you didn't know. In a windows filesystem, you information is never actually deleted. What the computer does when you say 'delete' [or empty the recycle bin if you insist on that language] is windows removes the first letter of the filename, effectively making the file invisible to normal DOS or windows. Eventually the file will be overwritten as you use the disk. However, if you want to restore a 'deleted' file, all you need is an 'undelete' program that can see the files with the ?character as the first letter. Often you can fully recover deleted files this way. Unless the part of the disk where the file is has been overwritten, it's still there. There are various programs to 'truly' delete the file for the paranoid by this reality. However, it's not really a big deal, just seems like it when you read the PR from companies trying to get you to pay big $$$ for very basic stuff - good ol' reliance on ignorance to sell things.

Scandisk ME
This is just a windoze micro$oft program. But the newer ME version is a serious improvement if you are running win98, like me. You simply replace the .exe in the relevant directory and then it defragments a lot faster. However, when it starts it doesn't look like anything is happening for a while, but don't worry, when it does finally get going it will be way faster than the defragment98 version. Some seriously reworked mathmatics or something.

mozilla obviously
I kind of like the WYSIWYG html editer in the mozilla suite [the non-firefox mozilla] but I use the firefox thing for browsing. Jane uses the Thunderbird email client in mozilla, but I still prefer my old eudora. Mozilla not firefox link.


what about mosaic!
just for historians
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_web_browser
I just like to reminisce about when my friend bryan was skipping out of his 'virtual high'school and he told me about using mosaic.

amipro 3.0
www.zisman.ca/Articles/1991-92/OCP_AmiPro.html
this is the writing program I use instead of M$word or openoffice [bleh... java]
apparently others like it too. I'll send the .exe to you if you want it. Unfortunately
it is becoming dated. The file selection thing is annoying and it still forces you to use
8.3 filenames. but otherwise, it's still quicker and better thought out than anything else
I've tried. I'm use to it, but I wouldn't really recommend the 1993 version unless you
are use to it.

not recommending openoffice
because of the java in it and once it didn't save my homework when it had said it did which made me skip school I was so upset. I'm hoping there is a fork in the program and a non-java version comes out from the debian purists. This is the flagship of opensource after all [after linux servers] and it shouldn't suck so bad.

perfect keylogger lite
I use this not to be a spy, but to backup what I write in web browsers text boxes [like in your webmail] because often browsers will crash or just reset the text box if disconnected or something. It records every keystroke and mostly is a pretty reliable fallback plan [unless your computer is super fucked, which does happen]. Just be careful, it records every password which is good but I don't like it keeping my bank password!

search and replace html 98
I use this on webpages and in many other things it is useful.
All it does is 'search and replace' text which is exactly what you want. It can do a single file or all the files in a directory which is perfect for websites. Not fancy, not bloated.

AceFTP
This is the most straighforward FTP I like to use. I like how it highlights the difference between your disk directory and the server directory. Free with ads and pretty reliable I've found.

Turbo FTP
This is a 30 day trial program which I don't consider free, but you can set your clock back to feb 2003 and keep using it forever. It's great if you have a big website and are changing lots of files. It is designed exactly for that. I needed it when I made by bikesexual pictures thing because it's about 3000 files that need moving and sometimes, with a computer, you need to AUTOMATE!

Procomm Plus
This is the program I use to use to use the dail up modem to renew my library books. Also my friend had an ascii art BBS that was pretty cool though I never fully understood that stuff [back in grade 10/11]

Hackman Hex Editor
I used this to hack my way past level 50 in kobodeluxe, which is a seriously hard level. It was actually quite simple, but you need to edit the file that is not text, but hex or binary or something. This program can deal with that and it's pretty intelligently designed.

Lavasoft Ad-aware
This is very popular and is supposed to remove spyware. Commercial company, but smart, like the computer companies that will survive, it advertises with the good quality free product. Listen up 30 day trial nickle and dimers, nobody likes you.

Eudora 4.2
I have a CD of this that my dad bought! Why did I put this in the free section? I like it. I can hack the text back end of the program very easily. It's all these .ini files. Eudoralight I used for many years.

Smartwrap
This installs into eudora as a plugin but also is a standalone program. It erases the >>> and reformats garbled email so it's readible and doesn't have idiotic line breaks. Quite handy.

EzWare EzDesk
This thing keeps the icons on your desktop in the place you put them. Windows fucks it up regularly and resets the icons otherwise. Kind of a gimmick, but handy if you run a stupid windoze computer.

Photoshop, Flash MX, Dreamweaver
These I got to use because of my school. In order to move the program onto your 'home study' system, simply copy the directory containing the program from the 'program files' directory onto your equivalent, copy all of it. Then, go into regedit, and copy the section with the 'adobe' directory or the 'macromedia' one, and then copy that and then put it on your 'home study' unit. Learned this from a Lindows tutorial. Why the fuck are people so unwilling to fess up and be proud of sharing? Does everybody beleive just because the M$ stock price is down that their competition is, due to their own label, 'piracy'???
By the way, it even works from XP to win98. However you have to reformat the .reg file that you copied into the other format. It's like email formatting thought, just plain text. Just export a sample of the win98 .reg and compare to that.
Does that make sense? If not I can explain it better. I guess it's kindof a hack.
Premiere Pro 1.5
I tried the above trick with this program and it didn't work. Apparantly photoshop 8 is the same. Does anyone know the mechanism to get this to work?

Corel Print House Magic
This I got free on a CD that came with my scanner. If is very good for text layout and then printing. It is especially good for circular text, like the writing on a bicycle wheel for instance, which happens to be something I tend to draw. The interface is really annoying, but it does function.

Thumbsplus 3.0
This I have used for years and it was an awesome program. Starting to be obsolete with winXP being able to view files a bit better in the explorer. On the otherhand, it keeps the thumbs.db in one single place instead of all over the damn place [that is why you always end up downloading god damn useless .ini files with a directory of mp3s when you fileshare] Also it has seriously decent batch conversion features that I still use. I tried the google/flickr 'hello' or whatever stupid thing they made to do the same as what thumbsplus started 10 years ago and I still find thumbsplus works better.

Kobo Deluxe
This is a cool game in python that I'm slightly addicted too. Except I got over it because after level 50 it just repeats and is kind of dull. Opensource. It may improve in the future!

Eliza
This is something I remember trying first on the 286 and it was kind of stupid then and it is still now. But it's kind of interesting if you try and thing of alternative ways to use it.

Sayzme
This I love. sourceforge project. Made for blind people basically, it reads out the text to you. I want to figure out how to hoow it up to an automated webcrawler so it just reads the internet out loud until infinity. That would be a conceptual art project. I'd weld the computer into a steel box with a solar panel or something and have it access the net by wifi or something. Then you could never make it shut up.

Impulse Tracker music tracker
This I use to play with and even made a few songs. I'll post them here one day I guess. I transcribed scott joplin's entertainer. The .it files play in winamp nowadays!!! My friend rowen, or maybe jason the BBS guy, showed me it.

Klik & Play
This I ordered the floppy disk off the net in 1998 or something. It's a program for making your own video games. It is very limited but you can still make something fun. It's one of those annoying programs you use because the capabilities are worth the fucking butt ugly hard to function interface.