Get Your Geek On

Title stolen shamelessly from Zeldman.

If you spend much time in front of a PC, here are a few programs I recommend for making your digital life easier. Best of all, they're all free.

MS Power Toys: Handy little apps provided by Microsoft for users who like to tweak their working environment a bit. My favorites are Tweak UI which gives you a lot of customization options for your entire system, and the Virtual Desktop Manager, which lets you create four separate desktops. For example, you can have your e-mail and web browser open on one, several word processor files open on another, and financial software, photos, or a game open on another. That way, rather than having a ton of windows open and lots of clutter, you just switch between desktops by clicking a button and you have only the items you're working on in front of you. Particularly handy for the limited screen real estate of laptops.

IrfanView: The best simple image viewer and editor out there, period. I've used IrfanView since 1997 and every upgrade just gets better and better.

Konfabulator: Widgets galore! Very handy and flexible program with something for everyone... check it out. Recently bought by Yahoo! and thus now completely free.

TextPad: Very versatile text editor, great for writing and editing HTML files, or any other simple text document. It's actually shareware, but you can use it for free with just a frequent reminder to register, or get rid of that annoyance for less than $30.

GoldWave: Powerful sound editor. It slices, it dices, does fade-ins/outs, adjusts levels, and muchmore. Again, a reasonable price tag, or use it for free and get hounded occasionally. It's only limitation is it doesn't record direct to .mp3, but you can download another file (for free) which will add that option, and there are directions on the web site which explain the simple process.

iTunes: I've been slow jumping on the iTunes bandwagon (still don't have an iPod) but I have been converting many of my CDs to .mp3 files for portability and I must say this is a really slick application. Very nice.

Finally, there's Firefox: If you're using Internet Explorer to browse the internet, you owe it to yourself to try Firefox. No browser is perfect, but Firefox is, IMHO, head and shoulders above IE in user-friendliness and range of features. Pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, and much more all built in. Definitely worth checking out.