Chris: Geek Guy

This list of Lifehacker readers’ most recommended free apps contains some real gems, including some of my favourites (Google Chrome, Dropbox, uTorrent, Gmail, Winamp etc.)

Open Source Living provides an index of software that is not only free, but also has all the benefits of open source. It’s well worth checking out if you’re looking for a quality piece of software to do a particular job, but don’t want to break the bank.

Some of my favourite pieces of open source software listed on the site are:

• 7-Zip – archiving utility that supports ZIP and RAR as well as its own 7Z format
• Audacity – great for quick audio recording and editing jobs
• MediaWiki – powers the biggest and most well-known wiki in the world, Wikipedia
• Mozilla Firefox – my favourite Web browser
• Mozilla Thunderbird – well-regarded desktop email client, although I’ve now switched to Gmail
• nVu – Mozilla-based WYSIWYG HTML editor
• OpenOffice – a very capable alternative to Microsoft Office, without the price tag
• phpBB – one of the most popular and easy-to-use forum packages
• WinSCP and FileZilla – full-featured FTP/SFTP clients
• WordPress – the blogging platform that powers this very site
• Zen Cart – a highly-customisable online shopping platform

Real Alternative is a great alternative (for want of a better word) to the bloated official RealOne Player. However, it’s still good to know that the BBC has a spyware-free version available for download, which runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris. Apparently BBC insisted on this condition before licensing Real technology.