I've just found some great software for making panoramic photos:

Hugin

I found this over at opensource living.com, (which if you've never been there, is a great list of open source software. I've been looking for some time for something decent and free, since Photoshop Elements does an unsatisfactory job of compiling the shots into a coherent image. This is a very easy system, basically load the images you want to compile and the program takes over, shows you a preview and then joins the images...and voila:

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c3...choo/coal2.jpg

I then used GIMP photo software to crop the ragged edges of the panorama and compressed it for uploading to the net, cause it turned out to be a 92MB shot!

hey that's a cool thing there ^^


I have an app for equilizing the volume levels of your mp3 collection. so the relative volumes is fairly close...so you don't need to constantly change the volume ya know.
MP3Gain Downloads

I'm wondering if batch editing the volume levels of MP3s would alter the sound quality at all. Of course, maybe I should look into it myself rather than just wonder aloud.
EDIT: yep, shoulda checked the FAQs. Apparently no harm is done to quality. Thanks for the app, boink.

Best Free Application for ____________

Some of these are open source, some of these are free, some of these have free versions. Either way, they're free and good and have my personal stamp of approval.

FTP: FileZilla
FileZilla - The free FTP solution
There is a free client and server application. I use both personally and professionally. Some applications that you have to pay for are absolutely crap compared to this. The live edit mode is great for modifying files directly on the server. Other applications make you upload a new file every time, this program will upload every time you save the file.

HTML/Coding: Notepad++
.:: NOTEPAD++ ::.
This application has code highlighting for a plethora of programs. The only one that it is missing is ColdFusion.

CD Ripping: CDex
CDex | Open Source Digital Audio CD Extractor with more than 37,000,000 downloads

DVD Ripping: Handbrake
HandBrake

Audio/MP3 Editing: Audacity
Audacity: Free Audio Editor and Recorder

Video/Media Player: VLC Player
VideoLAN - Free and Open Source software and video streaming solutions for every OS!

MP3 Player: Winamp
Winamp Media Player - MP3, Multimedia, and Music Player

Image Viewing: IrfanView
IrfanView - Official Homepage - one of the most popular viewers worldwide

Torrents: Vuse
Azureus, now called Vuze : Bittorrent Client
Java-based torrent application. It consumes very little memory and CPU time while allowing you to download specific files out of your torrents (as opposed to the whole chunk).

Video Editing: (TBA)

Email: Gmail
http://www.google.com/gmail
Web-based email with the BEST spam filtering and the BEST user interface of any mail system.

Web Browser: FireFox
Mozilla.org - Home of the Mozilla Project

Operating System: Ubuntu Linux
UBUNTU - World Forum of Civil Society Networks
These guys have busted their asses to make a desktop OS that rivals windows in usability and funtion. Some would argue that they've surpassed.

How to Find the Perfect Christmas Gift at convert-video-dvd site

Synergy

This is a great little app that allows one computer to act as a keyboard/mouse server for another. For example, I often use my laptop on the keyboard shelf for my desktop, thereby blocking the desktop keyboard. That used to mean that I couldn't really use my desktop at the same time as my laptop, but now my laptop acts as a keyboard/mouse server for my desktop. I just scroll the mouse up and the pointer switches over to the desktop screen which is above my laptop. The keyboard automatically switches over too. And I can even copy/paste text across computers!

WhoCrashed

Summary: Whenever a computer running Windows suddenly reboots without displaying any notice or blue screen of death, the first thing that is often though about is a hardware failure. In reality, most crashes are caused by malfunctioning device drivers and kernel modules. In case of a kernel error, most computers running Windows do not show a blue screen unless they are configured to do so. Instead these systems suddenly reboot without any notice.

WhoCrashed shows the drivers which have been crashing computer with a single click. Normally, debugging skills and a set of debugging tools are required to do post-mortem crash dump analysis. This program checks for available crash dump files and checks for reponsible modules. In most cases it can pinpoint the offending drivers which have been causing misery on your computer system in the past. It does post-mortem crashdump analysis and presents all gathered information in a comprehensible way.

I need to come back to TFP at some point and update my thread-jacks (posts). I have a lot of new toys.

Electric Sheep screen saver - bad ass

Sandboxie - condom for your computer.

FixVTS - repairs DVD information in VOBs. Many of my backed up DVDs' menus no longer play correctly with the latest VLC. I have had to run FixVTS on all of them so that it recognizes the buttons on the menus. Stupid new VLC.

And everything I use is from Portable Apps now.

Cool, I got pointed to this app: Adobe Consulting | User Experience Hub: New Flex Style Explorer: Jam-Packed with New Features
It can run in browser from the adobe site, or you can download it to run it offline. This app allows you to edit the CSS attributes directly, with a great GUI; I'm extremely impressed with how easy this app is to use.
This works on all platforms. This tool is amazing for web developpers and webdesigners.

a couple of free security programs:

Comodo firewall- Free Firewall Antivirus Software Download by Comodo easier to maintain and lighter to use than ZA

and second the avast recommendation:

avast - Download FREE antivirus software - avast! Home Edition
I switched to this one on my laptop because for some reason it would always crash when AVG was trying to apply certain updates.

2 additional freeware programs, one which might interest more people, and the other is pretty specific:

Stellarium Stellarium
A planetarium freeware program. Plug in your coordinates, it gets hour/date from your computer, and voila, you can see the stars, nebulas and planets outside, complete with names, constellations, coordinates, distance and other interesting info for the amateur astronomer.

Deep sky stacker: DeepSkyStacker - Free
For those interested in astro photography, this program automatically aligns multiple pictures if you are doing the multiple exposure/stacking thing

I am a techno junkie with a PortableApps kick -- Stellarium, Skype, and ImgBurn
 

I tried out Stellarium since I am in an astronomy class, and it is really cool. There is a version of it at portableapps, too ( Stellarium Portable | PortableApps.com - Portable software for USB drives ).

I have some BAT scripts that make ImgBurn and Skype portable. Both have command switches to engage them as portable but it is a shame that they can't be set permanently (yet).






---------- Post added at 12:34 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:19 AM ----------

Sometimes I feel like a five-year old...

Does anyone have experience with using Ubuntu via Boot Camp on a mac? I've done a bit of research and it seems fairly straightforward, but it'd be nice if someone had done it and had any tips.

Any document to PDF
 

I have found a Windows application that will format any size drive to FAT32. Other programs have limitations in them which are unacceptable. The software is h2format, and I have a separate thread dedicated to this program.

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/tilted-...ml#post2634492

Another very nice open-source/freeware program that runs across multiple OS/Platforms is X-Box Media Center. It's what I use for my media center on an XP box. I have put all my DVD's in an ISO format and XBMC picks them up and uses different scrapers to find Poster art, cast and crew, synopsis, etc. You can also use it for your music and it will also scrap for album covers, etc.

Even better: If you have your ISO image split into like 50 rar files it still shows as just one ISO. No need to un-rar stuff you have...eh...created a nice backup of:rolleyes:

I had been experiencing a ton of errors on a set of laptop computers recently where the .NET 3.5 assistant and Silverlight were corrupted on install. The corruption prevented any kind of update or uninstall. After a few Google searches I came across these:

That solved the Silverlight problem.

This solved the .NET problem

Here is a website that lists open software alternatives to commercial software.
Find Open Source Alternatives to commercial software | Open Source Alternative - osalt.com

so; is this the technology of the future, or just flashy gimicks?

Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology | Video on TED.com

what do you think?

I'm looking for a bandwidth monitor...something like bitmeter that can hang out next to the clock. I'm sure most of us know about Comcast 250gb limit. well I got an email about their new bandwidth usage tool, a tab on my account page. so far this month I've racked up 380+ gb and last month clocked in at 512gb !

the email I got was not a warning pointed at me personally, it was a mass email about the tool. the rep on the phone said if they were warning me personally it would be via snail mail. (she thought) since alot of people use other email services their primary email and also change phone numbers w/o notifying Comcast.

but she also said flagrant abuse could lead to a years suspension of internet. :shock:

so anyway, looking for a free tool to monitor useage.

I was looking for one of these a little bit back... Never found a free one sadly, and there were too many projects on SourceForge to try them all out. Doing a quick search shows all new projects on SF that I'd never seen.

While it feels like tilting at windmills, I'd recommend using Google to search SF projects: "network usage monitor Windows site:sourceforge.net".

I was told uTorrent has a tool in the new version, but I haven't updated it yet. it won't reflect total bandwidth use though.

I use samurize. With the right plugins, it gives me drive status, network usage and config, memory usage, temperatures, etc.

This is probably a long shot for your situation, but the Tomato firmware (Tomato Firmware | polarcloud.com) will track all bandwidth through it and it is free; however, you need a router that can have its firmware updated with 3rd party firmware. Tomato can do a whole bunch of other cool stuff as well.

You can set it so that download+upload is only 7GB/day (~210GB/month), leaving that 40GB for regular browsing (those program updates add up!).

Also set your downloads to STOP (i.e. upload = 0kbps) after they reach a certain ratio. Just remember that 7GB/(1+r) ~ Max Download for the day.

Text Editors
 

At the risk of linking to another forum's thread the single best and largest freeware list I've ever found is the periodically resurrected Neowin Freeware Alternative list. Freaking HUGE.