Born free

A lot of people don't know it, but there's a lot of good free software out there. I use a few of the freeware programs myself.

For example, why would you want to buy photoshop when gimp is available as freeware? The gimp is the gnu image manipulation program and I've been using it for years. I used photoshop for years before that. It's a bit quirkier than photoshop but you get used to it fairly quickly if you know photoshop, gimp is an easy program to use. If you install it on windows you will need the windows version with the gtk libraries. I even use this at the office, while others have a photoshop license.

The open office suite makes a good freeware office suite for the home. It even writes PDF files, something you can't do from microsoft word without acrobat. It opens and saves word files as well.

I also started using filezilla which is an excellent tool for ftp transfers. I send the filezilla download webpage to people when I send them instructions how to use our ftp site at work.

Here are some notable others. One old standby is the programmer's file editor which I use as a text editor. Sharpreader I've found to be a good RSS aggregator useful for reading the news from 50+ sources at the same time. Antivir is pretty good anti-virus software. However, it's kind of hard to use sometimes and scheduling updates is not straightforward.

Sometimes there is freeware that turns stupid or becomes nagware or worse. That's why oldversion.com is great, you can download the older version of something when it was still freeware. Tired of using a pesky, naggy program just to unzip files? I recommend power archiver 6.00 to do that job, it's simple and good. Winamp 2.8 is probably the best mp3 player, it's about the time Justin Frankel left and before winamp started to really suck after the AOL takeover.

Or how about a new operating system for an old laptop? I've tried xubuntu on an old pentium 2 laptop and i like it very much so far.

Liquid gold

This is such amazing honey that our friends over at canyon bees honey gave to us. Many thanks to them for this delicious, sweet fluid.

More tomato pictures.

Okay okay just a few more pictures of tomatoes. There's early girl, roma, black krim and golden jubilee. I think this is it for the determinate varieties. I hope we can get a few more pounds of the early girl at least.