What are your Top 10 programs?

Stefano Demiliani responds to a new piece on Slashdot: What are your Top 10 programs?  10? Who could live with 10 programs?  Beyond the standard word processor/database/spreadsheet/presentation programs, I'd need at least:

• Winzip (unpack those zip files)
• Winamp (music for the soul)
• EditPlus (handy text editor, 1000x better than Notepad)
• Adobe Acrobat Reader (for reading PDF files)
• Adobe Photoshop (image editing)
• Adobe Pagemaker (old-school desktop publishing, but I like it)
• Ahead Nero Burning Rom (for burning CDs/DVDs)
• Xara X (great vector graphics app from merry old England)
• Macromedia Dreamweaver (fast web design)
• Blogjet (posting to this site)
• SharpReader (nice RSS news aggregator)
• WS_FTP (full-featured FTP utility)
• Vmware Workstation (for non-destructive testing)
• MyInfo (a handy note/outline editor from Milenix)
• Symantec Antivirus
• TurboNote+ (great yellow "sticky" notes)
• Audacity (quick audio editing)

And why stop there? I'm always finding handy utilities that prove useful, including ones I've mentioned here before such as JPEGCrops (for cropping digital images), FolderSizes (for figuring out what's eating up all that hard drive space), and Spike (the network clipboard utility).

What about you?  Any tips?

Kevin Kelly on Improving Your Commute

Kevin Kelly touts the pleasures of listening to books on tape at Cool Tools.  I completely agree with his points: it's a great way to improve a commute; unabridged versions are a LOT better (libraries are key here unless you're willing to spend $50-100 per book); and a good narrator matters (I'm a big fan of George Guidall).  I often find I get more out of listening to a book too, because it prevents my unfortunate tendency to skim!

Spike provides neat network clipboard

I have two computers at my desk tied together with a keyboard-video-mouse switch. I've always found it a convenient productive solution.  But on a regular basis I run across information on computer #1 that I'd like to paste into something on computer #2.  Spike, a new network clipboard program from Porchdog Software, makes that a snap. Using a cross-platform implementation of the Zeroconf networking standard -- think Apple Rendevous -- you can share temporary and persistent clipboards between PCs and Macs automatically (though you can also specify ports for firewalls and passwords for clipboard privacy).  Very nice.

Typewriter nostalgia -- would white-out by any other name smell as sweet?

Retiree prefers clack of typewriter over hum of PC | theledger.com

Though marginalized by general-purpose computers, here's an article about how typewriters can still be found here and there.  As a kid I learned to touch type on a old manual Underwood myself, which necessitated really whacking the keys, a habit I had to un-learn in later years when I moved to electric typewriters and then personal computers and "daisywheel" printers.  There's probably something positive to be said about having to "crystallize each phrase" before putting it down indelibly on paper -- but not by me!  God bless the backspace.

New desktop in honor of spring

Spring trout season just began here in New York, and I used the event as an excuse to replace the old default Windows XP desktop background with something new.  The fish -- a bluegill, not a trout -- is a 1908 illustration from the Illinois Natural History Survey (bluegill is the state fish of Illinois).  A couple minutes in PhotoShop and I had a whole new outlook.

This test PC has an Nvidia-powered dual display so I can use two monitors as if they were one huge display.  Very productive when you're dealing with programs that use lots of separate tool pallete windows.  The Mac-like dock in the upper-right corner is the now-defunct free Y'z Dock -- one of the few dock programs that supports multiple monitors.

I'm not much of a desktop "modder," but it was fun to give the test system a little style.  Setting this up was trivial and I can easily revert back to a standard configuration if I want.

But this was also a reminder about some of the arbitrary limitations built into Windows XP.  For example, I purposely hid the few remaining desktop icons I have in this screenshot because I don't like how the icon labels look. You can have icon labels that blend perfectly into your background, as long as you want white text and heavy dark shadows around the text.  If your background is dark, that works ok -- though I think the shadows are too thick and distracting even with my dark blue fish desktop -- but if you use a light background, icon captions turn into an unreadable mess. If you turn off "use shadows for icon labels," you have to have solid color backgrounds behind the labels which won't blend in nicely with your background. Ditto for choosing another color for icon caption text.  I assume with the right third-party utility I could easily get around this limitation, but I'm still scratching my head wondering why Microsoft couldn't have made these user-configurable options from the start. 

Maybe in Longhorn...