Useful Software Thread

Woah.

I wasn't expecting this to be updated in a while, never mind it making a new page. That teaches me never to think threads will stay dead at tv tropes. That and to keep an eye on your threads.

Anyway, I shall happily inform you all that the first two pieces of software that got five or more votes are both Opera  ^*

and VLC media player.

Now to put them on the main list of recommended items.

EDIT: Now on the list of recommended software.

edited 2nd Feb '11 7:33:55 AM by revertedtozero

Hellote.

Anyone have some favorite Firefox add-ons? I'm always in the market for more good ones.

We're not just men of science, we're men of TROPE!

First, so I don't have to link everything, get the add-on search addon and the addon search search addon.

Now, I'm not posting from my main computer, so I don't have the list of all my addons, but I can remember the most important ones.

• Tab Mix Plus: They absolutely should have bundled this with Firefox by default; it just makes it SO much better.
• Download Statusbar: Same as above; not as much help but it's much nicer than the normal download window.
• IE Tab: In case you ever happen across one of those websites that insists on IE, this is how you get around it. (I believe there's also another one called User Agent Switcher that does essentially the same thing but more general.)
• Mouse Gestures: Or, as I call it, the "go back by rocking the mouse buttons extension". It does much more than that, but I use the back function so much more often then the other stuff.

More will come next time I get on my normal computer.

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

You forgot the most important ones: Ad Block and No Script.

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

You also forgot greasemonkey.

Hellote.

The first three (free) pieces of software that go on any mac or PC I use are:

• VLC - been covered, I personally use it to preview AVCHD formats before transcoding.
• Audacity - In some ways more intuitive than Adobe Audition. Recommended for quick edits, tidying up audio files, and re-encoding.
• MPEG Streamclip - you could say it's an Audacity for video, sort of. I typically use it to transcode HD video footage, it offers a great deal of control over output settings  ^*
  ^{you may need to get the odd extra, also-free plugin depending what filetypes you use it for}
  . I also use it for playing .flv files, since I find the default controls a bit more precise than those of VLC.

I'll continue the lavishing of praise on Opera by recommending Opera mini 5 for mobile phone use- rather a good alternative to the in-built ones in my experience.

^^also seconding NoScript as an ff addon.

...is out to lunch.

Hm, firefox addons, let me check my list of enabled ones. I think I've got about twenty or so. Some of them are likely legacy installs from back when it was FF 2.x or so.

1. Ad Blocker
2. Adblock plus
3. All-in-one Sidebar
4. Broadband speed test
5. Copy Link Name
6. Dictionary Tooltip
7. Download Manager Tweak
8. Download Status bar
9. Download helper
10. Down Them All
11. FEBE (I highly recommend this one if you're worried about having to reinstall something.
12. Fission
13. Forecastbar Enhanced
14. Foxy Proxy
15. Greasemonkey
16. Image Zoom
17. Invisible Hand
18. Link Alert
19. Linkification
20. Live IP address
21. Mr Tech Tookit (this is necessary if you want to override any compatibility tests)
22. No Redirect
23. No Script
24. Open In Browser
25. Organize Status Bar
26. RABS (this one is no longer supported though)
27. Rotate Image
28. Screengrab
29. Show Picture
30. Skip Screen
31. Stop! Hammertime
32. Tab History
33. Tab Mix Plus
34. Toolbar Buttons
35. Try Again
36. Update Notifier
37. Window Shopper
38. Ymail Notifier
39. Youtube comment snob

Fight smart, not fair.

Personally, I prefer Google Chrome or Firefox over Opera.

Warm hugs and morally questionable advice given here. Prosey Bitchfest

Yeah, me too. FF was sort of meh.

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

I'll also recommend POV Ray, Audacity and Steam.

F.lux is a colour-temperature adjustment tool which turns down the colour temperature of your display at night, resulting in less of a shock to your system when using a computer at night. I've actually started sleeping better since I installed it on my computers.

For MOD playback, I suggest XMPlay.

For playback of OPL 2/3 music, try Adplug. This can sound better than the original hardware (no, I'm not joking). I personally use the Winamp plugin.

For P 2 P networking, Shareaza and uTorrent. Shareaza's torrent support isn't that great, but it works nicely for Gnutella 1, 2 and ED 2 K downloads and uTorrent makes up for Shareaza's weak points in torrent handling.

For Firefox addons, I'll recommend:

• Download Statusbar
• English (Australian) Dictionary
• Flashblock
• Flashgot: really the only way I can watch anything hosted on bliptv is by using this to save the video to my hard drive first.
• Tineye Reverse Image Search
• Tree Style Tab (no troper should be without this, given it makes the Browser Narcotic sites like TV Tropes manageable)

Accidental mistakes are forgivable, intentional ones are not.

Good Firefox addons I haven't seen mentioned yet:

• Cool Previews (hover your mouse over a link for a second to have the link pop up in a separate and then go away when you don't need it anymore, which makes it great for Wiki Walks)
• Down Them All(a really good downloader designed to let you get everything on a page in a couple clicks)
• HTTPS-everywhere (forces sites to use https)
• Feedly (an extra-fancy RSS reader)
• Omnibar (integrates the location and search bars)

Two more suggestions that I've given several other times in other places: Miro, for automatically downloading and watching your favorite web shows, and Duck Duck Go, a search engine that is almost as good as Google as far as relevance, but excels in useful commands and privacy issues.

Hey, I mentioned DTA in my humongo list.

Fight smart, not fair.

The new Winamp is another decent media player. Not as versatile as VLC, but it plays & saves playlists.

STEAM! Now you don't even have to get out of your computer chair to buy a new game! No more discs to get all scratched up, lost, or defaced by your child!

Couple that to working from home and having pizza delivered, and I have no more use to see the sun EVER AGAIN!

Happiness is zero-gee with a sinus cold.

Seconding uTorrent.

I'm surprised No-one's mentioned Skype yet. The Voice chat system of choice.

Also, I'm just wondering what would happen if someone gave a rec to any emulator of their choice.

Hellote.

Project 64. Because it's the only one I ever used. But it hasn't given me any problems so far, so I guess I'll recommend it.

Warm hugs and morally questionable advice given here. Prosey Bitchfest

The only emulators I've tried are Zsnes and Kega Fusion. Kega is missing some features I'd like, bt there aren't any better alternatives that I know of.

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

@revertedtozero: there are some emulators that are completely legal and there are collections of games and applications that are officially licensed — either ones that have been explicitly made free or ones where a license fee has been paid and the collection is paid for. Emulator doesn't HAVE to equal copyright infringement.

A brighter future for a darker age.

OK, then. Emulators are perfectly fine here, end of.

edited 5th Feb '11 12:57:38 PM by revertedtozero

Hellote.

High-level emulation, e.g. emulation not including actual data from the system is legal in the US. ROM and BIOS dumps aren't. Well, unless they've been authorized.

edited 5th Feb '11 1:01:37 PM by Tzetze

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

Unless the game you want isn't really on Steam.

You can't even write racist abuse in excrement on somebody's car without the politically correct brigade jumping down your throat!

DEBOSS IS MOUNT FIRE EYES!

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! ~ GOD

On the note of Steam, there's Desura, for indie games.

[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.

I'd rather recommend Teamspeak and Qutecom before Skype. IINM both are FLOSS, free from backdoors and at least Teamspeak has a lower overall bandwith consumption. Of course, since the three software are not actually equivalent/alternative to each other, I can't really do that. I'm still doing a vote on Qutecom though because it is one of the best "resuscitated" projects around the FLOSS world.

On emulators, since they are given a go, Visual Boy Advance gets my vote. This emulator covers GB, GBC and VBA on Windows, Linux and Mac without any hassle except accelerated sound in some minor cases. ZSNES does deserve a vote from too, if only because it is the only emulator that doesn't slow to a crawl playing Street Fighter Alpha 2 or (for some reason) Yoshi's Island, and it has proven to me harder to break with the Donkey King Country "ROM-kill bug" than other emulators... And since not only consoles can be emulated, a vote for VirtualBox, a multiplatform virtualization system that can run anything Windows 95 or later, even Windows Server 2008, in a nicely contained environment.

As for the Firefox extensions, I +1 both No Script and Ad Block Plus, and add a vote, in case it hasn't been done already, for Enigmail (which I guess amounts to voting for GPG/PGP) and Header Spy.

And since Firefox is recommended, I have to cover all the bases and recommend Mozilla Thunderbird as well. In particular with the Enigmail extension.

Any field that could be left to promote? Global menus perhaps, in which case I'd vote for Cardapio, a Gnome menu that brings most of the nice features of the Windows 7 menu, plus integration with the native Linux finder backends such as mlocate. I hear it even works well with XFCE.

Fanfic Recs orwellianretcon'd: cutlocked for committee or for Google?

Mozilla Thunderbird = Yay. Two votes.

^ That makes it two votes for Virtual Box, I already mentioned it a page or two ago.

I also recommend uTorrent, so is that... three votes?

I give another vote to Audacity. Not sure how many that is.

Warm hugs and morally questionable advice given here. Prosey Bitchfest