Chris: Geek Guy » Downloads

List of popular free applications

Chris Barnes — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:06:57 +0000

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.)

Comprehensive catalogue of open source software

Chris Barnes — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 22:18:11 +0000

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

Spyware-free RealOne player

Chris Barnes — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 12:44:36 +0000

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.