Cool Programs

white · Post by **white** » Fri Nov 04, 2005 1:49 am

In the vein of Silverclaw's Cool Sites thread, I thought it might be fun to share whatever fun little programs we've all found. For sanity's sake, I suggest we stick to stuff that's freely available, and include, in the post, information relating to supported platforms. Oh, and don't forget to describe what it actually is

I'll start off:
The Gimp - Someone, can't remember who, keeps plugging this whenever anyone asks about image manip, so you've probably all already heard of it, but I'm including it for the sake of completeness. It's, put simply, photoshop for free, with a nonstandard UI.

Blender - 3D Modelling/animation/rendering suite; it's very good, if a bit hard to learn.

Gaim - Multi-protocol IM client. Does AIM, YIM, Jabber (google talk and compatible), MSNIM, and probably a few others I don't know about.

Ethereal - Network traffic sniffer; good for finding out what's actually going on on your network; has any number of applications, but is most useful for security monitoring. Find out exactly what your computer is actually sending to the 'net!

Terragen - Realistic terrain generator; very tweakable, and very realistic.

That's all I've got off the top of my head. So what do you all pass the time with when your net's down and you're out of books?

Renorei · Post by **Renorei** » Fri Nov 04, 2005 4:18 am

(Not posting links, but if you just do a google or yahoo search, you can find them easily)

Limewire - a really awesome P2P sharing program. I now have about 3 days worth of music.

Peer Guardian - you can run this while you're using Limewire. It scrambles your IP address.

I'm not going to mention why, because I'm not sure if we are allowed to directly mention such things on this site...but trust me, if you're like anyone else who downloads stuff using a p2p program, it's a handy thing to have.

Phoenix Ravenwolf · Post by **Phoenix Ravenwolf** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 12:00 pm

DO you know where i Can get Tutorials for Blender?>

PariahPoet · Post by **PariahPoet** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 1:32 pm

Trillian is another great multi-chat program.
NoteWorthy Composer is loads of fun for composing midi files.
Talisman is a cool shell that you can boot directly into.

Aki · Post by **Aki** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 5:59 pm

FaceGen

Lets you create some neat face, even put your own one in and then mess with it! Quite fun and simply to use.!

The only bad part about the putting your own face in is, that it takes 15 minutes, and you cannot obscure the scanning window (by, say, opening a new window) and ...well..no hair. No hair is true for all face-gen faces.

Examples of a couple faces I made: Villan

Asian
Examples of what you can do to your own face: Yellow... O_o

If I were black...

Blue man group Aki

Orc, Goblin, some other green thing, you decide!

The UNaltered facegen scan of my face.

Its a fun program, as you can see theres alot to do with it.

And sometimes you do weird things...

Okay, next program.

FireFox
A damn good webbrowser, my favorite (and IMO, the best).

PariahPoet · Post by **PariahPoet** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 6:29 pm

Oh heck yeah. I use FireFox too.

Lupin · Post by **Lupin** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 6:44 pm

Portable Firefox A version of firefox browser that's small enough for USB drives.

And

Portable Tunderbird
A version of the Thunderbird mail client that's small enough for USB drives.

Baphnedia · Post by **Baphnedia** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 10:29 pm

An IRC dicebot written by Vilkacis, assisted by Ralith that totally blows the competition away. The staff on chat.psionics.net like the bot - and who knows, may even replace what they have with this new one. It even does arithmatic!

white · Post by **white** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 9:16 pm

PariahPoet wrote:Trillian is another great multi-chat program.
NoteWorthy Composer is loads of fun for composing midi files.
Talisman is a cool shell that you can boot directly into.

I wrote:I suggest we stick to stuff that's freely available

@Phoenix: Look around on their website; they've got tons of documentation.

@Baphnedia: Heh. Not exactly what I had in mind for this thread, but good point nonetheless.

@Lupin: Cool!

@Aki: Hehe, neat. I heard about that in relation to Oblivion, but didn't know it was free.

Aki · Post by **Aki** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 10:00 pm

Ralith Lupus wrote: @Aki: Hehe, neat. I heard about that in relation to Oblivion, but didn't know it was free.

The Demo is. The full version isn't.

Upside: Demo doesn't have a time limit to how long it can be used.

PariahPoet · Post by **PariahPoet** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 10:16 pm

I wrote:I suggest we stick to stuff that's freely available

Those are all free. Well, they all have functional demos anyway. Trillian is absolutely free.

white · Post by **white** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 10:53 pm

Oh, they are? Sorry; I could have sworn trillian wasn't free.

PariahPoet · Post by **PariahPoet** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 10:56 pm

Yup.

Renorei · Post by **Renorei** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 11:10 pm

I really like Trillian. Haven't used it in forever, but it's cool nonetheless.

celtwolf · Post by **celtwolf** » Sun Nov 13, 2005 2:29 am

Skype
http://www.skype.com
it's a speakchat program that's free. from skype user to skype user it's free to call. you can purchase credits to connect to landlines and call ACTUAL phones through your computer. but before you get it make sure you have a decent processor, as it DOES take up substantial memory to run. and having a decent speaker and mic is a DEFINITE plus.

and if anyone wants to drop me a line, i'm celtwolf_8b.
~Celtwolf

Celestialwolf · Post by **Celestialwolf** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 1:41 am

Thanks for terragen, Raith Lupus; and thanks for portable firefox, Lupin.

Some of my favorites:

Eraser - Securely deletes files as oposed to just marking them as "deleted," like emptying the recycle bin would do, for instance.

Winamp - The customizeable media player I use to play my movies and audio files. A great replacement for windows media player.

Zone Alarm - An awesome free firewall. I highly recommend this if you don't currently have a firewall.

Open Office - Reads most formats of word processor documents: Word perfect, Microsoft word, Adobe Acrobat, etc.

And lastly, the obvious (and already mentioned) Mozilla Firefox and Trillian.

Searif · Post by **Searif** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 9:24 am

my brother uses terragen, at first it was all just the program doing it then he showed me how to make one with just code, confused the hell out of me

Searif · Post by **Searif** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 9:26 am

celtwolf wrote:Skype
http://www.skype.com
it's a speakchat program that's free. from skype user to skype user it's free to call. you can purchase credits to connect to landlines and call ACTUAL phones through your computer. but before you get it make sure you have a decent processor, as it DOES take up substantial memory to run. and having a decent speaker and mic is a DEFINITE plus.

and if anyone wants to drop me a line, i'm celtwolf_8b.
~Celtwolf

sounds like something I could use

celtwolf · Post by **celtwolf** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 1:42 pm

well, i provided the link, so you can go and download it and try it out!

white · Post by **white** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 11:19 pm

Found another!
Media player classic - download here for windows 2k/XP, or here for 98 and me. This is an mplayer-based media player that's quite impressive in it's abilities (Can open ANY media file, and use them to their full capabilities, really nice keyboard interface, decent GUI, tons and tons of options...). It's not very pretty but it's the best media player I've found, and it's free. I think it's even better than VLC; it certainly renders faster and is a lot more stable, not to mention handling at least .mkv files better. *nix users, just find yourself a good mplayer frontend, or even use it alone.

And another:
WinDirStat - For you windows users, this is a great tool for cleaning out your harddrive.

Another! Crossplatform this time, though not the simplest of things to install on windows:
LyX - An amazingly powerful replacement for a word processor, this program both eases and greatly accelerates the process of writing. It calls itself a WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) editor, as opposed to the usual WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). It's a bit confusing at first; work through the tutorial and you'll realize how impressive it is. Based on the TeX layout engine.