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I use a variety of software that's a bit off
the beaten path. For those who want to tread the same path as I,
here's what I'm using on my Windows 2000 machine and those machines
I maintain.
Email Reader
After moving from the Unix
world, I wanted something at least as powerful as Pine, but a bit
more user friendly. I settled on a program called The
Bat!. This program supports powerful filtering for
moving mailing lists to their own folders, allows you to set different
identities for different return email addresses, signatures, and
some homebrew hierarchical rule filtering for getting rid of Spam
(you can use complex regular expressions and Perl type scripts).
There are also macros for customizing your mail space.
An example of a filter line I use in The
Bat! is:
(32|38|52|55|61|69|81|129|141|168|170|195|200|202|203|206|213|214|218)\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+
Which filters out domains starting with the number list above.
A more specific version might be:
(24\.190)\.\d+\.\d+
And a version that allows only one subdomain
would look like this:
198\.\d+(?<![147])\.\d+\.\d+
while sending all others to my Trash folder or deleting them automatically.
Originally I needed The
Bat! for work, so I could get mail from my home ISP
and keep personal mail completely off the company server, while
still being able to get my work related company mail. Last I checked,
they were selling it for around $25 USD. There's also a secure version
with built in encryption. They also provide regular updates (though
after 6 years, they finally decided to charge old users for the
latest major update something like $18), and have truly knowledgeable
tech support that's fairly prompt.
News Reader
Again, I was looking for something a bit more
powerful than your average news reader, that supports multiple identities
so I could have different identities and sigs for different newsgroups.
X-News
fills the bill. It also supports multiple servers, so if you need
a different server for getting binaries or for other reasons, it's
just a pulldown menu away. X-News also has some great filtering
support, which not only allows it to be used as a killfile, but
also for flagging posts made by people you actually want to read,
and identifying them with a "score". It
also automatically flags responses to your posts with a value of
"9999". You can display posts that fit into rule based
scores by number as well, and sort by score. It also allows you
to assign different colors to different quote levels, making it
a bit easier to follow a long thread after you've already marked
the originals as "read" and aren't displaying them anymore.
If you want to use multiple identities, you
can either use the pull-down menu when you post, or you can edit
the "groups.ini" file to automate different identities
and sigs in different groups.
With Xnews,
like The
Bat!, you can use Perl like scripts in defining your
filters.
Browser
These days, I'm using a free browser called
AvantBrowser.
What makes this browser cool is that instead of opening a bunch
of windows that take up space on your open programs bar, it opens
a single window for the browser, and additional browser windows
are opened within the program and have tabs. It's got a good popup
blocker, ad blocker which you can also add urls to so you can really
annoying forum avatars to as well, a Flash blocker, script blocker,
picture blocker, etc. The popup, Flash and picture blockers are
accessible through buttons on the toolbar.
But the main features are its speed and the
tabbed windows. I've had as many as 100 windows open at once. You
can just scroll through them by using the Control+up and Control+down
keys. You can save all of the open windows as a group, and open
each or the whole group. You can save all the open windows if you
have to walk away from the computer, so the next time you start
Avant
the same windows open.
If, like me, you have a scroll mouse with a
middle button, you can use that to open links in new windows. I
do this when I see a page full of pictures and you click on thumnails
to open them. I just middle click all the pictures, and then wait
until they're all loaded to scroll through them.
It's also good for html documentation and help
files. I can have a lot of windows open and page through them, with
very little memory being wasted.
Best and worst of all, is that it uses the
Microsoft Internet Explorer engine. Not every feature from IE is
duplicated, most notably missing is FTP, but it means that a lot
of pages that won't open in Opera and a few that won't open in Netscape,
will open properly in Avant.
It should also be noted that not all custom toolbars work with Avant,
and rearranging the links buttons and "favorites" is a
little on the esoteric and non-intuitive side.
Directory
Tools
As one of those former Unix weenies (I got better)
who occassionally resorts to using a Unix style shell like Cygnus
to do simple things, I'm always happy to find some Windows program
that does an old Unix trick. Like printing the contents of a directory.
Simple enough, and it's curious that Windows 2000 doesn't have anything
built-in to accomplish that.
So I was happy, through the Avant
forum, to discover Karen's
Directory Printer. And like nearly all of my favorite
programs, it's free. What's even cooler, is that if you want to
print a directory's contents, you can just right click from Windows
Explorer, or better yet 2X
Explorer (which has two trees and lots of other handy
features and beats the heck out of WE).
Well, heck, one of the only things left that
I use the Unix shell for is renaming massive numbers of files in
a directory. So, says I to myself (because RHSD doesn't care, so
saying it to her is pointless, and talking to the cats just reminds
them that they haven't eaten in a few minutes), if there are improved
directory browsers, and a directory printer, there must be a bulk
file renamer. That's free. Sure enough, I find one called Oscar's
File Renamer. Simple, works like a text editor, and
gives you multiple opportunities not only to change your mind, but
to make multiple changes before committing to file name changes.
Now I realize that this is an indispensable
tool for digital photography, and sometimes late name changes for
rendered animation frames (especially to keep different rendered
versions from having the same name for archiving purposes). I can't
figure out how I got along without it.
Back to 2X
Explorer. Who would have thought that you could apply
some level of creativity to a file browsing program. Well, this
one has all sorts of nifty features. not just a dual pane, not just
a tree browser. It's got a nice text editor for quick and dirty
editing of large files. You can save selections to reselect them
again. Well, from one directory. You can't save selections across
directories. There's a sticky selection toggle, so you don't have
to hold the control key down. It allows you to create a regex filter
like "*.exe" and it'll only list the ".exe"
files until you turn the filter off. I has hotkeys that you can
attach to a nice Strokeit
mouse gesture (like right mouse>up to go up one level, or right
mouse>left to go back to a previous directory selection). Bookmarks
to jump to frequently used directories. A drive browser (nice when
you have a variety of removeable media). Pane synchronization so
you can get both windows starting in the same place. It's a useful
tool, and it's free. Now it's hard to see how I've worked without
it for so long.
Firewall
If you're on a broadband connection, you need
a firewall. You might not even realize it until you get one and
see how often someone is trying to access your machine and scanning
your ports. I'm using one that's provided free for personal use
called Zone
Alarm. After you click
on the link, scroll to the bottom of the page. It's definitely easy
to use, and is still very powerful.
Hotkey and
Mouse Gesture utilities
Sometimes,
you just want to do things with the minimal amount of moving your
hands around. I adopted the use of two programs that just make other
programs easier to navigate or to add functionality without having
to move the mouse all over the place. The two following programs
are free to individual users.
The first is a hotkey program called, oddly
enough, Hotkeys
2000. This program allows you to use any number of
key combinations or mouse actions to execute programs and scripts,
or to duplicate selecting menu items in a program.
A nice compliment to Hotkeys
2000 is a mouse gesture recognition program called
Strokeit.
Strokeit
lets you do what Hotkeys
2000 does, but without touching the keyboard. You
can even create hotkeys in Hotkeys
2000 and then create mouse gestures that execute
them.
What is a "mouse gesture". Well,
I don't use a lot of them (in fact, I deleted all the ones that
came with the software since it was countermanding the ones I wanted),
but I use them a lot in Avant.
To go to the next window tab, I hold the right mouse button down
and move the mouse to the right. To go to the previous window, I
hold the right button down and move the mouse to the left. To close
a window, I hold the right button down, move the mouse slightly
up and to the right, and to open a new window, I hold the right
button down, move the mouse slightly down and to the right. Each
gesture executes the hot keys CTRL+Up(arrow), CTRL+Down(arrow),
CTRL+w and CTRL+n respectively. There are a large number of gestures
available, and they can be set up to operate in a program specific
mode, so the same gesture does different things in different programs.
Pop-up
Blockers
You can't browse the web anymore without annoying
pop-up windows appearing all over the place. Not only are they annoying,
but frequently they contain self installing spyware that tracks
your browsing on the Internet, and once in awhile they propogate
so many windows that you have to turn your computer off to kill
the process. I've run two pop-up blockers that serve different purposes:
Pop-up
Stopper (I use the free one) and Webwasher.
Webwasher in particular is very powerful, but sometimes it's a little
too powerful and has to be turned off, because some sites just won't
function properly. That's why I leave Pop-up
Stopper on when I turn Webwasher
off, so I still have some pop-up protection while using Java heavy
sites like MSNBC.com.
OK, actually I no longer run Pop-up
Stopper. It's a great product, but the free version
just wasn't all that flexible. Avant
comes with a nice popup stopper, that's "site customizable".
Before
checking out the following sites, I suggest
you install some pop-up blocking software. I don't know if they're
still infested with pop-up ads, but they used to be.
Recently, I've had been using the pop-up blocker
available in the Google
toolbar. It seems to work as well as anything, and is more convenient
to turn off from the browser itself.
I still use Webwasher
for controlling images and conveniently blocking links, especially
within forums that use links for images. Sometimes you just want
to follow a thread, and don't want to see people's avatars and sig
pictures, or a group of pictures you've already seen. So you can
right click and filter them in Webwasher
so you just see new stuff. It has a list that you can easily edit,
and is great if you have a slower connection and don't want to reload
all those stupid pictures.
Spyware Eliminator
If you browse the web, you're gonna pick up
something called "tracking cookies". It's almost unavoidable,
though I've eliminated a lot of it by killing ads with a "hosts
hack", which I'll describe below. "Tracking cookies",
also known as "spybots", essentially follow your movements
on the web and allow advertisers to see what sites you're browsing.
They're very evil. So you need something that'll track down the
common ones and kill them. The one I prefer is called Spybot
Search and Destroy, another free utility. This one
is pretty powerful, in that it lets you set "ignores"
on cookies that you want to keep, such as sites where you want to
stay logged in like TV schedules, news and other sites with preferences.
This also has some great tools for dealing
with startup programs. You can look at a list of startup
programs and turn them on or off by checking a box.
Another cool companion to Spybot
Search and Destroy is SpywareBlaster.
This program has a list of evil spyware websites and prevents your
browser from accessing them. The list is complete with checkboxes
so you can opt to still access some adbot sites, so you can still
use your adware supported software.
Eliminating
Flash
Flash has become a major annoyance.
It's cool when you're looking at an animated short, or playing some
fun game. But it sucks when you're trying to look at some news page,
and some constantly cycling, annoying ad, just gives you a headache.
And there's no built in way to stop such intrusive eyesores.
Fortunately, if you hate those ads you're not
alone, and someone sat down and did something about it. You can
now download a program called No!
Flash.
No!
Flash has a fair number of overlapping functions
with the popup blockers and Webwasher.
But you can narrowly tune it to eliminate only the Flash
and stop the cycling of annoying .gif animations that a lot of people
use for avatars in various web forums. How many times do you really
have to see Brittney kissing Madonna?
OK, so I no longer use No!
Flash, but again, Avant
has a built in Flash blocker that's more easily turned on and off.
If Microsoft came up with a browser that had
all that stuff built in, they'd be back in court for acting like
a monopoly again.
Eliminating
Internet Ads
I don't have a problem with
Internet ads per se, but the flashing animated crap gets really
annoying after awhile. Also, some of it drops unwanted spyware on
your computer, and that I don't like. Here's a page that tells you
how to do this with something called a Hosts
Hack for Windows based machines. In addition
to the hosts list which they provide, there are others available
on the net. But the larger the list of hosts, the more it slows
your computer down when you're browsing (and maybe at startup).
I've got a "shortcut" to my hosts file on my desktop,
and whenever I encounter an annoying ad site or can guess at which
site is creating cookies I don't want, I add it to the hosts file
(you just add the line 127.0.0.1 ad.unwanted.com [which would be
whatever the host site for that ad is] to the bottom of the hosts
file), which you should open with a plain text editor like Notepad.
Obviously, if enough people adopt the Hosts
Hack it could lead to an end to ad sponsored, commercial
Internet pages. But it's really not for the faint of heart and I
don't think it's something granny is gonna do on her PC.
Go Back
Go
Back is one of those strange products that come with
another product, that you wonder what the hell you're going to use
it for. Mine came with Norton Systemworks. It's available from Symantec
as a stand alone product.
Well, so far, it's been worth my weight in
gold. Every once in awhile you delete something, or something just
flat out goes wrong.
Go Back is sort of a way back machine for your hard
drive. The version that comes with Systemworks just lets you revert
to a former period of time, ranging from 5 minutes ago to days ago.
The stand alone, pay, version lets you restore individual files
or deleted programs from some period in the past.
The program works by reserving a portion of
the hard drive for itself that you can't touch. As things are changed,
the altered programs and files are backed up, as is a snapshot of
the whole hard drive. Only changes are stored.
So far, the software has saved three different
computers I work on after crashes. It's saved me hours of trying
to track down plug-ins (that I accumulated over years) accidentally
deleted when uninstalling a program that used them, while not realizing
that other programs used the same plug-ins.
To be certain, regular backups would be wiser,
but it's not easy backing up 80gb hard drives. For us lazy, regular
folks, this is a pretty good solution that will solve most (but
not all, like say physical failure of your drive) of the mishaps
that can befall your data.
Unfortunately, when I upgraded my computer
with a Maxtor drive, and used their software to completely copy
my old, failing drive, the Maxtor software has some sort of ju-ju
in it that stops Go
Back from working. In an annoying email exchange
with their India based customer service folks, they point the finger
at Maxtor, and say that the only way to get Go
Back working would be to wipe the hard disk clean
and completely format the new drive using the basic Microsoft installer.
This isn't a solution in my opinion, it's a computer owner's worst
nightmare. Symantec refuses to recognize the problem as one that
must be solved on their end, prefering the age old denial of responsibility
in the computer industry that comes with a lot of finger pointing.
They won't even promise to fix the problem in future releases, since
they purchased the code from Roxio.
The upshot of this is, if you have a Maxtor
drive, don't buy Go
Back.
Other Software
Links
Without lengthy descriptions here are
some other links of interesting software I use that's slightly off
the beaten path:
Animation
Master-Powerful and inexpensive 3D animation software
Goldwave-Inexpensive
and powerful audio editing/effects software
Cdex-Free
CD ripper that makes MP3s out of your CDs
Irfanview-Free
picture viewer and image processor. Scroll through pictures with
mouse wheel. Can do batch processing, including reductions, sharpening,
contrast and color balance.
Printkey
2000-Screen grabber and saver. User defined hotkeys
and rectangal capture, auto file save and increment. Great for doing
tutorials.
Kazaalite-File
sharing program without the Kazaa ads and spyware. Record companies
can still find you if they subpoena your Internet service provider.
Shareaza-File
sharing program using the Gnutella network.
WinMX-File
sharing program. It's crowded and there are lots of leaches.
AVI2MPG2-Free.
Converts .avi animations to smaller .mpg files
RealVNC-Free.
Lets you look at and work on another computer on a network. You
see the other computer's desktop and programs running as if you're
working on that computer. Great when your wife is looking at some
animation on her computer and is cracking up, and you want to see
what the hell is so funny.
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