It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.

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Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

Free Open Source Software for the Post-Crash Desperate

Filed under Tech by Jim at 11:45 am

I know someone:

a) whose computer just crashed
b) who just switched over from Mac to Windows
c) who is short on cash and can’t purchase software

For that person, I’d recommend the following open source software:

For Sound Editing: Audacity

For Graphics Editing: GIMP

For Word Processing and Spreadsheets: Google Docs

Do you have any other recommendations for my friend?

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6 Comments »

AVG for free anti-virus. Alternative to Microsoft Office for word processing and spreadsheets is freeware Open Office.

Comment by paul — 10/7/2008 @ 1:51 pm
TheOpenDisc.com - download the entire disc or individual programs.

FileHippo.com - not necesarilly open source, but many excellent free programs.

Comment by krmyers — 10/7/2008 @ 5:00 pm
http://www.theopendisc.com/programs - list of the programs on the disc, including Audacity, Gimp, OpenOffice, FileZilla, VLC (media player including DVDs), PDF reader and creator, various games and other utilities.

Comment by krmyers — 10/7/2008 @ 5:12 pm
And for someone switching from Mac to Windows, who still prefers the look and feel of a Mac, try FlyakiteOSX. The current version does not work on Vista, but if you are using Vista you have more problems than a crashed system.

http://osx.portraitofakite.com/boot.htm

Comment by krmyers — 10/7/2008 @ 6:02 pm
Wasn’t Textpad on this list? Or am I just imagining things? It’s not free or Open Source so maybe it was removed. I bought TextPad but even so, use Scite mostly now for my text editing.

Paint.NET is a another good photo editor along the lines of GIMP. But it seems a little more simple to use. At least for people used to windows.

CDBurnerXP for ummmm, CD burning.

Comment by Billy Buerger — 10/7/2008 @ 8:43 pm
Textpad was, and I removed it for just that reason. But it is a really good text editing program. I’ll have to try Scite.

Comment by Jim — 10/7/2008 @ 9:03 pm