Category: Geek Software of the Week

Two for the price of one (which is, of course, FREE!) Two Open Source programs that work together to protect your system. The first is ClamWin, a free, Open Source anti-virus. Clam Anti-virus has been around a while, but it has the limitation that it does not scan in “real time,” you would have to initiate a scan to find a virus… however, by combining it with the second, free, Open Source program, WinPooch (weird name, I know!), then you have a setup that will scan in real time for virii, changes to your system, spyware, ad-ware, or trojans! Very cool! However, you must do the following in this order!

Download ClamWin from:

https://www.clamwin.com/content/view/18/46/

Install ClamWin FIRST!

Then, download WinPooch from:

https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=122629

and install WinPooch! Then, you will get WinPooch notices when it detects modifications in your system, so as to detect a trojan or a spyware installation. You can also set your own security level for anti-spyware, anti-trojan, firewall, antivirus (ONLY if you have ClamWin installed.)

Cool! And, you now also have a weird, cute little dog with squinty roving eyes in your taskbar tray… how cool is that?!??!

So, you like Internet Radio, Streaming Podcasts, Internet Music, etc., etc. You REALLY wish you could record it. Well, now you can! If you can hear it on your system, you can now record it as an MP3 file! Very cool! And, of course, very FREE!

MP3myMP3 Recorder

Download, install, and enjoy the freedom of recording the audio on your computer! Oh, you can also use it to search for, and find, any audio file on your computer. Very nice!

This week’s Geek Software of the Week requires a few caveats! First, you should only use it to download TV programs that you legally have rights to, second, you have to have a BitTorrent client like Azureus installed prior to installing this software. TVTad allows you to select a TV program and then download it every week! So, imagine setting it to receive Stargate SG-1 and every week, you will get the episode on your computer! Cool! This is the beginning of IPTV, one of my favorite “cool ideas” that folks are talking about today!

TVTad

Check it out! This is very cool… let’s just hope the RIAA and the networks don’t kill it!

Security is on everyone’s mind these days, and rightly so… there is a lot going on in computing. Plus, more and more, we are putting our “lives” on our computer systems. We have information on our computers, and especially our notebook or laptop computers, that is VERY private! So, if YOUR laptop was, horrors, stolen… what would be compromised? YIKES!

TrueCrypt Open Source Software

Check out the link above. You will find free, Open Source software that just might give you some peace of mind if the worse were to happen! It can create a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mount it as a real disk. It can encrypt an entire hard disk partition or a device, such as USB memory stick, floppy disk, etc. Very cool! Check it out!

This is very specialized software, but it is slick! You may have noticed that churches today like to show song lyrics and Bible verses up on a projected screen (or screens.) The software to do this is very specialized and can be quite expensive. Often, if you want multiple Bible translations, you have to buy separate, special modules to do it. Why can’t somebody write a FREE Open Source version?! Well, they did!

OpenSong Software

You can download FREE modules for these translations: The Amplified Bible, Contemporary English Version, English Standard Version, King James Version, La Biblia de Las Americas, The Message, New American Standard Bible, New International Version, New King James Version, New Living Translation, Nuevo Version Internacional, Portuguese from IBS, Svenska Levande Bibeln.

It also supports one or two screens, and has a built-in “shorthand” coding system that allows you to define the behavior of the “slide show,” as well as add and change fonts, backgrounds, etc. Very cool! Check it out!

OK, so this week’s Geek Software of the Week may be for hard core geeks and techies… but it is cool. If you have to update a lot of different kinds of systems and need network connectivity to do so, here’s a tool for your “tech tool belt!” Imagine a regular floppy that you can insert in nearly any halfway decent PC and boot, have it detect your network card, and allow you to access network shares via a TCP/IP connection (like say, to get to Ghost, if you need to “Ghost” images over a network!) OK, now imagine it is FREE!

NetBootDisk is FREE!

Download and enjoy! And, if you have a tool like Nero, you can even transfer it to a CD-ROM and have a universally bootable CD-ROM with TCP/IP network connectivity. Very handy!

This week’s Geek Software is “Paint.NET.” It is a class project from MIT that has continued since being developed in a .NET programming class. It is written in C#. The idea was to make a “better” Microsoft Paint. They added in layers, and it has grown to nearly (but not quite) Photoshop proportions! The nice thing is… unlike Photoshop, it is FREE!

Paint.NET

You won’t regret checking it out!

Wikipedia says of BitTorrent: “BitTorrent is the protocol and the name of the peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution tool written by programmer Bram Cohen and debuted at CodeCon 2002. The reference implementation is written in Python and is released under the BitTorrent Open Source License (a modified version of the Jabber Open Source License), as of version 4.0. The name ‘BitTorrent’ refers to the distribution protocol, the original client application, and the .torrent file type.

With BitTorrent, files are broken into smaller fragments, typically a quarter of a megabyte each. As the fragments are distributed to the peers in a random order, they can be reassembled on a requesting machine. Each peer takes advantage of the best connections to the missing pieces while providing an upload connection to the pieces it already has. This scheme has proven particularly adept in trading large files such as videos and software source code. In conventional downloading, high demand leads to bottlenecks as demand surges for bandwidth from the host server. With BitTorrent, high demand can actually increase throughput as more bandwidth and additional ‘seeds’ of the completed file become available to the group. Cohen claims that for very popular files, BitTorrent can support about a thousand times as many downloads as HTTP.”

Azureus – Java BitTorrent Client

This is an excellent Java client for BitTorrent with lot’s of great features. Try it! You’ll like it!

PHP is an amazing server-side scripting language! It is part of the group of tools that much of the Internet is built on… LAMP… which stands for “Linux,” “Apache,” “MySQL,” and “PHP.” This blog, for instance, is being hosted by one of our Linux servers (CentOS Linux, to be specific), using Apache as our web hosting software, and is written in PHP, with data saved in a MySQL database. It is everywhere! If you would like a great introduction to PHP… here’s a FREE On-Line Book! Yep! FREE!

Practical PHP Programming

PHP is our Geek Software of the Week! Learn it, use it! It is Open Source, and it rocks!