Post5 underrated Applications that I insist you try

November 26, 2008 – 2:53 pm

This is more of a list than a review of each product, there is plenty of information out there on them for you to find.

1. AntiVir
Everybody loves their favourite anti virus program and many refuse to use any others, this creates a scenario where someone is using 1 anti virus application for years, the problem with this is no anti virus application stays on top for more than a year, you can bitch about how yours has been the best for years but those are the facts, many people are caught out when a virus gets through their anti virus defenses simply because they refused to change and keep up to date with current trends.

One high flier this year is AntiVir by Avira, AntiVir is similar to AVG in it’s simplistic nature and like AVG has a free version and several paid versions, it shines in scan times and detection rates, however you must watch out for those false positives as it does have a high false positive rate, this can be fairly easy to detect as those usually have no information in the virus database. I have not been able to try out their Firewall that is included in the Premium Security Suite however I have experience with the web filter and have found it incredibly effective, say goodbye to Antivirus 2008 trying to install itself because AnviVir won’t even let the page open and will instead put up it’s own page explaining the situation.

2. ImgBurn
I feel that this burning program doesn’t get the credit it deserves, it’s simple, fast and has the advanced features that you would not normally find in a free product, it’s the perfect application for burning a slipstreamed Windows installation yet can also burn the latest Linux ISO with only a few clicks.

3. FileZilla
FileZilla is an FTP application, again, simple, fast, highly customisable.

4. FoxIt Reader
This application has come a long way in a short time, it is a free alternative to Adobe’s PDF reader and works very well, I have not come across a PDF document that has not displayed properly. The speed has to be experienced to be believed, it absolutely flies, not only that but it works perfectly on fairly old computers as well. PS. Watch out for their sneaky install program in version 3, it tries to install toolbars and shortcuts, just uncheck them when you see them.

5. DownThemAll!
A simple download accelerator add-on for Firefox, some of us with high speed broadband connections need to utilise multiple download streams at once, the selections of software can be quite daunting, ranging from spyware/adware infested to down right intrusive and buggy. DownThemAll! is donationware, this means that on the main window, their is a link to donate to the application’s developer, it works great for multiple stream downloads with no fuss.

Written by Ben

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PostRepetition on the Internet

November 26, 2008 – 1:49 pm

Repetition is something that gets to me. Everybody experiences it when they are reading news, searching and during general browsing.

There is a ridiculous amount of repetition on the Internet, I’m not talking about the generally similar articles, posts, pictures etc out there as they still add extra information, but whole articles can be spread over dozens of websites with no extra information, it’s a bit of a waste and it’s not necessary, I can understand for archival purposes that having multiple copies of information can keep information available for a long time, but there are many services available that do this professionally, for free and sometimes without request, these services are necessary so that the internet doesn’t lose important information.

Recently through the millions of Blogs set up around the world people have gotten into a habit of copying and pasting an article, a picture, a whole section of a website with nothing more than “website x had this to say” or “our friends at x wrote this”. Spreading information is important these days as it’s easy to get your “incredibly important” news/article buried under the “general crap” that other websites spew out, however copying an article from a very prominent site and pasting it onto your 2-bit blog has little possibility of reaching a further audience.

I try my best when sharing information from an important article or blog post to add to the information supplied, even writing a whole article about my views/experiences and linking to theirs. I’m not going to say that people only do this to get their search rankings up, because there are sites that genuinely want to spread the information, however it just seems lazy to me to not write at least a paragraph about the article, isn’t that what their site is there for in the first place? Spreading it’s own information?

Written by Ben

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