What Browser?

I'm using Google Chrome more and more, and I dig it. Of course all my personal data is being captured and resent back to Google, a given. Right now I don't care too much about that, but that might change. As far as a clean, responsive browser, I'm liking Chrome, and I didn't think I would.

I think for an every day browser I would still recommend Firefox (more plugins). I think IE will be back in the game once IE 9 comes out, but till then I'm generally staying away from IE now.

If you are like me and initially evaluated Chrome, said "not seeing what the big deal is", and moved on, you might want to give it another try.

List of Open Source Useful Software

Yeah, it is time to redo my laptop. So as I go through the process, I thought I would list some of the common freeware apps that I use. If you know of any good ones feel free to list them as well. I use a Windoze so this won't help you Mac folks much.

• Irfanview - great for simple image viewing and manipulations
• Virtual Clone Drive - Opens ISO's locally
• Izarc - Unzip utility with RAR support. Careful, site has a big advertisement that confuses the Isarc download with something else that isn't free
• CD Burner XP Burn CD's and DVD's
• Winamp- The old stand by for playing MP3's
• Sumatra PDF - Faster, Lighter Adobe PDF reader
• Open Office - Alternative to MS Office (There are others as well, google them yourself)
• Virtual Box - Run virtual machines on your computer
• Gladinet Cloud Desktop - Use this so I can map a drive to Microsoft's Live free 25 Gig free remote storage (see previous blogs)
• Paint.Net - Great for light Photo manipulation, not Photoshop. Also there are some great web based alternatives, do a google search.
• Notepad ++ - Great open source notepad replacement similar to Ultra Edit (Use Column Editing)

There are also some services I use, some I even pay for. I'll do a post for those as well, as well as update this list. I know there are more great open source software tools out there, I just either have commercial equivalents or I haven't used them yet.