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.)

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Free Rice is a fun word game that lets you build your English vocabulary and donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Programme for each right answer. It might not sound like much but the site has already donated over two billion grains of rice to help stop world hunger.

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New legal music download service We7 offers free, non-DRM MP3 downloads from a number of popular artists. The catch? Each track has a 10-second advertisement tacked on to the start. A month after downloading an ad-supported track, you are able to go back to the We7 site and download a version with the advert removed. However, I downloaded two test tracks and found that the advert can be removed easily through the use of simple audio editing software. A very interesting business model indeed… only time will tell whether it is ultimately successful.

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JkDefrag is an open-source disk optimisation utility (or “defragger”) for Windows operating systems. As well as the standard GUI, it also comes with a command line version for scripting and scheduling, and there’s even a screensaver version installed for defragmenting your disks while your machine is idle.

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MozBackup is a free utility for backing up your Mozilla, Firefox and Thunderbird profiles. Mozilla haven’t yet released an official backup tool, and while it’s possible to achieve the same effect by manually copying folders, MozBackup makes the process much simpler.

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Alex Feinman’s ISO Recorder allows you to burn CD/DVD ISO images under Windows XP/2003/Vista without the need for a dedicated CD burning application. Lucersoft’s LC ISO Creator enables you to do the process in reverse, i.e. create an ISO image from a physical CD/DVD.

Edit: Alex’s ISO Recorder now supports image creation, removing the need for an external tool such as LC ISO Creator.

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Red Dodo: offers free personalised screensavers/animated wallpapers suitable for most popular phones. Quite a snazzy little service, I think.

GetJAR: free applications to add functionality (or just fun!) to your handset.

Lasyk Networks (for Sony Ericsson handsets): software, ringtones, wallpapers, games and more.

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I don’t doubt that AbiWord is an excellent free word processor in its own right, but it saved my sanity earlier when I was stuck using a crashy version of Word. The Windows version is a 5MB download (20MB installed) and there’s also a portable version available. It’s able to open, edit and save Microsoft Word, XHTML, Rich Text Format and plain text files as well as its native ABW/AWT format, and while I’m sure it lacks many of Microsoft Word’s advanced features, it’s lean and mean and has handled all the documents I’ve thrown at it. Plus you can’t argue with the price…

AbiWord is also available for Linux and Mac OS, and being truly free software, the source code is of course also offered for download.

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The Music Genome Project’s Pandora experiment is a website that allows you to create your own playlists, or “stations”. The way it works is that you enter the name of a song or artist you like, and the software finds other songs it thinks you’ll like. There are restrictions imposed by its licensing agreements, but it is completely legal and plays songs in full, not just clips. Give it a go!

I’ve just heard about Ubuntu Linux and placed an order on their site for a free CD. That’s right, they’ll send you a free pressed CD (or more if you request them). I’ve tried various Linux distributions including Red Hat, Mandrake (now Mandriva), SuSE and the Knoppix live CD distribution, but am still using Windows for my day-to-day computing, simply because I’ve been a Windows user since the 3.1 days. I’ve dabbled in Linux for server use (I set up proxy and Intranet servers last year during my work placement) but hope to make the plunge into using it as my primary desktop OS once I find a distribution I really like. Maybe Ubuntu will be the one!

I’ll post a review of Ubuntu once the disc lands on my doormat

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