Keeps Me Going

I rely on the Internet way too much for my own good. Sure, I rarely touched a computer when I was at boot camp, but aside from that, I’m on the computer for a minimum of 3 hours a day, depending on what I have planned. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone on this. Sometimes it’s just for surfing up videos to keep me occupied, looking up information for papers, or social activities like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and all those other social networks that I update. If it weren’t for the computer, I don’t know how I would get through a day on my own, unless I were somewhere where things acutally went on. Good stuff. I really should be studying for finals right about now, but my brain is a mess and so I thought I’d take a break and be at least semi-productive. This post is going to focus on what keeps me going on my laptop. My laptop is definitely on of my most treasured posessions next to my wallet, phone, and uniforms, etc. I can part with certain things in my room, but I would cling on to my laptop for dear life if anything horrible happened to the apartment. *Knock on wood* I’ll share with you all the programs and tools that I use either on a daily basis or occassionally. Hopefully you can find something you can use as well. I’m going to separate them into web applications and desktop tools. Hope you like. Let’s get started. 

Desktop Applications and Tools…that drive me CRAZY (that’s the good kind of crazy)

1) Google Chrome: It turns out that Google Chrome is the browser of my choice. According to Wakoopa, I use Google Chrome about 33% out of all the programs I use. That means that 1/3 of the time I’m online, I browse with Google Chrome. Why? It’s lightweight and easy to use. Although not everything supports Chrome as of now, things are beginning to click into place. I love it. Check it out if you haven’t already.

2) Flock: While we’re talking about browsers, why not talk about the distant relative of Mozilla Firefox? It’s pretty much Firefox with added social features. I love it. It has integration with Digg, YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, and a boat load of other sites. Although this used to be my primary browser, I’ve started using Chrome more and more and Flock less and less. Sorry, darling.

3) Firefox: Continuation of browsers. I swear I didn’t want it to be a “battle of the browsers” thing. This is my third mostly used browser. It’s some pretty good stuff and is the original. Most people have heard of Firefox and among my friends at least, it is still the browser of choice, with useful add-ons. Awesome, but it’s just that I’ve discovered Chrome. I still use it sometimes because I like mixing it up once in a while.

4) Internet Explorer: What about the beloved Internet Explorer? It’s still some pretty good stuff I guess. Not as safe to operate, but still some sites are designed to only work with Internet Explorer. I use it to check my Coast Guard mail, but I use IE sparingly. For those of you who don’t use anything but Internet Explorer, you might be missing out.

5) Mozilla Thunderbird: The best, in my opinion, e-mail and RSS congregator. I use it to check a lot of my popular feeds and all of my separate e-mail accounts. What more can I say? I’m actually about to check them all right now! Good stuff right? Definitely! I also highly recommend it. If you haven’t heard of it or want to learn more, just click the logo below! (This also applies to all of the apps I’m writing about.)

6) iTunes: Yea, everybody knows what this is for and I think most people have it on their computer right? I mean if you own an iPod you probably have this software. Pretty awesome, although I must admit it is a little slow on Windows sometimes. Does that happen on Macs too? Hmm, I wonder. Anyway, enjoy iTunes! I’d say my usage of iTunes for music is about 60%.

7) Songbird: I’d say my usage of Songbird is about 30% and mainly because it loads a whole lot faster than iTunes does on Windows and has a buttload of cool add-ons. I love being able to check out the artist’s discography, album art, and lyrics while playing their song. It makes music that much more interconnected. Loving it! I’m probably going to start using it more. I would totally recommend songbird and out of 5 stars, I’d give it a 5, because customizations and add-ons rock. Oh, did I mention it’s Open-source?

Windows Media Player: I allot it some play time so it won’t get left out, but it’s limited to that 10%, usually when it’s new music that I’ve acquired and haven’t had time to process and put in iTunes yet. That means it’s music that I didn’t purchase from the iTunes store. I have nothing against Windows Media Player, although it is also slow, somewhat like iTunes. A good player though. I used to use it a whole bunch when I has a Creative MP3 player and had to sync from Windows Media Player.

9) Digsby: Excellent program. This is pretty much how I stay connected and communicate. I’m a big fan of Digsby and I’ve made that known throughout my blog and on plenty of external sites. Good stuff and I expect it to keep coming out with more. Need to stay connected with Myspace, Facebook, Yahoo, ICQ, AIM, MSN, Gmail, and Hotmail all at the same time? DIGSBY! The Best Multichat Client out there, at least in my opinion. Enjoy!

10) Adobe Photoshop: I don’t claim to be a Photoshop genius or wizard, but I do know what I’m doing. This is by far the easiest and most efficient way for me to get photo editing and graphics design done. Need to manipulate photos? This is the way to go. What about editing screenshots? Yup. I do a whole lot with Photoshop, from correcting and altering digital photos for Facebook to composing for websites. Awesome stuff Photoshop is. Sometimes I correct for friends too, but I usually don’t do too many of those. A must if you’re into that kind of thing.

11) GIMP: Another graphics editing software that I use, but it’s not quite the same as Photoshop. However, I’d still like to pay my respects to it because it’s great. It’s Open-source and free, so a great alternative to the expensive software, without sacrificing quality. It pretty much does the same thing. Adobe is just a little more on the “high-end” if you will. Enjoy GIMP!

12) Notepad: Simple and elegant. I know it comes with Windows and doesn’t cost anything. I still love it and I use it ALL the time, so don’t judge. It’s called Notepad and that’s pretty much how I use it. I keep little notes in it, like a digital notepad. Cool beans right? Definitely one of my most used applications, although I don’t usually spend a lot of time on it. I usually copy and paste URLs or write a to-do list on it and just save it to my desktop. I mean, since I’m on my computer anyway, right? Don’t want to waste a post-it note. Sorry, no link for download on this one.

13) Openoffice.org: Awesome stuff. I don’t have a copy of Microsoft Word or any of the popular office softwares from Microsoft, even though I should probably purchase it someday. I’ll eventually get around to it and take advantage of my military and student discounts. Anyway, I use Openoffice, which is an Open-source alternative to Powerpoint, Excel, Word, etc. It does exactly the same thing and is constantly being updated. I love it! That’s how I’ve been getting by in college, so you know it works.

14) Adobe Reader: Oh how would I get through anything without this handy dandy tool eh? If you don’t have it, uhm, get it? Actually you don’t really have to, since there are a whole bunch of alternative PDF readers, but Adobe is free and it’s good. Why not?

15) Qvod Player: I don’t exactly know how this works, but actually my dad showed this to me. It’s usually in Chinese, but I managed to find a copy of it in English. What does it do? Let’s you stream and watch some awesome movies and TV shows. Coupled with tom365.com, it’s heaven. If you need help with the Qvod player, drop me a line or leave a comment down below. Sorry, couldn’t find that English download link again.

16) Veoh Player: Yes, I rarely use the player, but there have definitely been instances when I’ve used it nonstop. For example, I’m pretty sure I watched a whole bunch of episodes of Battlestar Galactica from Veoh on the player. What’s so nice about it? The content on Veoh is free and you can download it to the player for your viewing pleasure offline. Heck yea!

17) ALTools Utility: Some excellent stuff. Not a whole bunch of people know about this one, so if you’re one of the people who don’t know, I recommend you check it out. Yea I know people use winzip to unzip their files, but what about an awesome free alternative? Well ALTools offers an unzipping tool, a music player, movie player, FTP transfer tool, Internet Explorer toolbar add-on, and a tool to store all your online passwords. Good stuff. I use the unzip tool and the FTP transfer tool, although Filezilla is also a good FTP tool.

18) Google Desktop: Ahh, one of the greatest tools ever. I love it! I’ve always been a fan of Google and their products and software. This is no exception. The best part? Easy search, both for files on your computer and for files online. Definitely some good stuff. What else do I use it for? I use the widgets and the sidebar. Check it out for yourself, don’t just take my word for it.

19) Google Picasa: I’m glad I didn’t forget Google Picasa. It’s the free software used to organize, edit, and share all of your photos. If you’ve never heard of it before, here is just a little bit about what you may expect from Google Picasa. It’s great for fixing up all your photos and then having them automatically uploaded onto an online album. My favorite part is it’s picture viewer, which integrates spectacularly with Window’s default picture viewer. It’s just so much nicer. What would my pictures look like without Picasa? I don’t even want to imagine that.

20) Programmer’s Notepad: Sure, notepad is great, but what about for editing code? Nope, it’s a little hard for editing code, but the Programmer’s Notepad makes it that much easier for you to do just that. All you need to do is start typing and if you’re typing in HTML, the tags will change colors to correspond with why part of the page you’re working on. It will also correct and close tags for you once you’ve started. Good stuff.

21) Audacity: It’s a free, cross-platform sound and audio editor. It does some pretty amazing things and I’m definitely surprised at all it can do. Whether you’re trying to edit a video’s audio, create a mix, or isolate some sort of sound from an audio file, Audacity can do it for you in a few short steps. I personally use it to create mixes, mess around with audio, and to convert audio files from one format to another. Easy, simple, efficient.

22) Rainmeter: A pretty good tool. Excellent desktop customization tool and it can handle pretty much anything. Why is it so good? It’s easily customized and there are so many people using it and building new skins and monitoring tools all the time it’s hard to just stick with one or even keep up with them. I use it to keep my computer’s vitals in check.

23) Boxee: If you’re a video whore like me, boxee is a must. It is currently in alpha, at least I think it still is and I managed to get in on it. It’s pretty awesome because you can access a whole bunch of media. You have the choice of watching video, listening to music, or viewing photos. Best of all, you can put in on Apple TV, Linux, Mac, and Windows. Boxee is a must, and aesthetically, it’s pretty amazing too. Sounds like it works out.

24) Adobe.com Suite: Good stuff. I use a whole bunch of Adobe software, but here is something that not a lot of people know about. It’s pretty handy though. When I first came across this, it was because I was testing out Adobe Buzzword, but since then I’ve switched to Zoho, which I’ll talk about later. What does the Adobe Suite include? It includes Adobe Buzzword (a writing application), Adobe ConnectNow (meeting live on the web), Create PDF’s online, Share documents, and Access your files. Good stuff. You will need Adobe Air in order to use this. It’s in beta, but it’s still cool.

25) Download Accelerator Plus: It’s also known as DAP! I love it. Sort of like the technology behind the Qvod Player, I have no idea how it works. DAP is good though and I love using it. It’s my default download manager. The cool thing about it? You don’t have to use your browser to access the download. You can add a URL straight to the manager, pause, stop, and delete downloads. It looks like it pulls the download from many places at once. It definitely speeds things up, more so than if you didn’t use a manager.

26) Steam: You know what steam is? Do you really? It’s like a browser that helps you keep all of your games together and talk to your contacts while you’re playing games. Just by signing onto steam, you can access all of your games, saved games, and contacts list. Within the browser, you can also shop for upcoming and released games and look at user reviews. Good stuff. I play lots of FPSs on Steam.

27) Quicktime Player: Sometimes Windows Media Player just won’t play a file correctly and I don’t want to open iTunes up because it’s so bulky. What do I do then? I end up opening them in Quicktime Player. Quicktime is from Apple and is free. No other comments.

28) Adobe Media Player: Adobe Media Player runs on Adobe Air and is also awesome. I know McGyver is on Hulu, the internet video site that I’m a huge fan of, but sometimes I just want to watch it on something else, not in a browser. Adobe Media Player is an excellent way to watch video on your desktop. Oh another cool thing about Adobe Media Player? Some shows are downloadable, so you don’t even have to be connected to the Internet to have a good time!

29) NVU: I would put this into the same category as the Programmer’s Notepad because I use it all the time to edit my webpages. The Programmer’s Notepad is alright for a litle bit of code, but the disadvantage of editing webpages in it is that there is not visual mode, while NVU has a preview mode and is a WYSIWYG editor.

30) DIVX Player: Divx! What else do I need to say? If you don’t know what DIVX is, it’s a pretty popular format for watching videos. It used to be pretty popular on DVDs, but the format has now migrated over to the internet. Alright, let’s see what it’s about. The DIVX web player is essential if you want to watch DIVX Movies online. 

31) Ditto: It’s just an extension to to the regular standard windows clipboard. It’s really neat because you can store all the stuff that you’ve previously copied. Each item that you copy saves onto the clipboard screen that you can pull up using hot keys. It’s really helpful if you need to copy and paste a whole lot and want to go back to something that you copied earlier. You can even display text, images, HTML, and custom formats. I don’t know what I’d do without it. Sorry, no picture.

32) Virtual DJ: Need to mix something up real fast? Are you having a party? Yea I know right? You can use Virtual DJ to mix something up right on your computer. It’s pretty easy to do and it’s a great tool. So far it’s the best DJ software that I’ve come up with to test so far.

33) Google Earth: Another product from Google. Excellent stuff. If you’ve used Google Maps, then you pretty much know how cool this is. Google Earth is pretty good stuff because you can zoom in and out at will and you can access pretty much the whole globe with it. You can even enter into a flight simulator and fly around the globe. There are so many plugins on Google Earth for so many things too, including animal migrations, flights, and just a whole bunch of other things.

34) UVLayer: Another cool application. It also requires Adobe Air and in essence it lets you watch and search Youtube videos on your desktop in a presentable manner. You can favorite videos, watch them, send them to people, and even manipulate them on your desktop while you watch. When I mean manipulate, I mean move the video around on your desktop and search for other videos. An interesting way to look at video content. I’m glad I came across it.

35) Ultramon: Probably the best tool ever for multi-screen capabilities. I hook my HP laptop up to another computer monitor so I can take advantage of the dual screens. Don’t get me wrong, one screen is enough, but why stick with one when you can have two? It makes it that much more productive, especially when I actually need to get work done. When I’m just attempting to do things, like write this blog post, I usually have iTunes open and a video playing on my second monitor. What’s so neat about ultramon? You can treat each screen independently or extend your screen. It even comes with hotkeys to bring windows back and forth between monitors and will provide toolbars for your other monitors either. Excellent stuff.

36) Rocketdock: Rocketdock! How can I function without this excellent tool? It’s easy to extend aesthetically, because there are so many people making skins for it and also because there are tons of plugins available for rocketdock. It makes launching programs so much easier than it would be just by searching for it or have icons on the desktop. Love it! I’ve customized mine with my desktop wallpaper and rainmeter so they go hand in hand. Hope you enjoy it. Cheers!

37) Tweetdeck: If you’re not familiar with Twitter, you should check it out. Twitter is a site that allows you to broadcast your status to the Internets. Tweetdeck is a desktop application that runs on Adobe Air and allows you to send and recieve tweets without ever touching your browser. Most recently, Tweetdeck beta has added Facebook status updates and the ability to update your own status as well. Furthermore, you can tweet your friend’s Facebook statuses and vice versa. Definitely a keeper.

38) Windows Live Writer: I haven’t been using Windows Live Writer as much as I should have, but I did do a test post recently and it was excellent. It was recently updated and I definitely love it. I have a self-hosted Wordpress blog and I usually log on to update or write new posts from my browser, but with Windows Live Writer, it’s so easy to add pictures, add text, and link to other pages. Probably going to start using it a lot more. Go grab Windows Live Writer 2009!

39) Adobe Air: I don’t know how I would get by without Adobe Air. If you’ve been reading these brief descriptions about the programs I use, you’d know that a whole bunch of them count on you having Adobe Air. Adobe Air is essentially a runtime environment that allows developers to use online technology in order to build and connect with desktop applications. You still need to have an Internet connection for most of these programs, but it’s still better than doing everything in your browser.

40) Woopra: If you have a website and need a comprehensive web tracking and anaysis application, you’re in luck because Woopra is just that and oh so much more. I used to use Google analytics, but then I switched over to Woopra because it offered a desktop application and gave much more in depth information. Just by inserting a little code into your website, you can talk to your visitors and gather a whole bunch of information. Good stuff. Makes my life a little easier.

41) Manycam: Manycam is pretty cool. I don’t use it too much, but I do use it once in a blue moon when it’s someone’s birthday or I have to make fun of someone. It offers you a choice of backgrounds and features you can add to your face to augment it. You even have the option of blurring your eyes, adding new eyes, adding flags, hats, and such. The neat thing? It’s very easy to use. The add-ons will follow you wherever your head moves. Best thing: It’s Free!

42) Enso: I used to use Launchy, but then I decided to give Humanized Enso a try and boy do I like it. I use it with Rocketdock so I have three ways to launch every program that I use more than once a day. I can either click on the handy icon on Rocketdock, open it with enso, or physically go look for it through my start menu. I like to have options.

43) Gizmo5 and Skype: Alright, I decided to lump these two VOIP services together because I don’t really use either of them too much. For those of you who don’t know what VOIP is: it’s voice over IP, or basically a phone over the Internet. They are both great. I have Gizmo5 linked to my Grandcentral (now Google Voice) and Skype reserved for calling others with Skype. Awesome!

44) Simplify Media: It’s available for PC, Mac, Linux, and the iPhone. What is it? It connects your music and allows you to listen to your home library over the Internet. This is particularly useful because each person in your household can share their playlist. If you have the Simplify Media app, you can stream the playlists straight to your iPhone and your iPod Touch. Good stuff. It’s simple, free, fast, and very easy. Just try it out!

45) Autohotkey: What is it? It’s a program that you can run in the background. The program basically allows you to edit and run scripts with only a couple of key strokes. You can define your “hotkeys” all on your own. I pretty much use my hotkeys to open up different websites in chrome and also to plug in some HTML.

46) DiskAid: Simple and not much to talk about here. It opens up your iPod touch or iPhone and allows you to connect it to your computer and transfer files back and forth. It is available for Mac and PC and connects via a USB cord.

Online Sites I Just Can’t Get Enough Of

I’m not even going to summarize these sites because then the list will go on and on and on. The list is already really long as is and now I’m about to make it just a tad longer. Here are a list of sites to check out if you haven’t already. These sites keep my going.

Twitter.com; Facebook.com; Ping.gm; Woot.com; Youtube.com; Break.com; Funnyordie.com; Collegehumor.com; Grandcentral.com; Mint.com; Hulu.com; Searchme.com; Viewzi.com; Myspace.com; Socialmedian.com; Zoho.com; Photoshop.com; Wikipedia.org; Imdb.com; Meebo.com; Wakoopa.com; Digg.com; Friendfeed.com; Lala.com; Grooveshark.com; MetaCafe.com; Veoh.com; Pandora.com; Blog.tv; Tokbox.com; Blip.tv; Google.com/reader; Flickr.com; Deviantart.com; Youmail.com; Peoplebrowsr.com; Windowshop.com; Thinkgeek.com; Tvshack.net; Sidereel.com; Surfthechannel.com…

That’s just the beginning. I can’t even begin to cover everything, but enjoy!

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