I find the Telegraph Boot camp a fertile source of articles that, with a small amount of editing, can be made into very readable tutorials, hints & tips and sources of programs and materials. This month Rick Maybury (Boot Camp's author) has rounded up some of the best Freeware programs from around the web. I have often been told that Freeware is a load of rubbish but it isn't so. There is some rubbish out there but in the main the programs and utilities fill in the gaps that the main software houses leave or would find uneconomic to write for as they have a limited audience. A second source of material is those authors who like to find an idea, write a program to develop it and then ask others to add to what they have done. A good example of this are two famous programs The Gimp and Picasa which you will find on the computer of any serious digital photographer.
Rick split his offering up into eight weekly parts but I have tried to draw it together to make it more readable and the programs easy to find so you will find a menu page for the main groups and then individual pages for those groups. The groups are :-
- Handy tools and utilities
- Pictures and graphics
- Audio and multimedia
- Privacy and security
- Networks, Internet & email
- Alternatives to Microsoft programs
- Odds and ends
You will find the menu page here Freeware Menu Page. Not all the pages are up on my site yet (there are nine in all) but I hope this little project will keep me busy while I converless.
This is the week when I have the next op on my hands. I am usually looking forward to an op because I know exactly what the surgeon is going to do and I am intensely interested in what is going on. This time I don't feel that way at all, in fact I am very apprehensive about the whole thing. If my hands weren't so painful and there was another form of treatment available I think I would seriously consider giving the op a miss and trying something else. In this case there is no alternative that I know of so on Tuesday morning I will be lying on the table and hoping the op doesn't go on too long.
Network wise I was called to a computer that had its sound card replaced and was misbehaving when it was re-connected to the Internet. It had a relatively new motherboard with two network adaptors. When just one of the adaptors was connected to the router the Internet connection was painfully slow. However if both adaptors was connected to the router and then the resulting network connections bridged Internet browsing became blisteringly fast. This will be old hat to large network technicians but small network and home networking technicians like myself often miss out on these snippets. When I got home I thought I would see if it made any difference to my own network. My motherboard has two gigabyte adaptors so I ran an extra cable to my hub and enabled the second connection. It took about three minutes for the computer to recognise both connections and to bridge them but the hub took all that in its stride and now have a bridged connection running at a full 1 gb speed. It has speeded up my Internet connection noticeably but the real gain is when I move big files around my network - they now don't doddle about at 20 to 30 kbps they are moving at several megabytes a second. I think I will spend some of my enforced rest time after Tuesday rethinking the layout of my network and seeing just which of my computers will benefit from 2 network adaptors and which can be safely left with one.
I may not be adding to my blogg over the next week or two as typing one handed is a right royal pain so please keep an eye on this blogg and I will be back as soon as I can use at least one finger in my left hand.
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