Here's a list of some of my favorite freeware applications that I've compiled over the last few weeks. I seem to use these applications on an almost continuous basis. Let me know if there are any applications that make your computing experience better or easier.

Without further ado, here the are: categorized, but in no particular order.

System Tools

• Launchy - Open applications, documents, and websites by typing the name, or a portion of it... and more! Link
• StrokeIt - Global mouse gestures that can execute hotkeys or system commands. Link
• Samurize - Offers a wide variety of desktop overlays. I use it to display my current TODO.txt list on my desktop. I wrote a tutorial on how to do this. Link
• Synergy - use a keyboard and mouse over a network. Link
• Bulk Rename Utility - Quickly rename files in a given folder using a wide variety of techniques, including regular expressions. Link
  
• Avast Anti-Virus - Excellent free anti-virus software. Link
  
• Alcohol 52% - Create and mount CD images on virtual CD/DVD drives. Link
  
• Visual Subset - Create virtual drives of your commonly used folders. Link

Customization

• Folder Marker - Changes individual folder icons, for both aesthetics and easy locating. Link
  
• Taskbar Shuffle - Drag programs around on the taskbar, middle click them to close (just like tabs in Firefox). Link
• Send to Toys - Customize the choices in the Send-To portion of the context menu (including sending the filename to the clipboard). Link
  

Media

• Tigo Tago - Modify ID3 tags for MP3s in a spreadsheet-like environment. Link
  
• Virtual VCR - Excellent program for video input. Link
  
• Media Player Classic - A great lightweight video/dvd player. Link
  
• Quicktime Alternative - Installs codecs to play MOV files in Media Player Classic. Link
  
• FlashMute - Mute all sounds from your browser. Link
  

Editing

• MWSnap - Screenshot/Color Grabber program with global hotkeys and lots of extra features (adding mouse cursors or effects to screen captures). Link
  
• Virtual Dub - Linear video editing, converting application. Link
  
• Audacity - Audio editing program with lots of features. Link
  

Communications

• Zoomit - Sysinternal's Handy demonstration/presentation software, zoom in on the screen, doodle on it, or overlay with a countdown timer. Link
  
• Google Talk - my new favorite way to instant message, with a neat, clean UI. Link
  
• Firefox - the crown jewel of the open source community (kinda depressing really), its strength is in the extensions: check out my list. Link
  
• RSSOwl - powerful standalone RSS reader. Link

PDF

• Foxit Reader - Excellent replacement for Adobe Reader, especially since it opens almost instantly. Link
  
• doPDF - Free PDF writer/converter. Link
  

I spent a few minutes today adding two features to DiggReSS:

• The ability to filter the feed based on minimum and maximum numbers of Diggs
• The option to embed videos from Google Video, YouTube, and Metacafe directly in the feed (I have tested this in RSSOwl and Google Reader thus far).

Let me know how you like these new features!

Link: DiggReSS

PrintLink is a Firefox extension that adds a hotkey (Ctrl+Shift+V) to Firefox. This shortcut opens the printer-friendly version of a page (if it exists).

PrintLink is coded to be as adaptive as possible in finding the link and redirecting the current page. However, if it is unable to find such a page or it is horribly mired in Javascript (e.g. CNN uses a service called Clickability which requires a "partnerID"), it will simply execute the link or the onClick Javascript.

In short: this extension will hopefully open the print view of a given website in the same tab or worst case: in a popup.

Let me know if you have any bugs / problems / comments / suggestions either in the comments or at: randomtechprojects at gmail.com

Project Page (details): Link
Install (Firefox 2.*): Link

I put together a page tonight as a better / expanded version of the original cheat sheet. It now has a full featured tower calculator that automatically updates as the number of towers / current level is changed.

It still has a full listing of the creeps and their associated value, health, speed, and type. The primary changes are in the format and coolness coefficient.

Link

The Digg API is now officially released. It is so nice to finally have the documentation for something that I've been trying to use for about two months now. It has clued me in on a several features that I had been craving in my DiggReSS feed (which is finally resurrected after about a month of being dead).

DiggReSS is my alternative Digg RSS feed. It links directly to the article in question while providing several other article related links (the Digg page and various mirrors).


DiggReSS in RSSOwl

As of this morning DiggReSS has the ability to choose individual topics (e.g. Apple or Playable Web Games). I also implemented a caching system which will store the feed on my server with a timestamp. This way it will request updates at most once every five minutes and is thus much kinder to the Digg server (mmh… irony).

Note to API users:
If you're using PHP, make sure that you have ini_set('user_agent', 'APPLICATION NAME'); somewhere in your application, otherwise the Digg API will simply return a blank page.

DiggReSS: Link
Digg API Documentation: Link

--- UPDATED ---
now in html and javascript: Link

Desktop Tower Defense has become a bit of an obsession lately. It is a game of strategy, timing, and now: statistical analysis. If you haven't played it, I suggest that you avoid it like the plague. If you're hopelessly entangled with it, then continue reading.

To determine the best use of gold I tossed together a webpage with information about the Creeps and Towers.

• Creeps: type, health, speed, value, count, total gold per level, and total gold to that point
• Towers: Cost at level, upgrade cost, sell value, damage, range, speed.

I also included a "Quick" and "Advanced" Tower Calculator. It will help you determine how many of a particular kind of tower you can buy at a particular level.

Links:
The Sheet (now in html and Javascript): Link
Game: Desktop Tower Defense

The 5th person (the creator of MS Word) has now paid his way into space. This twenty million dollar per head thrill has brought Russia around 100 million dollars in the last few years. My first thought with that realization was: "why isn't NASA doing that"? They need funding after all:

(AP) -- The chairman of the U.S. House science committee said Thursday that NASA is headed for "a train wreck" if the space agency isn't better funded to finish building the international space station and develop the next-generation spacecraft. Link

Tossing the rich and famous into space would solve two of the problems NASA currently faces: the funding issue and the fact that nobody is all that excited about space travel anymore. A handful of exciting commercials, a dash of press conferences with the returned astronauts, and other PR tricks would go a long way to revitalizing American interest in the space program.

It is just a thought, and there is probably some legislation against it, but it would be better to keep those dollars in America.

In this modern age of the Interwebs/Internets/The Great Series of Tubes, truth is a consensus, rather than an absolute. I don't entirely blame this era of the Post-Modern "well if it works for you" mentality, but is allowing the largely uninformed world the ability to decide the truth of something for everyone else the best thing? I'm not talking about spiritual truth and the issue of whether or not you're going to burn in a lake of fire for all eternity, but the simple expression of measurable, documentable, day to day, facts.

Historically speaking, personal testimony in the form of journals and diaries is one of the key sources when researching an event. However, through blogs, every single current event has hundreds of people recording the incident. The problem is they probably weren't all present and that they tend to draw their content from one another. The problem is with the documentation of fact.

Wikipedia is a glorious resource, but it is still only a consensus. While it may be better than only allowing the "victor" to write the history, it will never give an unbiased account of well, anything. The problem is that people like truth that agrees with their opinion of what truth should be.

Social media and social bookmarking perpetuate this problem. Things that people agree with are promoted and things people disagree with are routinely buried as "inaccurate" or "this is lame" (at least on Digg). I've written recently about how newspapers as a whole don't place much value on social bookmarking, but are they correct to do so on an epistemological (study of truth/knowledge) level as well?

Blogs really are the crux of this issue; without them would we need sites like Digg to decide "truth"? A blog can turn anyone with an Internet connection and some hosting space into an instant self proclaimed pundit:


It is ironic that I'm attempting to wax eloquently on a topic I have no credentials to speak about. I won't pretend that these are indisputable facts, but merely my observations. That being said, this really is the "glory" of the Internet. I can expound through this site and spread my thoughts to the world (true or not) and have them arbitrarily accepted or denied. I suppose that rhetoric is just as potent on the Internet as it is on the campaign trail.

Is the "power" of social media is a relative concept? Those that are involved in it, that read Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, and the ilk would certainly say it is a breakthrough in the distribution of information. However, only 22% of the Top 50 Newspapers (by circulation), have any form of social bookmarking integration aside from a simple "email this article" link.

I spent an hour or so mindlessly clicking and compiled a table of the Top 50 Newspapers in America and their level of social bookmarking integration:
Option 1: Google Spreadsheet
Option 2: PDF

In summary, every single online edition of newspaper had a link to email the article to people (except the WSJ which wanted me to pay to read it), but very few had "Digg it" buttons or similar links. The most logical explanation is that newspapers don't try to drive additional traffic from social media simply because the traffic isn't worth very much.

I don't mean that in the sense that traffic from Digg et al doesn't do anything other than leech bandwidth; such traffic simply isn't profitable. When compared to the dead tree form, online advertising is not all that profitable for newspapers despite their online distribution being nearly limitless.

Daily Newspaper Advertising Revenue 1984 – 2005
Source: State of the Media


Online Ad Revenue, 1997-2005
Source: State of the Media


The most striking aspect of these graphs is that the Online Ad Revenue graph depicts the total amount of advertising online, not merely for newspapers. This says two things about the Internet:
1) Social media doesn't really matter to the real world (yet).
2) Companies like to make money and maximize their cost to profit ratio.

When it can be easily seen that the newspaper industry makes 379% more than the total revenue from online advertising in a year ($47.4 billion vs. $12.5 billion), it's not hard to understand why they don't put more effort into driving traffic to their websites with social media.

That being said, there is some value in social media and user generated content. For the moment, big corporate media doesn't seem to care about such things, the blog-o-sphere is growing rapidly and may one day truly matter in the journalistic scheme of things.

It is rather depressing that as I sit here writing this article I am writing about my own insignificance. However, I have encountered something during my exploration of this topic that I should remember: blogging only really matters to bloggers and people that spend a significant portion of their lives on the internet.

So, I have presented my evidence of the current insignificant of the blogging and social media, especially from the perspective of corporate media, and now it's your turn to answer the question: does it really matter?

I spent a few minutes this afternoon and tossed together an app to make my life a bit easier. I find that I'm copying text from places and sticking it in .txt files on my desktop all too frequently.

I wrote ClipNote to simplify this task.
1) Copy the text
2) Run ClipNote (hopefully with Launchy)
3) Specify a filename and hit enter.

Download (Windows only)