News and Views

Here are some of the free programs I’ve been using.

Firefox
Firefox has had the 3.0 version (now 3.01) out for a few weeks. It looks pretty stable, with a couple of new features. For one thing, it’s supposed to use less memory, and release memory better when it is done using it. This seems to be true from my experience. Another enhancement is in page zoom. With Firefox you could always hold the Control key and roll the mouse scroll button to zoom in or out of a page. Before it would only zoom the text, but now it also zooms the pictures too. Handy for taking a closer look at a picture. The picture zoom option can be turned off if you want, so it can behave like it did before.

AVG
AVG has also had version 8.0 out for several weeks. I recommended the upgrade several blogs ago, but I have some reservations now. It seems that if any of your hard drives are formatted with FAT32 the new AVG doesn’t seem to work so well. I have one FAT32 drive on my computer, and a full daily scan takes about 8 hours. Anyway, the protection seems to be better than before, but this is a little inconvenient.

Encryption
TrueCrypt is a very nice free data encryption program. You can create an encrypted file that once “mounted” looks just like another hard drive. Once you unmount it, it is almost completely unreadable. I guess the FBI or NSA could probably eventually crack it, but it’s pretty secure. What’s more, you can have it set up with two passwords. If you use one password it will display one set of data, while the other password will display another set. This way you could hide all your banking information under one password, but put fake data under the other. If a bad guy holds a gun to your head and makes you give him the password, he will only get the fake data. Or for another example, US Immigration has claimed the right to examine your laptop computer when you bring it in the country. This could also be a way to keep what’s private, private and only reveal to them the fake stuff.

Photo Copier
If you have a scanner and printer, but lost or never got a photocopy program with it, PhotoCopier is a nice free alternative. It’s pretty basic with only a few adjustments, but works quite well.

CD/DVD Burner
Similarly, if you have a CD or DVD burner, but lost the burning software that came with it, CDBurnerXP is a good free alternative. It’s not quite Nero, but it’s pretty good.

Calendar
If you want a calendar, I know of three free options. Outlook is probably the best, most full-featured calendar available, but it’s definitely not free. However, Lightning is. Lightning is made to integrate into the Thunderbird email client, while Sunbird is an identical stand-alone version. Another free option is to download the Palm Desktop program. This is actually designed to synchronize with your Palm handheld, but it works fine as a stand-alone calendar, event manager, and contact manager. It’s a little more mature than Lightning, too. And the final option is Google Calendar. This has the advantage of being online, so you can access if from anywhere. Plus, if you collaborate with other people you can see all the calendars side by side and determine when you are all free for a meeting. I have not used Google Calendar, so I am only telling what I have heard.

DVD Copier
If you want to make a backup copy of your DVD (just in case the dog chews up the original — I’m not advocating piracy here!), I have used DVDShrink for a years. It will remove region restrictions and most copy-protection schemes. Plus, it can compress a two-layer DVD onto a cheap single layer DVD, so you don’t have to buy a dual layer burner and expensive dual-layer disks. The compression works very well; I’ve never noticed any image degradation. I don’t think they have a Blu-Ray version yet. If you have Nero installed, it will integrate with it and burn directly. If not, it will create the files that you can burn with CDBurnerXP or another program.

Backup
Cobian Backup program is an excellent free data backup program. It can be set to run automatically every day, or whenever you like. The only problem I have seen is that even though I have set it to only keep a limited number of backup copies, they seem to keep accumulating, so periodically I have to go in and delete old ones. Otherwise it’s an excellent program. I back up critical data on my C drive to my D drive, and vice-versa. So if either drive fails I should have a backup on the other. Of course if the computer gets stolen I would be out of luck… You can also back up to an FTP location.

PDF Reader
I’ve mentioned Foxit PDF reader before. If you tried it and had problems, try the latest version. It is much faster than Adobe Reader, and uses much less system resources.

Shop Safe
This is an option that my Credit Union offers. I’m pretty sure other banks have similar options. When I want to buy something online, the ShopSafe program will generate a one-time credit card number, limited to the amount I tell it. The charges are applied to my regular credit card, but the number is useless for future purchases. This takes most of the worry out of giving out your credit card number on the internet.

Image Viewer/Manipulator
The FastStone image viewer is an excellent image browser, viewer, slideshow program. What’s more, it has edit capabilities, both single and batch. Do you have a lot of photos you want to upload to your gallery, but they are all high resolution straight from your camera? Select the pictures you want to resize and FastStone will do them all in one shot. I used to use ACDSee, but FastStone is better and free.

Disk Usage
TreeSize will go through your whole hard drive and tell you how much space each folder is using. I find this useful when I start to run out of space. I can find out what the space is being used for and decide what to delete.

Well, that’s enough for now. What did I miss?