Software for my new laptop 2

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:15:49 +0000

Time for a new laptop, and to replace software. Here’s my new list.

A lot has changed in the last 5 years. Mainly, I use the browser, cygwin and Portable Apps a lot more. (The last is to escape jailers, not registry bloat.)

Media

Chrome [new]: For browsing and development. Fast, light, and stays out of the way.
Firefox: I keep it just for printing. Chrome sucks at printing.
Media Player Classic: Nothing against it, but I decided to stick to just one app, which is…
VLC: Continues to be the best media player, IMHO.
WinAmp: I just manage my playlists as M3U files, using Python programs.
Audacity: Still the easiest way to record audio.
Camstudio: The simplest free portable screen capture software I know.
PicPick [new]: Lightweight, powerful screenshot grabber
VirtualDub: Not the simplest, but still good for what I need: cropping and joining video.
MediaCoder [new]: Good for video/audio conversions. Maybe I’ll install this later.
Foxit Reader: The simples free portable PDF reader I know, better than…
NitroPDF Reader [new]: … which is good for Printing PDFs – better than…
Primo PDF: … which has trouble on rare occasions.
Microsoft Reader: I have a lot of ebooks in .LIT.
Kindle for PC [new]: I don’t own a Kindle, but I’ve bought a few ebooks.
Paint.NET: Good enough for cropping and adjusting colours on images.
Windows Live Writer [new]: The best way to write this blog WYSIWYG
Inkscape [new]: I occasionally edit vector graphics.
Google Earth. Google Maps is good enough.
ImgBurn: I no longer use CDs/DVDs. Just flash drives and external hard disks.
Picasa: I’ve stopped browsing pictures. No time.

Sharing

Dropbox [new]: Simplest way of sharing files.
Skype: I use it more than my phone.
Google Talk: For those friends who have chat enabled on Gmail.
TeamViewer [new]: Pretty efficient screen sharing. Works better than Skype, I think.
Google Calendar Sync: To keep Outlook in sync with Google Calendar.

Utilities

7-Zip [new]: Covers all compressed formats, and has the best compression ratio.
WinRAR: 7-Zip has it covered.
AutoHotKey [new]: Shockingly powerful macro functionality. Shockingly underused.
Clip [new]: Command line clipboard. dir | clip copies the directory to the clipboard.
ClipX [new]: Stores multiple clipboard entries and history. Invaluable.
DiskTT [new]: I’m paranoid about disk speed. I keep measuring it.
WinDirStat [new]: Best way to find what’s taking up space on disk.
ProcessExplorer [new]: Just in case Task Manager doesn’t show you everything.
Google Desktop: Well, it’s dead.
mDesktop [new]: A Virtual Desktop Manager (multiple screens) for Windows 7.
PowerToys: doesn’t work on Windows 7, but I got X-Mouse working.
Teracopy: I don’t worry too much about copying files any more. Maybe later.
Junction Link Magic [new]: To map folders. But I now use Cygwin, and symlinks rock.
uTorrent [new]: For bittorrent.
ntlmaps [new]: proxies requiring a password to a proxy not requiring a password
Putty [new]: SSH for Windows, but can also act as an SSH tunnel
TrueCrypt [new]: To securely back up my bank details on the cloud.

Development

Cygwin: UNIX on Windows. I also install make, curl, lynx, wget, tidy, mercurial, git, openssh, rsync, optipng, pdftk, sqlite3, imagemagick and sgrep. Also cacert.pem.
ActivePython: My primary programming language. I also install NumPy, SciPy, ipython, tornado, tabular, lxml and eyeD3.
ActivePerl: … isn’t as readable.
node.js: Soon becoming my favourite programming language. Fast, popular.
XAMPP [new]: Fastest way of getting Apache + MySQL + PHP running
nginx [new]: Faster than Apache, but no CGI, and I like CGI.
Google AppEngine [new]: To maintain sites like 250.
redis [new]: My new favourite database. In-memory, and fast.
CouchDB [new]: Simple, persistent JSON store. (Or MongoDB. Both’re fine.)
Fiddler2 [new]: To see where traffic is really coming from.
IETester [new]: I’ve stopped developing for Internet Explorer 6 or 7.
JDK: Sadly, some apps require a Java compiler. (I like the JRE. Can’t stand Java.)
Notepad++ [new]: Excellent editor. I’ll probably go back to it some time, but…
Sublime Text 2 [new]: … is just a little bit cooler.
Crimson Editor: Didn’t have Unicode support a long time ago, so I switched.
Subversion. I’ve switched to Mercurial and git.

Data Visualisation

R [new]. The God of all statistical packages. Install reshape and ggplot2.
Gephi [new]: Does network visualisations quite well.
GraphViz [new]: Does network visualisations not quite as well.
Google Refine [new]: Helps clean up messy data.
qhull [new]: For voronoi treemaps. Don’t ask.
wkhtml2pdf [new]: To print web pages as PDF.

What am I missing that you really like?

Comments

Scraping for a laptop | s-anand.net 14 Jan 2012 4:01 am (pingback): […] for a laptop January 14th, 2012 How I do things S Anand I’ve returned my laptop, and it’s time to buy a new one. For the first time in my life, I’m buying a laptop for […]
shiva 10 Dec 2011 11:45 am: Wat abt notepad ++
408wij 28 Sep 2011 11:56 pm: Evernote Zipeg (available on both Mac and Win, better UI than 7zip) Keepass Switcher (Expose-like feature on Win. A bit flaky and not supported.) Erunt (registry backup) I’m trialing Xplorer2.
Arun 13 Oct 2011 6:11 pm: I tried to do something similar and then got lazy and simply installed VirtualBox ;)
Rajasekar 4 Nov 2011 11:35 am: Good One.
bhavesh 4 Jan 2012 5:24 pm: What about CClener and Unlocker?
Naveen 28 Sep 2011 6:26 am: Finally :-)
Ravi Atluri (@sonnes) 28 Sep 2011 7:14 am: One more thing, I wanted to know from you is - How do you organize your work, specifically code and how do you handle repository and workspaces (if you use an IDE) ? In case you don’t use an IDE, what kind of coding environment? I got a new laptop a few months back and have been trying to figure out how to start organizing my work, repositories of things I work or experiment on and the IDE. Currently, I am trying to put in Java, Python and Scala into eclipse by using it’s plugins, hoping eclipse would help me to organize the code and repos.
Mohit 30 Sep 2011 8:37 am: At least some of this could be automated :) check out “ninite dot com”
Shankar V 30 Sep 2011 3:06 pm: Excellent list. Thanks for sharing :) I agree about Eclipse - too heavy. But if you code in Java, I dont see a better alternative. Anyone remember NetBeans? Google Desktop - I find this amazingly useful and I am sad Google is retiring this. Wish there is a good alternative. I hate windows search.
Venu 7 Oct 2011 7:22 am: Thanks for excellent compilation. Can you point to any free utility to optimize the performance of our computers
TD 28 Sep 2011 8:32 am: Wordweb and Evernote
TD 28 Sep 2011 8:38 am: Also, iTunes…. Not that I like it but for Ipod.
S Anand 28 Sep 2011 3:13 pm: @Ravi: I don’t use an IDE. Just Sublime Text + bash/Command Prompt + git/hg. Since I don’t use Java, I can stay away from Eclipse (which I think is way too heavy for my liking).
Karen 17 May 2012 5:23 am: Very nice list! I would add JV 16 Power Tools to the Utilities list. They have a free 30 day fully functional trial to try them out. It’s not limited like most trial software.
Vinu 11 Aug 2012 11:06 am: If you spend any time in Excel, ASAP Utilities is an absolute joy!… get it and I’m pretty sure, you’ll swear by it in no time.. the Sparklines add-in by Fabrice Rimlinger is also excellent.. a bit raw, but powerful nevertheless.
Vinayak 23 Jan 2013 7:40 am: Nice list. You should really try out: Xplorer2 (get the professional version if you can - it is $30 and worth every penny and more) from http://zabkat.com Wikidpad - for organizing information in an offline desktop wiki - from http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/ Sublime Text - the best text editor - http://www.sublimetext.com/ Everything - the perfect replacement for Google Desktop - actually it is better since it does not hog memory - from http://www.voidtools.com/ Slickrun - the perfect program launcher - http://www.bayden.com/slickrun/ MindManager - for Mindmapping - from http://www.mindjet.com/ Irfanview - basic image viewer and editor - http://irfanview.com/ SumatraPDF - Single portable program for reading ebooks (ePub & Mobi), comics (CBR and CBZ) and PDFs - from http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html
Software I currently use | s-anand.net 9 May 2014 6:19 pm (pingback): […] few years, I review the software I use. Here are some of my earlier […]
Perl, 1994-2011 - S Anand 28 Sep 2024 10:21 pm (pingback): […] 2011, I stopped installing Perl on my […]

Portable Apps

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:17:24 +0000

I’m totally hooked to portable apps now. You don’t need admin rights to install them. You can run them off a USB stick. They won’t make your machine slower. All the reasons not to install an application vanish.

PortableApps.com is a good starting point. For what it’s worth, here are my portable apps by category (most used on top).

Platforms

Firefox. If you’re using IE6, please die. Lack of admin access is no longer an excuse.
Cygwin brings you UNIX commands to Windows.
Portable Ubuntu run Ubuntu as a window in Windows.

Tiny utilities

GDI++ replaces the Windows font engine with a Mac-line rendering. Looks cool.
Clip is a command line tool that copies to clipboard. “dir | clip” copies the file listing to the clipboard. Outrageously useful.
PicPick takes screenshots of the screen, windows, regions, whatever. And you can edit them too.
uTorrent downloads torrents.
WinDiff compares two files and tells you the difference.
AlwaysOnTopMaker makes any window stay on top of other windows.
DiskTT tells you your hard disk (or USB stick) speed.
WinHTTrack downloads websites.
AllChars lets you type special characters like ½ by type Alt-1-2 or “ by Alt--. It’s shockingly intuitive.
Restoration lets you undelete permanently deleted files.
Windirstat tells you what’s taking up space on your disk.
Sysinternals is a bunch of system monitoring utilities.
Virtual CD-ROM mounts .ISO files. You can use .ISO files without burning them.
Autostitch stitches together photos to create panoramas.

Media

VLC plays any audio or video file.
TightVNC lets you log into other machines like a remote desktop./li>
Audacity lets you record and edit audio.
CamStudio lets you record video (screen capture).
VirtualDub lets you edit video.
MediaCoder converts audio and video from any format to another.
GIMP is like Photoshop. You can edit pictures.
Inkscape lets you edit vector graphics.

Servers

XAMPP installs Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl at one shot.
App Engine is Google’s freemium platform for app hosting.
Persevere is a RESTful JSON app server that runs on Java.
Tomcat is a JSP server.
nginx is a fast web server
CouchDB is a RESTful JSON app server that runs on Erlang.

Development tools

Notepad++ is my current text editor. It has syntax highlighting, column editing, Unicode support, auto-completion, and is fast and free. So I dumped Crimson Editor.
Putty is SSH for Windows.
Tidy cleans up HTML files.
CSSTidy cleans up CSS files.
Processing is a graphical programming language.
Wireshark monitors network traffic.
Drip checks IE for leaks.
NVDA is a free screen reader.

Let me repeat:

You don’t need admin rights to install these.
You can run them off a USB stick.
They won’t make your machine slower.

There’s really no reason whatsoever not to have them on a USB stick at least. They’re cheap.

Comments

Naveen 19 Jan 2010 9:34 am: I have been using portableapps for more than an year now.Though the idea is to run it off a USB stick, this results in poor performance usually, especially for firefox.
Ganapathy 13 Feb 2010 5:47 pm: I landed in your site for analyzing IR songs. The collection of applications in www.pendriveapps.com seems to better than PortableApps.com (my personal opinion).

No registry cleaners

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Why I don’t use a registry cleaner

Folder Size 2.1

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Folder Size lets you see the size of folders in Windows Explorer. Useful to find out where all the junk is hidden.

GDS Extreme

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 12:00:00 +0000

GDS Extreme is a Windows GUI front-end for Google Desktop Search that lets you filter / sort results (like X1.)

windows-utilities on S Anand

Software for my new laptop 2

Comments

Portable Apps

Comments

No registry cleaners

Folder Size 2.1

GDS Extreme