The following is a list of windows software which I find useful. I refer to this list when I install a new machine so I can remember which things I need to install.
Analog Box (aka ABox or ABox2) is an open source, circuit based, modular software synthesizer for Microsoft Windows platforms. You put sound objects on the screen, connect them together, listen and adjust. ABox was developed between 1998 and 2004 by Andy Turner at andyware.com. The software and web pages now reside here at Google Sites and at Google Code. (Text verbatim from their homepage)
Pro Imaging Powertoys is Microsoft’s Color Control Panel Applet for Windows XP. This little panel applet lets you mess with the color gamet of windows.
PingPlotter is a cute little program that does a traceroute and pings each of the nodes along the way and shows you a graph over time.
EnergyXT is a another music sequencer. I’d say it’s similar to Reaper in. It lets you lay down tracks, create sound loops, and mix it all together.
Sue and Bruce Wilcox have written books and software to teach and play the game of Go.
I have found all of their material extremely useful, easy to use, and mentally challenging:
EZ-GO Oriental Strategy in a Nutshell – This is truly an excellent book and by far one of the best I’ve seen on how to play the game.
Bruce Wilcox’s Go Dojos: Sector Fights and Contact Fights – These are programs which walk you through in a tutorial like fashion of sector fights and contact fights in Go. Extremely well done. Hours and hours of explanations and exercises.
EGO Go program – A computer Go program that plays at about 12kyu. No, I’ve not beaten the computer yet!
Synergy-Foss is a small little piece of software that runs in the background that lets you slide your mouse (and keyboard) focus to a different computer on the network. Yes really! Set it up on 2 computers next to one another and you can control the other computer from one keyboard/mouse.
Unfortunately, you can’t slide a window on to the other computer!
The version of Synergy I am using has some problems. It crashes sometimes if you play with the settings. It also does not allow the screens to lock, even after you quit it. Hopefully they’ll fix these little annoyances. This could be a great little tool.
Gigapan is not wholly software. Gigapan.org is a website that you can upload your panoramic images to. They also have an uploader, the gigapan uploader. I don’t know how it works so fast but it uploads hundreds of gigabyte images in a very short time. And the quality is pretty good when it does so!
ImgBurn is a simple to use application that lets you take an iso file and burn it to a CD/DVD.
Balsamiq is a mock-up wireframe tool for applications design.
Don’t try to do this stuff in Word! It’s SOOOOOO much easier to use a tool like Balsamiq. It costs $79 and it’s worth every penny. I like to mock up all my complex websites and run the design by the client before I start implementing things.
Gpg4win is a gui front end to GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard). It is used to encrypt, decrypt, and digitally sign files.
It’s compatible with PGP. I managed to load my way old PGP into it.
It’s a shame that encryption things like this are not well integrated into email programs. It’s more of a copy/paste operation in order to get encrypted mail working. Especially with web-based mail like gmail.