digitaltoast

Twittering:

A guide to tweeting or getting started with Twitter

Broadband and ADSL

http://www.samknows.com/broadband/checker2.php?p=map

http://www.kitz.co.uk/isp/plusnet_shaping2.htm

New broadband network http://www.switchedonuk.org/

Misc

http://appengine.google.com/start

Multimedia

Top 5 video encoding applications compared

StaxRip Excellent batch encoder for h264, x264 divx etc

Avidemux
will transfer files to and from many formats with simple editing and powerful processing tools. Really excellent.

DVDShrink will allow you to backup a full DVD to a single 4.7Gb DVD (freeware)

Irfanview is a great, free, modular image viewer and manipulator.

The Gimp is a free clone of Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro, a bit tricky to work out, but a bit free-er too!

Audacity is an excellent free sound editor, a bit like Soundforge

Isobuster is an incredibly useful tool for recovering data from multisession CDs which have either become corruped, or where you simply forgot to import the old session.

ASFTools will join, mend, cut, re-index and do generally useful things to wmv and asf files

Auto Gordian Knot is a complete DiVX/Xvid processor – in goes a DVD, out comes a DiVX file.

For all of these encoders and playing back many files, you’ll need the k-lite codec pack which also includes Mplayer

CDEx is a CD ripper package which will allow you to encode to various formats, will write the tag files for you, will transcode between formats and has a handy “record from analog input” facility.

Xisoft Net Transport Gets all the Real streams and more. Worth registering for, but works fine without.

Use  Windows Media File Editor which comes as part of the free Windows Media Encoder 9. This can losslessly cut/chop a wmv.

To encode it you’ll need either xvid4psp or psp video converter which is a little slower and fewer options, but simpler for beginners. Both allow you to do “batch processing” – I personally prefer xvid4psp because it makes xvid which are compatible with my media player and it seems quicker. To do batches, use the “save” function – it looks a bit confusing at first, but you just “save” a list of jobs, then use “encode” and let it run overnight.

Note to self and anyone who cares: If you have one of those Maplin / Sumvision / Noontech hard drive media player enclosure boxes, the only wmv to xvid transcode I’ve found that works is Xvid4Psp’s xvid 1p 768k Turbo mode.

More help: http://www.videohelp.com/guides/ and http://forum.videohelp.com/

Antivirus and security

Adaware is a Spyware finding and removal tool. Download and run it today – you’ll be surprised.

http://housecall.antivirus.com/ is an excellent web-based application which scans your drive from a webpage.

AVG Antivirus from Grisoft is a comprehensive virus scanner, free for personal use.

Website utilities

Filezilla is an excellent, free, graphical FTP utility

Getright is an essential downloading tool with NO spyware or adware:

Xenulink is a very fast website link checker – it will spider a large site in under a minute, and give a full link report.

WGET is a utility to mirror a website to a local drive. Command line only, but fast and flexible.

HTML Tidy is a command line application to clean up and remove errors from html documents

Am-Deadlink check IE, Firefox, Opera and Mozilla bookmarks for dead links and downloads favicons.

Web hosting

Xampp – complete install of apache, php, mysql etc. To install XAMPP you only need to download and extract XAMPP, that’s all. There are no changes to the Windows registry and it’s not necessary to edit any configuration files. It couldn’t be easier! Not sure about Ozzie Osbourne on skates on the download page, though….

Other applications

openoffice.org is an excellent, free and compatible alternative to MS Office. I’ve been using it for months, and I’ve not come across a Word or Excel doc that it couldn’t read

Doublekiller is one of the most useful apps ever – give it a folder or two and it will find all identical files, based on one or many criteria.

TightVNC (based on WinVNC but quicker) will allow you to connect to another PC and remotely control it. Like PC Anywhere, but free.

ForceASPI 1.8 is an ASPI layer installer, neccessary for some DVD ripping utils and burners.
Also replaces Window’s own sucky ASPI layer.

Belarc Advisor builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, including Microsoft Hotfixes, and displays the results in your Web browser. All of your PC profile information is kept private on your PC and is not sent to any web server

Driverescue saved my butt on more than one occasion – it will undelete files which have either been “emptied” from the recycle bin, or have been deleted on another drive or device (such as camera memory) which don’t even go in the recycle bin

HFV Explorer will read and copy Mac CDs and other media. If you have a disk which
appears to have data but no files, try this.

Skype is a very high quality free P2P VOIP net phone system.

Firefox is an good replacement for Internet Explorer, and
Nvu is an excellent free website editor from the same stable

PHP

Gallery is an excellent PHP gallery script which has an optional Java client app to make
uploading images even easier.

Squirrelmail is a PHP web interface to your hosts IMAP server. Has many useful
optional plugins. Also now included in the
Yellowtip Web Server, which is a complete
apache, mysql and php installation.

MyShell provides a shell-like PHP interface to your web host so you can compile, chmod etc. As an extra security tip, upload the small script, use it for what you want, then delete it from the server when done. You
can never be too sure!

PHPMyadmin
is a good MySQL front end

Links to other free software.

list of free versions of Windows applications

http://www.pricelessware.org/

Filesharing:
http://www.slyck.com/ – excellent site covering everthing you want to know about filesharing
including WinMX, Bittorrent, e-mule … everything!

The best bit-torrent client is Azureus, although not the most fully featured, it’s the most reliable and doesn’t have problems
with share ratio for some trackers. I strongly recommend using
Peerguardian
too.

And finally…Penetrating the rings around Uranus

If space is your thing, Celestia is a free real-time space simulation that lets you experience our universe in three dimensions. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. Thanks to Rob for that one.