Favourite things...





This page lists a few of my favourite things. I plan to add a lot more, but I will get the ball rolling...

Favourite Useful bits of (Windows) software...

  • PuTTY Very nice, free and hugely popular SSH and Telnet terminal. Most of my day is spent in PuTTY windows. Works exactly like an xterm, especially when you use xwindows fonts instead of the default Windows rubbishy fixed width fonts.


  • WinSCP A good companion to PuTTY, WinSCP. Copies and synchronizes files via sftp/ssh, keys supported.


  • OpenOffice Originally StarOffice, this great free alternative to Microsoft Office is now coming of age and is... well.... good. It lacks some of the glitzy glittercake features of MS Office, but more importantly it lacks Clippit popping up at random intervals: "It looks like I haven't annoyed you enough yet.. I suggest you punch your fist through the screen..." If like me, you purchased a PC and then gulped at the cost of MS Office being almost as expensive as that PC, this is a good free alternative to shelling out for MS Office or nicking a bootleg copy from work. tut tut...


  • UltraEdit Very very nice text editor for Windows. It has a huge range of handy features, like editing files in column mode, comparing two files, saving files to a sftp server, SSH keys, macros for those tedious "edit every line to look like this, repeat this 1000 times" moments, text formatting, HTML validation, syntax highlighting (including perl), bracket matching, folding, sorting. Add your own tools into it for example to interact with rcs, check files in and out etc... phew! Not free, but well worth the money as it is absolutely superb.


  • Miranda IM I used the tried and tested ircII/irssi-in-a-screen session combination for a long time, but finally conceded defeat, as I have so many terminal windows on 4 different desktops, the chances of me actualy seeing a message were virtually zero, much to the annoyance of some people moaning that I never replied to their messages. Especially Simon. It was true. So I needed something that would work in my slightly crazy setup with secure proxies and things and many IRC networks, that would actually pop up on my desktop and go bling, or something when somebody sends me a message, and not like irssi, just silently receive the message in a terminal somewhere that I might not even be logged on to. The hunt for a decent IM client that did all this was long and boring. Much like this paragraph.

    After being underwhelmed with the new version of Trillan (its IRC support went from bad to worse!) I tried this free IM client instead. It is plugin based, so you can add (or remove) lots of functionality and make it work exactly how you like it by just adding plugins to it (of which there are hundreds!). This is one of those things you either love or hate. One possible downside is that it possibly has too many configuration options, as it will take you a few days to get to grips with all the millions of options. But I use it, and it happily copes with: 4 IRC networks (including one over SSL), two Jabber IM connections, MSN and Yahoo! It can also do ICQ and a whole bunch of others. They have shipped a few shaky betas, but if you can cope the the occasional lemon beta crashing and burning, it's well worth it. It doesn't do all the MSN webcammy/nudge/games/annoying bloaty features, but supports file transfers and chat. And the rest of MSN I'm not that bothered about.


  • Perfect Screens I have used this piece of software called Perfect Screens for many years (since about 1998). It gives you a little toolbar, plus as many virtual desktops as you can eat. As I often find myself running out of desktop space, or working on multiple things at once, this thing just gives you multiple desktops with handy menus and things. Couldn't cope without it now. There's a new thing out called ExeDesk which looks like Perfect Screens on steriods. Not free (cheap), but well thought out piece of software.


  • The Bat! I have tried and failed many times to get with the times and to use a Windows based, GUI e-mail client, however, it usually ends in tears (Usually tears of boredom waiting for whatever mail client to synchronise my folders and screwing it up yet again, or not supporing PGP, silly quoting, dumb defaults, general slowness, or lack of $some_important_feature, like threading, or being able to configure a reply-to address and signature per-folder.) However, The Bat! (If you can get over the slightly silly name) Is actually a decent e-mail client that does the lot, and doesn't suck! The Bat!, for when Outlook just crashed for the 50 billionth time, and Thunderbird just isn't quite doing it for you. Me? I'll just stick to good old mutt and my nearest terminal window to read my mail. The Bat! very very nearly shifted me though.

    I ran away back to familiar territory though, becuase it has a wonderful feature to make e-mails you have read but don't want to respond to immediately, go away and then remind you again 2 days later that you haven't responded, and pop them up in front of your face again. In other words, maybe it was too good at pointing out the sheer volume of e-mails that I have to deal with and don't reply to within some timeframe. I might actually switch to this one day.... maybe. It just frightened me by pointing out how crap I really am at managing e-mails. Every time I started up The Bat!, I would get this sinking feeling that there was just work to be done. It's like having your boss poke you in the ribs every morning, over every e-mail that you read, but never quite got round to actually doing anything about. Just try the demo version for a couple of weeks. You will be horrified. Luckily the feature can be turned off and made to run in the more usual inbox of denial mode :) I thought I was good at e-mails. I am not as good as I thought.


  • VNC Access another machine (windows or many other platforms supported) remotely. Great for remote support. This thing has come to my rescue many times. Okay, so it's not as tarty as other software that does the same thing, but it is small, installs in about 60 seconds, and it just works. If paranoid, buy the commercial version which supports encryption, or use SSH tunnels to hide your password from going in the clear over the network.


  • Mozilla Firefox Of course, rapidly becoming the preferred web browser by (almost) everyone. Once you're hooked on tabbed browsing and other nice touches, going back to Internet Explorer seems just....wrong.

Favourite Firefox Extensions (Plugins)...

  • StumbleUpon I've mentioned this before, but it's so good I'm going to mention it again. I'm hooked on the thing. A whole new way of browsing the web. You sign up at the StumbleUpon web site, tell it what you are interested in (knitting, cycling, cats, astrophysics, photography, whatever..), and then when you are bored or curious, you click on "Stumble" in your Firefox toolbar. Then a web site that you might be interested in appears. It's like channel hopping with a TV that has 50 million channels. And it's completely addictive. Should you choose to try it, don't say I didn't warn you. And remember to go to bed at some point! :-)


  • Colorful Tabs "The most beautiful yet the simplest add-on that makes a strong colorful appeal. Colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appearance of the interface. An essential."


  • PDF Download It's difficult to describe exactly what this does as I've forgotten. It just makes that horrible sinking feeling of impending doom and browser hanging when clicking on a 20Mb PDF file you didn't know was 20Mb go away. It gives you options with what to do with a PDF file rather than just opening it in the browser window and hanging it for about 10 minutes. Which is almost never what I want to do. :)


  • Link Checker About a year from now I will look back at this page and probably a load of the links will be broken, or moved, etc. Link Checker adds an option to your right-mouse click button menu to check all the links on a page, and highlight good links in green, and dead links in red, and suspect links in yellow, etc. Neat.


  • AS Number Extension More of a geek toy than an actual user thing, this little widget displays the Autonomous System Number (AS Number) and route information about the website you are currently browsing. Use it just out of idle curiosity about what sites are hosted on what network. Or not, if you find it all terribly boring.