Best of Breed - The Best Freeware for Windows

Digg has come up with some new front ends to their service. It looks like Intel sponsored one of the interfaces, which is the type of business activity they do a lot of. So I decided to download the Flash object and run it on my PC. I’ve never scene a such a CPU intensive object! It had my AMD Athlon 3500+ maxed out consistently! Maybe they have something in there that makes AMD processors look bad ;). Just kidding, I haven’t even tried it on an Intel machine but I’m sure that Flash object will max out most of today’s desktop machines. The good news is that there is a great solution to that problem. Just log onto Digg’s site and let their processors do the work. There is no difference in the quality or look of the object and Digg has 3 more ‘views’ of their data.

This is truly the best way I’ve seen for staying up on the day’s news. You can view it through some really great visual interfaces and you’re only 2 clicks away from the actual story. Of course, the information you are getting is Digg data. Therefore, it is based on their ‘rating’ of the stories but Digg is as good a measure as anything else out there today. So with all things considered, this is a great way to get the news and you don’t even have to download anything. Just go to Digg’s site and pick which interface is the best for you. You can follow the link below to their website and start interacting with today’s news data right away!

http://labs.digg.com/arc/

I’ve tested a great number of solutions for grabbing streaming video on the Internet and downloading it to your PC and the one that works the best is UnPlug. There are all kinds of solutions posted on the Firefox page but over time UnPlug has delivered the best solution. It is compatible with just about every form of video on the Internet and the developer keeps the code up with the new releases of Firefox.

When you see a video you want you just click on the fish and it opens a new tab and lists all the videos found on that page. Then you choose the one you want and you’re done. Works like a charm almost every time, which is a good deal more often than most of the other extensions in this category do.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2254

All-in-one-gestures is an amazing product that allows you to do just about any command that Firefox recognizes through a mouse gesture. Once you get used to using gestures you won’t be able to live without them. To navigate back (same as pressing the back button) I have it set up so I push my right button then left button quickly and to go forward I do the opposite (referred to as a ‘rocker’ navigation). I don’t even keep the back or forward button on my browser any longer! Its so much faster and easier. I’m sure you’ll really love it. There are a couple of other things I have it set up to do; to zoom in on a picture I hold the right mouse button and drag to the left and I reverse that to zoom out. One last thing I’ll mention I use it for is to navigate up if I am at the bottom of a page. I just make a quick line up while holding my right mouse key and it takes me to the top of the page.

The product is very comprehensive, there are many commands, I only use a few but sometimes I’ll read through the list and pick up something else that I want to do. You can also edit the gestures, so if there is a command that seems more natural to you for a different gesture then you can make those changes.

The product is always up to date. I’ve been using it since Firefox came out and I’ve never had to shut it down because of a compatibility problem. It’s reliable, functional, and a darn good extension. There are other ‘gesture’ extensions but this is the most comprehensive and well maintained. If you use Firefox, you should use gestures (a few anyway…).

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12

Audacity is a very well known program for audio recording. I’ve used it for years, just to fool around with the audio tracks that I have. Besides all the ‘make sense’ musical reasons to have Audacity on your PC there is also something to be said for archiving your own list of sound files. Those who are talented will

enjoy turning down their favorite song’s voice tracks and singing into their microphone and making it sound like you’ve got a headline band backing you up. You can create your own lullabies or love songs or let your imagination go and put together God only knows what else.

All kidding aside, Audacity is a pretty powerful program and has always kept up it’s freeware status. Everyone should have a copy of Audacity on their desktop, everyone should experiment with it and know what it does, and everyone should have a couple of fun ‘when I’ve got the time’ Audacity projects. It does the soul good to stay up late the night your divorce goes through banging out the lyrics to one of The Guess Who’s tracks. Trust me, a night with Audacity can do the soul some good. By the way, those audio files I made will never, ever, see the light of day. So download Audacity and I’ll personally guaranty that someday you’ll be glad you did. Oh, one more thing… buy a microphone or you’re waisting your time.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/windows

RaimaRadio is truly a unique and fabulous service for anyone with some extra disc space and a desire for music. I can even tag a song to be recorded in the future and this program will watch for it and record it when it plays on one of the stations I’m monitoring. I’m totally amazed at what a fantastic service this

provides. There are plenty of programs that let you listen to Internet radio stations but that is only a small part of what RaimaRadio does. It’s primary function is in it’s ability to capture the songs you want, all with digital clarity and stored in an mp3 file format. It’s easier to run than most of the peer to peer or even torrent solutions to downloading music. Download it and tinker with it a little and I’m sure you’ll find that you can add a great deal of quality media to your collection.

I’m a little worried about the legalities associated with a service like this and I’m no expert in the legal details but I’m afraid that musicians are going to need to embrace the Internet as opposed to trying to force restrictions upon the users. There are just too many ways to interpret the law and too many smart people developing new solutions and the reason behind it is the great quality and convenience the brings to music distribution. If the industry would embrace it as opposed to fighting it off, the market would explode at an even greater rate than it has. I’ll get off my soapbox but I think technology should be viewed as an opportunity not a problem. Hopefully RaimaRadio will be available in the long run but I don’t see how it can last when the copyright lawyers are all well employed. I was up, running, and recording in less than 2 minutes with the software. So give it a try.

http://www.raimasoftware.com/