My Freebies

I'm not feeling particularly literary today, so I'm going through my start menu and listing all the free software that I use. It's all for Windows unless I say otherwise.

Defraggler - I probably don't need it because the one built into Windows works just fine. Still, it does a couple of cool things.

Notepad++ - See previous blog entry. Is nice.

Microsoft Security Essentials - Microsoft releases a surprisingly good malware-killer after several years of their mediocre OneCare product.

Lita SQLite Editor - See previous blog entry. Is handy if you deal with SQLite at all.

Mappy Tilemap Editor - It's pretty outdated looking, but if I need to slap together a quick game level, it does the job. I used it for Double Twelve and Head On Collision to draw up the levels. Good for light duty. Exports ActionScript arrays directly, which saves me a step.

NSIS - Good little install builder. Lots of good samples out there so you can save installation for the last minute.

NIS Edit - It's basically Notepad that edits and compiles NSIS scripts, but since NSIS scripts aren't especially big, it does a servicable job as an NSIS IDE. It edits, calls the compiler, highlights the errors, and can call the help directly, which is all you need it to do.

ResourcesExtract - Simple little gizmo that can crawl and extract resources from an EXE. I've rarely needed this, and when I have it's more of a "I wonder how they did this", but it works if you need it.

Appcelerator Titanium (Windows and Mac) - I haven't done much with this yet, but I might in the future. It certainly looks pretty cool.

FileZilla (Windows and Mac) - Terrific FTP program. I haven't found any FTP-related task that it can't do.

DropBox - DropBox is 102% awesome. It's just what you need if you're on the road and you need to get a file to yourself at home, as you can throw something in the box and it'll automagically appear in the other DropBox machines you own. It's also got clients for iPhone and Mac. The iPhone version is especially cool in that it allows you to read PDF and MP3 files that you've put in your dropbox. It also stores your files in its own cloud if you find yourself on someone else's machine and you need to get or put a file to use later.

Hulu Desktop - This is a really nice standalone player for Hulu content with a "ten foot interface" (i.e. a user interface that you can see from your couch). It also works with those Media Center remote controls, so if you can connect your computer to a TV you can sit back and watch some internet tv for free. Last I checked, they still had "Evil Alien Conquerors" available, which is at once the most stupid/funny movie I've seen in a while.

SWFTools - This is a pile of free command-line utilities that do stuff to SWF files. I use these in my batch-mode game building script to do things like add custom brands to games. That way if someone ever wants a custom-branded game for their site, I can give 'em a couple dozen games in a hurry.

FreeRip - To be honest, I only use this gizmo for one special function. The CD-to-MP3 capabilities of Windows Media Player work just fine, except that WMP doesn't have the ability to rip an entire CD to a single big MP3. And I wanted to do this when I was ripping a "how to learn Spanish" CD that had around a hundred 30-second "chapters" on each CD. Rather than deal with a squillion little MP3's, I made one big one. And this will do that.

SFXR - This is a cute little thing with a 1980's era GUI. If you need some horrid little NES-era sound effects in your game, this will do it.

AutoGK - Converting DVD's to AVI files can be done under Windows 102% free. Only problem is that it requires a half-dozen different utilities that must be run in a certain sequence. AutoGK fixes that by slapping a friendly interface on the whole process and doing it all for you. Note that AutoGK does not rip and un-protect the (absurdly simple) encryption that DVD's use, as that's a legal gray area. If you wanted to do that, you'd need some sort of "DVD Decrypter", but I can't imagine how you'd find one of those.

Win7 Library Tool - The new Windows 7 "Libraries" feature in Windows Explorer is a feature that I've grown used to in very short order. It's like the old Explorer-favorites feature, but about ten times better. And this little gizmo makes it eleven times better, as it allows you to change your library icons and it allows you to add *any* folder to a library, as Win7 inexplicably only allows you to add indexed folders to a library. This way I can have libraries containing stuff shared on network drives.

xCalc - This isn't especially pretty but it's a small and unobtrusive RPN calculator. I love that my MS Natural Keyboard has a "Calculator" button that I can map to run this. That way I don't have to search my desk when I need to add up some numbers.

OpenOffice.org (Windows and Mac) - I have bona-fide MS Office on my main office machine, but I didn't wanna shell out for it on my little laptop, and for that this works just fine. Mind you, it has been and will remain about two versions behind MS Office in capabilities and its support for DOC and XLS files isn't perfect, but it's really nice for a freebie. Plus it has a draw program that's not bad.

uTorrent (Windows and Mac) - This has pretty-much taken over the torrent utilities market, and with good reason.

TextWrangler (Mac) - Like the aforementioned Notepad++, this is a "better than default" editor for Mac. It's supposed to be a gateway-drug for the rather expensive BBEdit editor, but this one's pretty good.

Stuffit Expander (Mac) - Macs don't come with the ability to open ZIP files out of the box and this fixes that. Again, they'll try to upsell you to the fancier version, but for just unzipping stuff this works great.


As for web-apps, I'm all about The Google. I have Google Apps For Your Domain set up with The Code Zone and every other domain I own, so if you send me an email I check it online. I depend on Google Calendar for my calendaring. I depend on Google Contacts for my phone numbers. I depend on Google Reader for blogs and podcasts. I use Google Notebook to store random bits of text. I use Google Voice for voicemail and text-messaging on my cellphone. I use Google To-Do list to store those low-priority items that I promise I'll get to someday. I even depend on Google News for my news. I love love love The Google. Heck, I'd probably move all my docs up to the Google Cloud if not for the heebie-jeebies I get from having all my eggs in one basket and the sudden inability I'd have to get work done if a backhoe cut off my fiber.

And on that note, Backupify.com is a service that'll back up all of your online content from other services. I don't care too much about backing up my Twitter content, but it does back up your Google Docs in case something happens to your account.

And Backupify's got a deal right now that if you sign up before the end of the year (i.e. tomorrow), it's free. Not sure what the pricing's gonna be after that, but sign up now just to be safe.

End of year reminders

It's the end of the year and it's time to get your finances in order. Make sure all those accounts and loans and such are shipshape so you're not trying to explain things to a tax preparer while they look at you like a German Shepherd trying to understand calculus.

And that brings me to a great freebie. And it's a legit freebie.

It's http://www.annualcreditreport.com/

You see, a buncha years ago the US gubment got involved when people found that it was quite difficult, if not impossible, to find out your own credit information that's provided to loan officers and mortgage banks. So they made a law that credit reporting agencies have to provide you with 102% free information about you at least once a year.

And if you watch the TV commercials, you know there are plenty of websites and/or 800-numbers that are happy to fetch those reports for you. Problem is, those companies are only "free" in the way that that timeshare company is giving you a "free" vacation. That is to say that you'll be asked for your credit card number for "verification", and you'll find yourself signed up to something you didn't want and that'll cost you a lot of money.

Fact is, you can get your reports without signing up to anything or paying a dime. Ever. It's the law. The government contracted the creation of the site I mentioned above. It's quite simple. You just enter your personal information (NOT your credit card number), then the site will navigate you through the three credit companies websites where you'll be able to see all your credit information. It's all shown instantly, and the entire process takes about 15 minutes, which is quite a change from ten years ago when you had to call the companies individually and wait for a paper report to appear in your mailbox.

Mind you, each company will try to sell you a look at your "credit score" for about eight bucks. You don't need this, so just refuse it. Your "credit score" is just your credit information run through a proprietary algorithm which normalizes your credit to a scale from 0-1000. You see, loan officers and car dealers thought it was a big hassle having to sift through five pages of information on you, and nobody liked having to make the decision as to how many late payments constitutes "bad credit", so now they pay eight bucks to have somebody else do the sifting. If your "credit score" is above a certain threshold, then you have "good credit" and can get the best interest rate. If not, you get a worse deal.

While commercials will tell you that it's ABSOLUTELY VITAL that you know this number, it's not that important. What's important is the full report, because sometimes it isn't correct.

For example, a dozen years ago, Best Buy changed whatever bank they used to finance their computers, and the previous bank just closed up and never bothered to tell the credit companies that the accounts were closed. So when I looked at my credit last year, it showed an "open" credit account with Best Buy for a computer I financed long ago. And while the account showed a balance of zero, since the account was "open", the $2000 credit limit still counted against the amount I was allowed to finance.

So I made a couple of calls and got it taken care of. It never would've occurred to me that that long-closed account might still be thought to be open, but the credit people thought it was.



So anyway, do yourself a favor and check your credit. It's free once per year, there are no strings attached, and it's a good way to make sure that your actual credit situation is what you think it is.



Oh, and if you think you might need protection against identity theft, check with those credit companies before you sign up for some dodgy "credit monitoring". We had some guy in Kansas buy a cellphone in our name a couple of years ago, and the credit companies were more than happy to set our account to refuse any credit checks without our phoned-in permission. And that was free.

Freebies

Figured I hadn't done this in a while, so I'm posting a list of a couple of useful freebies.

First is Lita. It's an Adobe AIR application that's a nice friendly graphical front-end for SQLite files. I use SQLite files in my own games to hold the settings and high score tables, and Lita is the perfect thing to check the files to make sure they look the way I intended.

Next is CCleaner, which is a dandy little gizmo that gets all the crud outta your system without (thus far) screwing anything up. It actually does quite a good job.

Third is something you already know about. Notepad++. Whether you just want something better than notepad or you wanna do some heavier stuff, it'll handle it.


Last, and least related, is Hulu Desktop. It's not programming related at all, but it's quite a nice thing for watching lots of TV on your computer. Between this and Windows 7's "finally it's good enough" Windows Media Center, you no longer need cable TV.

Only complaint is that Hulu Desktop is a standalone thing and it refuses, REFUSES, to integrate with Windows Media Center (unlike Netflix, which loves WMC just fine). While it's not perfect, somebody put together a little hack here that at least gives you a Hulu icon in WMC so you can switch to Hulu without going to the Start menu. Good if you have a TV.

Filling in the blanks

Okay, I think I have the back-story to "The Teletubbies" figured out. . .

They're clearly not human. They're apparently mammalian, but they have no apparent gender other than by appellation. Thus I assume they're aliens, also evidenced by them being surrounded by technology beyond current human capabilities, going as far as actually containing electronic screens in their thoracic cavity. From their behavior, they seem unskilled and are largely uninterested in this technology that surrounds them and nurtures them (the speaker that announces events, the "nu nu", the food machine).

From this I assume that they are aliens but they are not the same aliens that created the technology. They are either a sub-species of alien or perhaps mentally deficient members of an advanced alien society, and they have been collected together and are being nurtured by a biosphere that's been constructed to their liking (grass, bunnies, baby-sun). This biosphere appears to be self-sustaining, as no other living creatures are ever seen other than the bunnies, grass, and flowers. And the semi-sentient technology that surrounds them appears to have been created to maintain them, namely the food machine that makes Tubby Toast and Tubby Custard, and the "nu nu" which cleans up. I assume they're not a larval form of the more advanced aliens, as the technology makes no effort to educate them or advance them to a state where the bunny-filled biosphere would no longer be suitable.

I assume the Tubbies' intelligence and capacity for ethics are severely limited, which is why they always shout "NAUGHTY NU NU" at the robotic cleaning-up machine even when it's clearly done nothing wrong. Perhaps their environment is intended to keep them separate from the larger population, where their misplaced sense of "naughtiness" might cause trouble for society at large.

So from this I am drawing the conclusion that the Teletubbies are mentally defective children of a technologically advanced alien race. Since they enjoy each others' company and clearly don't mind performing the same rote tasks every day, they were collected into a self-maintaining biosphere that's designed to keep them together and happy to the extent that their limited capacity for learning and entertainment can allow.

Whether this biosphere exists on the alien planet, another planet, or is floating through space somewhere is not clear. The Tubbies lack the curiosity to explore the frontiers of their environment, so it was never shown on the show.



Next week: The Professor never fixed the boat because professors can't get hot chicks like Ginger and Mary Ann unless they're stuck on an island.

Site attack

Just a quick note. Thecodezone.com and some of its related sites were attacked by a drive-by malicious hack last week. Thankfully, the attack wasn't entirely successful as it relied on a couple of commands that were disabled. Best I can tell, the attack attempted to auto-forward all thecodezone.com visits to an Eastern-European site, where they'd most likely try to turn your computer into a spam gateway.

In any case, the attack didn't work. Your personal data (the little I actually store, which is just your email address) wasn't compromised. At worst, you got some weird PHP errors when you entered the site.

Hopefully everything's fixed and is marginally better locked-down than before. If you see any other odd behavior, please email me at john@thecodezone.com