List of Useful and Free Software v2

Here's a small PDF compressor. It's most effective if your PDFs have a lot of white space such as margins or they're text only PDFs. Sometimes it doesn't work very well and sometimes it won't even load a PDF. But it's worth a shot if you need to email something.

http://www.portablefreeware.com/?id=494
 
On Windows 7 you have a feature called Snap I found useful for type articles and stuff. You can use this program to do it on earlier versions of Windows. Although it sometimes randomly crashes it works fine. Unfortunately it hasnt been updated in years so it might break in the future.

http://www.aerosnap.de/

You might ask why I dont tile windows horizontially. That messes up every open window, not just the two I want open.

Sometimes when typing articles Id find it useful to have 2 monitors but thats not practical as I have limited space.
 
I dont know if I posted this. It squashes PNG images the filesize. I run my PNG images through it before uploading to the site. It can be slow for large ones though.

http://pnggauntlet.com/

By the way, here's some of the squishing it did. (Note that the two 100% ones were already squished and they were mixed in with the others. I wasn't sure which ones I had squished so I just did them all.)

pnggauntlet.png


The best ones are for the PNG images I did not touch really, for example cropping or greyscaling it.
 
This is not strictly a software but it lets you make address labels and such to print out. It's obviously geared towards Avery labels. But I just printed out an address label and was able to cut it with scissors.
http://enu.print.avery.com/SelectSku
 
If you use IrfanView with the PDF view and saving plugins, you can get a pretty nice basic editor (cropping, for instance, and compression if you save at a slightly lower quality than the original file). One little issue though, which isnt too important to me but might be for someone else: you'll lose all the machine-readable text. Meaning no copying and pasting. Also note that I havent really tested it on multi-page files yet.
 
I've used jpdftweak to merge several PDFs and add bookmarks. It's pretty quick (quicker than Adobe Acrobat itself, just about), has a GUI and a CLI. Great little tool.
 
Well, for merging them I like to use pdfsam (which also has an option to rearrange pages which has helped). I don't deal with the bookmark part though.

Pdftk can also be useful. I've used the "burst" function (it splits every page individually) in cases where pdfsam just gave me an out of memory error (it was a rather large file, over a gigabyte. A digitized microform roll if I remember correctly. I only deal with those once in a while.)
 
Here is the sscreen recording software I use now.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Video-Recording/Gregion.shtml

The author website is down but softpedia has a good link. It actually works quite well although it can be choppy if youre not careful with the settings. And I somehow managed to mess up the aspect ratio of my first recording but I fixed that but then I ended up with black bars on my video from the fixing process. But then I figured out how to get the aspect ratio right.

Only problem is all the documentation is on the old broken site. But its fairly easy to figure out.
 
aimeeandbeatles said:
Here is the sscreen recording software I use now.

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Video-Recording/Gregion.shtml

The author website is down but softpedia has a good link. It actually works quite well although it can be choppy if youre not careful with the settings. And I somehow managed to mess up the aspect ratio of my first recording but I fixed that but then I ended up with black bars on my video from the fixing process. But then I figured out how to get the aspect ratio right.

Only problem is all the documentation is on the old broken site. But its fairly easy to figure out.
Click to expand...

EDIT: Another note. It also has its own special codec. But it includes a converter along with it so you can convert it. Also if you're in a hurry and don't want to tinker around with settings I found you can just drop it into Windows Movie Maker and export it and it'll work.

ANOTHER EDIT: One more tip. Somewhere in the options there's a priority setting for "Play" and "Capture." Hit Capture or else both your game and the video will be a choppy mess.

Also, you may need to reduce the resolution a bit if you find it choppy otherwise.
 
This is good for text-to-speech with export as audio. (There was Speakonia but you need to register to export it and it's broken. There's also recording with stereo mix but that's a bit of effort.)

http://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm
 
aimeeandbeatles said:
On Windows 7 you have a feature called Snap I found useful for type articles and stuff. You can use this program to do it on earlier versions of Windows. Although it sometimes randomly crashes it works fine. Unfortunately it hasnt been updated in years so it might break in the future.

http://www.aerosnap.de/
Click to expand...

Ive found an alternative. The free version has limitations (personal use only, no multi-monitor, neither of which are a problem for me) but it doesnt crashed.

http://www.nurgo-software.com/products/aquasnap

Portable version:
http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/aquasnap_portable

Ive also found a nice alternative to OpenOffice.org. Its here. You need to register a free license key (you may want to use a throwaway email) but its not a bad program at all, and doesn't take up nearly as much memory as OpenOffice.org. (Thats sort of a habit for me, even though Im not really running low on memory.)
http://www.softmakeroffice.com/
 
You dare betray the OOO?
 
OOO isn't bad, but its a little too heavy for what I need.
 
Libre Office is better than OO according to what little I've read on the subject.
 
Hmm... memory-wise? I've done a few little experiments and for the same document, the SoftMaker Office word processor opens it in less than 10 MB while OO.org requires over 100. I'm not running short on memory, but ... well, you get my idea.
 
The thing is that OO keeps the full stuff running so you can change relatively quickly to whateve rfunction you want, if there's no document open you get the generic OOO screen from which you can open anything. Can be good and bad.
 
Yeah. The thing is, for the amounts of times I use a spreadsheet or what have you...

I do keep a copy of OOO installed (well, it's portable). Its useful for some things. Just too bulky for my day-to-day things where I need something a little more than WordPad.

Anyways for notes and stuff (I have a couple of HUGE RTF files filled up with little snippets and it was getting kind of messy) I've been using this. Its a few years since active development but I rather like it. Though Ill change if I find something better.
http://theguide.sourceforge.net/
Portable version:
http://portableapps.com/apps/office/the_guide_portable

(Interestingly, when I open up my note file in a text editor, you can actually see the text between binary gibberish. It seems to be stored as RTF format. Interesting...)
 
The Guide is the one with the little blue book as its icon?
Such as this?

;)
 
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