• Programs I use, part 2

    A handful of folks emailed me and told me they liked the list I made months back, which was nice.  That was probably the first time I realized people actually read my posts.  So I guess since its almost half a year later, I’d update it a bit with a new list.

    Free Video Zilla - I use this to jack videos and music files off of websites, the ones that don’t ‘want’ you to download them.

    FastStone Photo Resizer - Bryant and a few of you other photographers might dig this.  You can batch edit files, meaning, you can edit multiple files at the same time.  You can resize pics, add effects, crop, rename the files, and possibly most important, you can add watermarks to all the images.

    Virtualdub - This is a small video editing program.  I mainly use it to turn parts of a movie into an animated gif.  You can also save parts of a movie, and add your own sound to it.  Mainly works with .avi video files.

    TreeSizeFree - This program helps you find out what are the biggest files and folders on your computer.  So if you’re looking to free up HD space and want to know where to start, this helps.

    Gmail Drive - This allows you to use the free space on your Gmail account as a virtual harddrive.  It shows up on your computer like any other harddrive, but the files are stored on your Gmail.

    There are probably others I’m missing, but I’m lazy now.

  • Software I use.

    These aren’t exactly recommendations, they’re just the programs I use.  I go for programs that don’t eat a lot of memory and ‘feel’ light (they open fast,  don’t feel slow).

    Audio: Foobar2000

    Video: Media Player Classic + K-Lite Codec Pack

    Image Viewer: XnView

    Instant Messaging: Trillian

    RSS Reader: Feed Demon

    Torrent Downloader: uTorrent

    Web Browser: Google Chrome

    Application Opener: Executor

    Google Chrome is the fastest browser out there, usually beating every browser in speed tests, so that’s one of the reasons why I use it.  Trillian lets me use AIM/Yahoo/IRC/Windows Live/Google Talk at the same time without having all of those programs installed separately.  I can also check emails and use Twitter/Facebook with it.  RSS readers are big these days.  I use Google Reader mainly, and I use Feed Demon to sync with my account and read the RSS feeds without a browser.  I don’t have any icon on my desktop or shortcuts in my start menu.  Instead I use Executor.  All I have to do is type in a program in Executor, and it starts up.  I can also type web links to go to a website automatically.

    There are plenty of others, but these are the main ones.  Try ‘em… you might like them.