~ MANUMISSION ~
Free & Useful Downloads
I loathe pages of links, and I loathe the frustration of finding out
that something which seemed like it would be useful and helpful is actually
not so but the reverse. If it doesn't work, the fact that it's free is
meaningless, and if it costs you time and SNAFU's your computer to boot,
then it isn't free at all. And I'm on an exceedingly tight budget — the
money from my CafePress sales for the year didn't quite cover the
cost of webhosting, fwiw — so for me, "free" has to be Free, not Free For
30 Days or Free But You Can't Save Your Work, either.
So here are programs that work, work well, don't take up much space
or resources on a system (ie will run on older slower computers, NOT bloatware!)
and do practical, necessary things, often better than the professionally-released
programs. And they're all free — not shareware, not demo versions that
stop working after a bit, but completely free. If any of the links stop
working, or if you have any questions about, or issues with, any of the
programs, please email
and let me know. (Not that I can support them or replace what support those
which have support can offer, but maybe I've encountered and have a quick
fix.)
I will be adding to this as I discover — and test out — new software;
but I won't post any programs that I have not tried out myself, "in sickness
and in health," to my own satisfaction. (Interestingly enough, very few
of these were programmed in the US of A, I realize as I look them over.
Are the amateur programmers on this side of the pond squandering all their
energy in writing viruses and stealing music, or just playing SimCity and
Ultima these days? Better not rest on our laurels — SubSeven isn't going
to be, ultimately, a viable career field, I'll hazard, nor is virtual life
going to pay the bills…)
Finally, all these are free — really free — but in some cases it's possible
to make donations to the programmers via their PayPal setups. If you can
afford to do so, it would be a good deed, a small bit of dharma, without
which no good karma is possible. These aren't for the most part the big,
obvious freeware programs by companies with plenty of other expensive products
to supprt them, like Acrobat Reader or Quicktime Player, after all
— they're done by individuals or smallish outfits creating programs of
the sort they'd like to use, and making them available gratis for caritas
to the rest of us.
(Note: these are all or primarily Windows-based because that's
what I use, Win98SE. Since I've only ever used Macs in professional settings
(and never any "-ix" computers), I don't have any useful experience with
grassroots software for the platforms, sorry to say.)
DOWNLOAD SITES
Where To Go Window-Shopping Without Wasting Time
PROGRAMS
Snapfiles
This is where I go now, even before googling, to find a particular
class of utility software I need. (It used to be called Web Attack, for
some reason.) Very well organized, you can look only for freeware, or for
both freeware and shareware, and it's all broken down by category — and
then each program is rated by users for its quality.
FONTS
Are fonts programs, or not? I'm not sure. But they're useful tools,
and they can be extremely expensive. These are all legit free download
sites, with public domain fonts or new fonts which have been offered to
the public by their creators.
Type
Oasis
Graphics heavy page, but full of wonderful handlettered typefaces broken
up into categories at the Fontennium section. You may recognize some of
these from my cartoons. (And where are you going to find an Ogham font,
I ask you? Or one that's readable English, but looks like Bengali
at a glance?)
1001 Fonts
Very well sorted and searchable, with some excellent titling fonts
and other graphics, all with previews.
Font Empire
This almost has too much, but they're pretty well organized and they
have nice previews of each font.
Apostrophic Labs,
source of one of my favorite fonts (Insula) is presently under (re)construction,
but may come back eventually. (The few articles currently up there are
pretty funny, even if you don't have much of a clue what they're alluding
to, simply because take away the specific field limitors and it's amazing
how unspecific human behaviour can be.)
SPECIFIC PROGRAMS
The Ones I Use Myself
I still use old Netscape Composer 4.73 to make my pages, because I
really have no desire whatsoever to hand-cut my code from stone, and I've
found the other free HTML editors to be either clunky or clunkier. By checking
browser display in IE and Mozilla as I go, and doing additional edits in
Wordpad when needful, I've managed to make pages that look okay and load
properly across the board, granted I'm not doing anything at all fancy,
but I don't spend more time on putting pages together than I do on the
content, in most cases — I'm always amazed when I read people who say they
"can't do a web page" or can't update it because they can't get the code
to work. Yes, the pages should look pretty, if possible — but cool bells
and whistles or graphics, to me, are less important than the message. (I
do mean to make a page on how to build a simple site like this one, but
it will have to wait a little, until I finish other projects.) So, long
& short & all, I don't have any other HTML editors to recommend,
though I've downloaded a few and tried them. Here are other programs I
use to make Odd Lots and do useful things, though.
BROWSING
Mozilla
USA - International, 12mb
I tried Opera, and although ideologically I'd have loved to support
it, I found it clunky and frustrating. Besides, it isn't really free, either,
it's shareware or else you have to deal with ads. Mozilla is free, and
don't be put off by the dire warnings about it not being suitable for amateurs,
it really is safe to take "over the counter" I assure you. I didn't like
the reduced Firebird/Thunderbird versions in practice; I like the full
version very much. It blocks popups automatically, but can be configured
at a click to allow specific ones, and likewise cookies. Being a die-hard
Netscape user, I find this is great because it feels like old Netscape,
before they turned it into a monster, but handles the newer protocols.
(I really hate what they've done to Composer, though; it made a messier
hash of a page than even Word when I tried it.) I've never tried IRC, chat
programs have historically tended to crash my computer, so I don't know
how well that feature works, either.
Ad-Aware
Sweden, 1.61mb
People afflicted with spyware need this, whether they know it or not.
There are others, but this one is well-rated and I found it very easy to
run, and clearly stating what is what and what to do about it. (Note: as
it happens, I have had no problems with spyware since switching from IE
to Mozilla, at all.)
Eudora
USA, 7.2mb
Mozilla handles mail just fine, but I've also been using the free version
of Eudora to keep different accounts separate, and it works pretty well,
though it does have a small unobtrusive ad panel and wants you to register
periodically. It also has an annoying little sound effect when you get
a new message, but you can turn that off.
COLOR SELECTION
Huey
UK, 440kb
The color selection tools in Netscape Composer, when it comes to getting
the hexadecimal numbers or specific colors, are abysmal — they seem to
be randomly wrong. So when I need to match a particular color (say, from
a graphic made in an image editing program) or duplicate one from one area
of a page to another, this is what I use. It's very simple, and a little
bit cranky to figure out, but it works. You can click on anything, even
a part of your screen, and get a color reading to use from that sample.
FTP
SmartFTP
International (US-Swiss?), 6mb
Lovely drag-and-drop utility, very easy to use. This is what I use
to do all my updating and moving of files. The "passive transfer" option
is easy to find and change, and there are not so many massive layers of
preferences and options that it feels like you're hacking into a secret
govt site just to use the program. You can simply open SmartFTP, log into
your site, click down to the folder you're using on the SmartFTP interface,
which is very like the Windows Explorer one, then open up a Windows Explorer
panel and drag copies of your files onto your site. If you are updating
an extant file, it will ask you if you want to overwrite (unless you disable
this option) and then do so. You don't have to hunt through layers
of folders by browsing to find your files, then upload one at time, that
is. And it remembers your most recent logins and keeps them in the pulldown
menu for easy recall. It's free for personal use, US $30 or less for corporate
clients (multi-user licenses available.)
ZIP/UNZIP
I used to have a decent little utility that came with an old edition
of Norton, but I think that it was discontinued, and I'm not even sure
what it was called, now. I've tried a bunch of them, and this is the one
I've stuck with for several years now.
EnZip
UK, 1.5 mb
All kinds of options, but very intuitive and easy to use/figure out.
One of the very few free programs that makes archives as well as opens
them, and unlike the WinZip or PKUnzip programs, it isn't at all shareware.
This is the only zip program I use at all now.
Stuffit
USA, ?kb
If you're not going to make any zip files, but only want something
to open archives with, Aladdin's Stuffit Expander is fine. It handles both
Mac archives (.sit files) and Windows (.zip files) and they do have versions
that work on both Mac and PC, I can attest in this one case. However, they
have an annoying policy of not keeping earlier versions available for download,
so if you're running an older computer or OS, this might not be the thing
for you — and now they're only offering it with a trial version of the
complete setup, even more annoyingly.
BACKUP
DeepBurner
Estonia, 1.64mb
I tried another free CD burning program before this one, which worked
okay, but then quit working (probably due to something unidentified else
being installed that conflicted) and locked up my entire system. This one
is easier, though having to open a new configuration if you change your
mind about which format to use is a bit of a pain — but it isn't a huge
resource hog like the Roxio (Adaptec) programs and the discs have worked
fine on other systems without issues. Since all I've been doing is basic
backups, this is more than enough for my purposes.
FILE RECOVERY
PC
Inspector
Germany, 3.9mb
I have had some nasty experiences with "disc recovery/repair" programs,
Scandisk and Hard Drive Mechanic leaving me with a mass of fragments, completely
worthless, after a crash/repair, when in all likelihood the files could
have been saved. After all, in this instance, after I finished recovering
everything that PC Inspector was able to find — and it was nearly everything,
in usable form — I then tried the professional utilities, and surprise
surprise, ended up with a mass of munged file pieces from the same data.
Good thing I used PC Inspector first! PC Inspector does not change
the files when it scans to see what it can salvage from a damaged disc,
this is the critical thing, and it doesn't automatically start doing anything
either.
BACKGROUND MUSIC
STP
Russia, 208kb
Most MP3 players that I have used want to play 70's style disco visuals
or some such nonsense, as if skinnable borders were the most important
thing. Note to programmers: the way a sound system looks on the outside
is much less crucial than that it play music well — and well in this case
includes not slowing down all other operations! STP is extremely low impact
(one of the few that will run on Win95, frex), very customizeable, and
allows you to make playlists. Depending on how low you set the buffer,
it will briefly freeze (like a record skip, almost) if you do some other
memory-intensive operation, like opening a large file, but you can adjust
that very easily. The only thing is, you have to be careful because many
other programs will try to reassign MP3 file associations to themselves
(Media Player, Quicktime), and you will want to go back and reset them
via Winfile if that happens.
TIMING
1Time
USA, 443kb
I don't know why you might need a stopwatch/timer on your desktop (you
may have guessed why I wanted one!) but this is a nifty little interface,
since you can set it to "float" over everything else, thus being able to
scroll down the page you are reading while still being able to glance up
at the readout without having to hunt for it.
"Manumission" — the title of this page is a very obscure
Latin joke: it means the giving of freedom to a slave or bondservant, and
is obscure in its origins (questions remain as to whether it derives from
the deed, a "freeing of hands," or the method, a handwritten document
granting of freedom?) but in either case, it is apt in being used for a
webpage that offers freedom from computer difficulties for free. And it's
a neat-sounding, good-tasting word.
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