Favourite Tools
Programs and utilities to make everything safer, easier, more efficient and enjoyable
Many people get mightily hacked off with Microsoft's Internet Explorer and it's continuous parade of security holes and failure to use modern
WWW standards. Other browsers you might like to consider instead are:
Also in the Mozilla stable is a very good and secure email client:
- Thunderbird: Reclaim Your Inbox.
Thunderbird 0.8 is Mozilla's next generation e-mail client. Thunderbird makes emailing safer, faster and easier than ever before.
The Internet is a wild place full of fanciful beasts which will eat your computer. (metaphorically speaking) Luckily you can protect your precious data with virus checkers and firewalls.
Other nasties may be purged by the following tools:
- Adblock - A powerful extension to Firefox which helps you get rid of annoying banners, splashes and other dancing balony
- Ad-Aware is designed to provide advanced protection from known Data-mining, aggressive advertising, Parasites, Scumware, selected traditional Trojans, Dialers, Malware, Browser hijackers, and tracking components.
- Spybot Search and Destroy. Spyware is a relatively new kind of threat that common anti-virus applications do not yet cover. If you see new toolbars in your Internet Explorer that you didn't intentionally install, if your browser crashes, or if you browser start page has changed without your knowing, you most probably have spyware. But even if you don't see anything, you may be infected, because more and more spyware is emerging that is silently tracking your surfing behaviour to create a marketing profile of you that will be sold to advertisement companies.
Notice how these two malware detectors give different results on the same machine.
Just a note of caution here - if you search for these beware the sites out there with similar sounding products - many of these actively seek to
install spyware or adware on to unsuspecting punters machines.
A suite of applications that enable you to create letters, databases, spreadsheets, presentations and graphics.
Be aware that in their zeal to faithfully reproduce all the features of MS Office the Open Office developers have also reproduced all the cringing useability failures and embarasing brain-wrongs of the original as well.
The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.
NoteTab is a leading-edge Windows text editor and HTML coding tool, and an excellent Notepad replacement. Lots of useful additional facilities. NoteTab Light is free for personal use.
If you're buried alive in e-mail, Mailbag Assistant comes to the rescue with tools to search, organize, analyze and archive your mountain of messages - tools that are probably inadequate or unavailable in your mail program.
NoodleTools is a suite of interactive tools designed to aid students and professionals with their online research.
Noodle Quest - One of the hardest parts about doing academic research on the Internet is fathoming out where to start. A search engine is usually the first thing to try, but which search engines are the most useful for your topic?
Search strategy adviser lets you choose the best search for your information need. Search strategies based on an analysis of your topic.
Collecting Material on the Internet
Cogitum Co-Citer lets you create collections of texts from the Internet. It automatically captures selected text, its title, Internet address where the text was found, and the date the text is added to the collection. You can also assign comments and categories to the texts, organize them, send by e-mail, export/import, search the collection, sort, print, and more.
Image Co-Tracker is a tool for creating databases of images from the Internet. It automatically captures the image, the Internet addresses where the image has been found and where it refers, its name, and the date it is added to the database. You also can assign comments and categories to images, organize them, send by e-mail, transfer to other computers, export to HTML, search the database, sort, print, and more.
Irfanview is a very powerful, easy to use free image viewer and converter which supports an extensive list of graphic, sound and video file formats.
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