Softwares/Programs you can't live without

Rega Amplifiers
Exam Diff - code comparison
Windows media player - somehow moved away from my earlier fav winamp.
Airtel PC Secure (F-secure) Antivirus - Its paid but smooth performance.
 
thevortex said:
Give Kmeleon a try if those are the addons you cannot do without. It is faster, more responsive and lighter on memory. There is also a Community created variant which has a very nice theme and a preconfigured Speed Dial - like Opera.
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I thought you will suggest some settings or any other equivalent things(adblockplus,noscript) related to opera.Actually I don't have interest in changing theme(cosmetics) of browser and using variants like u suggested rather than the simple and most preferred interface of original developer.
 
rajuwaste said:
I thought you will suggest some settings or any other equivalent things(adblockplus,noscript) related to opera.Actually I don't have interest in changing theme(cosmetics) of browser and using variants like u suggested rather than the simple and most preferred interface of original developer.
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Actually a readymade 'block content' feature is available on Opera by default. If you right click anywhere on a web page, I think you are given an option to block the content. Double check the link that you want blocked and if you click 'done' you should be done with the blocking.

Although there are a few alternatives too for this. Such as:

A.Ruzanov - AdBlock for Opera - analogue of Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper

On Noscript you can try this alternative (as given one one of the Opera forums):

"1. Uncheck:
Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Content:
Enable Javascript
Enable Java
Enable plug-ins

2. Visit the site you want to use javascript on.

3. Press F12 > Edit site preferences...:
Content:
Enable Java
Enable plug-ins

Scripting:
Enable JavaScript

Just repeat step 3 for every site that you wish scripts to be run one".
 
EZTimeSync
Convert
ZoneAlarm
NOD32
AShampoo Burning Studio
Cell Phone Manager
BitTorrent
GigaGet
IrfanView
PhotoShop
PhotoPlus
Paint.Net
ISODisk
Kana Reminder
Exact Audio Copy
FooBar
iTunes
Audacity
PerfectDisk
TCPOptimizer
RegCompact
RegCleaner
RegDistiller
EasyCleaner
Startup Manager
Powertoys for WinXP
WinMerge
XPLite
Windows Install Cleanup
Maxthon
miFiles
Trillian
EditPlus
MS Office
Visual Studio.Net
ATF-Cleaner
 
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I thought that I couldn't live without mailwasher. In fact, it was one of my reservations about moving to Linux, given that my e-mail is more than 90% spam.

However, given a chance, Thunderbird's spam detection turns out to be just as good. I have to use Thunderbird set to download headers only and then specifically download the mails I want. This actually works quite well, as there is quite a lot of "legitimate junk", eg companies whose mailing lists I am signed up for, but whose information, newsletters, etc, etc, I do not want right now.
 
I am surprised people are listing trivial stuff here. The thread is about programs you cant live without. All the firefox/opera fanboys will switch without any hassle to some other browser the day their favorite dies off. Not really "Cant live without" stuff is it?

For cant live without stuff, one of the two has to satisfy:
1. No replacements are available for the program.
2. Replacements are really poor.

In my 20+ years of using computer, I found only one program I cant live without. Its vi. The only other editor that comes close is emacs and I find it extremely inconvenient to use.

Edit: by the way, I use both opera and firefox at the same time most of the times. For what its worth, I like opera better.
 
Doors666 said:
I found only one program I cant live without. Its vi.
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Wonderful!

Once upon a time I was proficient. Unix was my first OS, and vi was my editor not only for programming scripting, but for correspondence, and everything else. As I had not yet, then, progressed to more powerful pattern-matching and processing tools, I did one of my first data-transformation excercises in vi. I think it was resetting a flag in an invoicing package data so that the transactions could be re-exported to the ledger package.

One day last week, I wanted to know how much I'd spent at Flipkart. I cut&pasted my order data into Libre Calc --- and stared at it for a while. Maybe it might have been easier in Excel (the only MS program I actually admire), but the lines were just not regular enough.

In two minutes, I had it pasted into vi, and ran two commands.

1. match beginning of line to Rs. and replace it with nothing.
2. match a group of digits at the beginning of the line, and replaced everything after it with nothing.

I had a clean column of numbers. I'm just ashamed that I can no longer, off the top of my head, write the ex command that says, look for a group of digits preceded by Rs and delete everything else. It uses \( and \) in the search pattern and &<digit> in the replace? Something like that. It's worth spending half an hour working something like that out if it has to be done many times, but not for a one off.

Apart from vi; grep, ex, sed and so on were once very much the tools of my trade, and the one that stands out head and shoulders above all as being responsible for earning my living for quite a few years was --- AWK. Oh! I guess I should mention sh :)

I guess that those who love vi hate emacs, and vice versa. I'm a vi man, for sure, and could never get a grip on all those emacs key combinations. You might enjoy this:

xkcd: Real Programmers

[IMG2]http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/real_programmers.png[/IMG2]

























(reproducable for free, non-commercial, with attribution)

At one point I worked in technical support dept, and one of the packages we supported was Wordperfect (running on Unic machines). There were two of us there who much preferred to do all our correspondence in vi. We refused to use WP until we were formally warned that we had to! :)
 
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anm said:
there is nothing that comes close to MS outlook. I can't live *in office* without that.
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I guess that might be because thats the only one your company supports:). nothing special about ol, tons of better email readers out there.
 
Thad E Ginathom said:
I had a clean column of numbers. I'm just ashamed that I can no longer, off the top of my head, write the ex command that says, look for a group of digits preceded by Rs and delete everything else. It uses \( and \) in the search pattern and &<digit> in the replace? Something like that. It's worth spending half an hour working something like that out if it has to be done many times, but not for a one off.
Click to expand...

\( and \) will "hold" a pattern, \1, \2 etc can be used for recalling it.
 
1. LTF viewer for peeking into very large text files having millions of records. No text editor can match its speed.
2. Irfan view
 
doors666 said:
\( and \) will "hold" a pattern, \1, \2 etc can be used for recalling it.
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Oh yes, I got my & and \ in a twist.

It's great to know that these tools are still in full and proper use. Over thirty years now? What a system those guys came up, eh? I guess I fell for Unix at first sight :cool:
 
The one program I cannot live without is MS Excel - and since it will only run on windows (Ah well, they have cloud, but thats not completely functional for advanced users yet) also Windows.

Excel is an underrated workhorse program and any alternative does not even come close. Most of the other software I use, I can easily think of perfectly alright alternatives but not for Excel.
 
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