emudir

Hands up who remembers Doom? Good. Remember the splash it made when it came out – the most realistic 3D of its day, high performance even right down to 286s, Doom became, for several years, the de facto standard of what a PC was – if it could run Doom, it was a PC.

Few end users noticed the “DOS extender” screen at the beginning of Doom, however. But those in the industry did, and other games companies began to take note – behind the scenes at iD software, they were using a pretty nifty set of development tools. That tool set was Open Watcom. …read more »

Due to having to reinstall this PC, there was no blog yesterday, and today will be a bit… difficult.

Nevertheless, one thing that we did use was Google Pack. If you haven’t used it, then please do – it’s an ever updated collection of free software, such as:

• Adobe Reader
• Firefox with Google Toolbar
• Google Chrome (we prefer the privacy-enhanced SRWare Iron)
• Google Desktop
• Google Earth (world maps, including Street View)
• Google Talk (instant messaging)
• Google Toolbar for IE
• Picasa (photo manager)
• RealPlayer
• Skype
• Spyware Doctor with Antivirus (starter edition, which is free, but can be upgraded to a more powerful version)

Recommended if you re-install a Windows machine…

Forgive us for featuring another office program so soon, but AbiWord wouldn’t wait. You see, with my regular computer in for repair, I’ve been using one with less than 4 gigabytes of memory. Half a one, to be precise. And Libre Office, lovely though it is, chews through memory like there’s no tomorrow. There had to be something smaller. And something that opened all my OpenDocument documents as well…

Well not only does AbiWord consume a mere 20MB of memory with a document loaded, it’s fast, small, and even opens Word 2007 documents as well (oh, and WordPerfect ones, ClarisWorks ones, ApplixWorks ones…)

One of the joys of AbiWord is that is is fast. And I really do mean lightning fast – it puts larger lumbering programs such as Word in the shade. And while the support’s not all it could be (tables frequently fail to open from Open Office documents, for example), AbiWord is more than capable of coping with the day to day word processing demands, and should be especially useful for those running XP or Windows 7 based netbooks…

The Opera web browser has been around for a long while. Originally a shareware product, it went free a few years ago after raising enough money from purchases to become self-sustaining.

Since then, Opera have added a few more tools to its arsenal, including Unite, allowing you to share items directly from your computer, and Opera Turbo, which compresses pages on the way to you, to help make the most of slow connections. …read more »

An excellent article on Just Creative Design, about making your own fonts set me thinking about making my own fonts. But it’s a shame that he didn’t mention the excellent free software program FontForge.

FontForge can edit many forms of fonts – Windows’ TrueType and OpenType, many types of Mac fonts, and X11′s bitmap fonts – although the level of support is currently variable. It can, of course, convert from one format to another as well. …read more »

Gnumeric is the spreadsheet component of GNOME Office. It’s a lightweight spreadsheet application that supports all the familiar functions, calculation modes and charts as seen in most spreadsheet applications. …read more »

Flock is a social web browser. Built around Facebook and Twitter, and available in over 2 dozen languages, Flock is designed to keep you up to date with your social networks, your email accounts, and your RSS feeds, all within your browser, with no third party applications required and no keeping multiple sites open in tabs. It even includes Facebook chat at the bottom of the screen at all times so you can instant message. …read more »

For those of us whose introduction to defrag programs was back in the Dos days with Norton Utilities, we remember the good old days – when you used to wait ages, watching a black and white animated display (or even left it overnight). And when you came down in the morning – your computer was faster. OK, just a little bit – and maybe it was just the placebo effect – but it felt faster.

These days, especially with Windows 7, defrag is just a service that runs in the background. No fancy display, no interaction – and no notion of whether it’s actually doing any real work.

Auslogics Disk Defrag, on the other hand, is different. …read more »

You’re a busy administrator. You run a small office – say a dozen people. And they all need email. What do you do? Well, Microsoft Exchange is very expensive – and it doesn’t support the peculiar way your ISP sends all the email to a single POP3 address, regardless of who it’s for, or maybe you’re already running a full NetWare setup.

Enter Mercury. …read more »

Have you ever deleted a file and didn’t mean to? Well, no problem – you can find it in the Windows recycle bin, right? No? Well, that’s where Recuva comes in handy…

Deleted it from your iPod, you say? Or your camera? No problem, Recuva can fix that too. …read more »