Fewer Broken Pieces

Apple’s iPod product is popular, but its abilities are fairly limited.  Want to play back Ogg Vorbis files or customized the user interface?  Too bad.

Thank goodness for Rockbox.  Rockbox is a free-software alternative firmware for most iPods and many other portable digital music players.  I happen to use it on my 2nd generation iPod Mini, and I love it.  So, if you are feel like trying something new on your boring old iPod, check it out.

For those Mac OS X users who have to connect to Windows servers via remote desktop, Microsoft provided their own Mac port of Remote Desktop. That was nice, but it is stale software and it’s a Microsoft product. Let’s face it: Apple users cannot abide a tainted system. Thankfully there is Cord, which is a free software implementation of a remote desktop client for OS X.

I just ran across a nice Free Software audio player called aTunes. It is written in Java, so it may not be possible to implement it in a fully Free Software environment (yet). Still, it is a nice iTunes replacement (on Windows especially).

It of course plays your music, syncs with your iPod, downloads podcasts, has support for more codecs and formats, implements Audioscrobbler and last.fm and other goodies, and in general is a nice client. The big drawback for some will be the lack of iTunes Music Store support and the inability to play DRMed files. I am using it as my primary player on a Windows box at work, and it does just fine.

Similar options for Unixy systems include Banshee and Amarok (which after being ported to Windows for version 2 will be my personal recommendation for a Windows audio player).

Some time ago I discovered that some of my IM buddies are still using AOL’s AIM client for instant messaging. It has been so long since I used that ad-riddled piece of garbage that I had literally forgot that it exists. I assumed everyone used free multi-protocol chat clients by now. I was wrong.

Thank God for Pidgin. Pidgin (formerly Gaim) is a free software mutli-protocol messaging client. What does that mean? It means that you can use one program to talk on AIM, ICQ, GTalk, Yahoo, MSN, and many others. Pidgin retains all the useful functionality but discards ads and possible spyware. It is also cross-platform, so Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and *BSD users (and probably more) can all use it. So what are you waiting for?

I remember the dark days of Windows computing when one had to download and utilize WinZip and WinRar just to unpack one’s goods. Now we live in an age of light, and in the age of Pea Zip.

Pea Zip is a open source archive and compression tool. It works great and is pretty fast. Also, you don’t have to wrestle with annoying “Register now…” screens while using it. Once again the world is one step closer to being able to use an NT-compatible system in the Free World.

Adobe Reader is somehow the “standard” for PDF viewers on Windows in spite of the fact that it is a bloated, slow, and cumbersome piece of crap. Long had I suffered under its cruel reign, fearing to accidentally open a PDF in the browser and bring my surfing to a stand-still. Not too long ago I found Sumatra. Sumatra is small, fast, simple, and free (gratis and libre). I no longer dread opening PDFs and I laugh in the face of “PDF Warnings” on Slashdot. It really is a wonderful tool if you just need to view and print PDFs (which I think is what most people have to do with PDFs).

A while back I wrote about another open source replacement on Windows. I think I will keep blogging my finds (and there have been several so far). It is wonderful when open source software is available and superior to boot.

While I like to convert people from Windows to free operating systems, I am a realist and I know that there is always some “kill app” that is only available on Windows. Whatever, I can live with that. So what I do is bring free software to people on Windows. Thankfully there is an ever-increasing amount of quality free software available for Windows.

Today I was excited to find InfraRecorder, an open source CD/DVD burning program for Windows. It works well with my external burner. Goodbye Roxio! I can’t say it has been nice knowing you.