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Free and Easy – 13 Digital must haves
| February 3, 2010 | Posted by Ross under Baker's Dozens |
The Baker’s Dozen category is my place for dumping lists that I’m keen to share and discuss with readers of this blog, and no matter how contrived I will always make it a list of 13, hence baker’s dozen for those of you had forgotten that fact from yer schooldays.
To kick off I figured I’d go for 13 free and easy to use pieces of software or online services that I use nearly everyday and have made a big difference to my work and personal life….so here we go, in no order of preference:-
- Last.Fm - still a bit of a hidden diamond, but Last fm is THE online service for music lovers who use their computer a lot to play their tunes. Last fm keeps track of the music you play, and over time this can reveal some information, about who you like and what your listening habits are, that might surprise you….turns out I’m a huge fan of Arcade Fire and The National when I previously assumed that I just listened to Johnny Cash and REM all the time. Last fm also creates play lists based on your favourite tunes that you or viewers of your profile can listen to online, and suggests bands you might like based on music you listen to. It also lets you view profiles of people who you share music tastes with (classed as ‘neighbours’) and link up with them to chat and swap messages, and thus they become ‘friends’.
- PrintKey 2000 – Such a simple piece of freeware that has saved me so much time over the last few years. PrintKey 2000 pops up whever you press the print screen key (Prt Sc) on your keyboard and allows you to draw a rectangle around anything you are looking at on your screen and then copy that content into it’s own little editor. From here you can change the colours, the size, the brightness etc and save it down as any main type of image file to your computer. At its simplest level is where it works best…..if you need to grab something from a website you just draw the rectangle around it, press the copy button on PrintKey and you can then paste what you have grabbed into any other type of document (e.g. Word, Powerpoint, etc). You can download a freeware version of PrintKey or buy the full version of PrintKey for just $19.95.
- Mozilla Thunderbird - It used to be that anyone who wanted a ‘decent’ email client could rely on their version of Windows to offer them Outlook Express, especially if you were a home or small business user and couldn’t justify shelling out on a full version of Microsoft Outlook. Those days have gone with Microsoft moving away from Outlook Express in recent versions of Windows with a focus now on Windows Live Mail. There’s not much wrong with Live Mail, especially if you use multiple addresses across Hotmail, Yahoo et al, but it is so heavily integrated with the Microsoft Live tools that you can end up downloading a lot of junk that you might not need for your business. If you use Windows Vista or Windows 7 (or a Mac) and want a simple email client then have a look at Mozilla’s Thunderbird software. I’ve started using it a few months ago and have so far been really pleased and impressed – it wasn’t a huge download, it was easy to set up and offers a simple and clean presentation and user interface that allows you to get cracking with your emails quickly. I’ve nothing against Microsoft, in fact I am a big fan, but dropping Outlook Express was a step back in the services they offer – if you have the cash then I will recommend a full version of Microsoft Outlook over Thunderbird, mainly because of the extra contact management and calendar features (Thunderbird does not have a calendar, it’s one black mark), but if ‘free’ is your budget then give Thunderbird a whirl.
- TweetDeck – I’m a recent convert to TweetDeck, but so glad that I have finally given in and started using it. Twitter is something I dabble with now and again (across a few accounts for myself, my business and for clients), and the same applies to Facebook. TweetDeck is a simple to use program that allows me to log in once and have access to all of my Twitter and Facebook accounts in one place, with the added benefit of being able to manage elements of LinkedIn from there too (of which I am a big fan). The information you can view from your various accounts is customisable, so you can be presented with only the ‘relevant’ rather than the ‘all’. Also works well with some add on services, such as the excellent URl shortener provided by bit.ly.
- CSVed – Microsoft Excel…..why, oh why (oh why) do you insist on adding your own twisted formatting to numbers in CSV files? Anyone who deals with large .csv files that contain important numerical data will have suffered from phone number or voucher code numbers being coveniently converted from the original number to something that looks like 2.5E+15 or having the number rounded up to having a zero on the end. Last year I had to upload around £750k of voucher codes into a system only to find that the last number of each code had been rounded up or down to a ’0′, thus making only about 1 in every 300 voucher codes actually valid. Using a combination of notepad and Excel only got me part success, and no online forums seemed able to solve the problem because of Excel’s default formatting. I could get it to save down ok, but if I then opened it again in Excel to check the file it changed the format again….enter CSVed, an free piece of software that categorically saved the day and is an important part of my software arsenal today. It does not alter any of the formatting of your data, and this combined with an easy interface that lets you edit columns etc gives you a genuine superior alternative to Excel….if you work with data then download it now!
- TopCashBack.co.uk – Don’t worry, I’m not going to get all Martin Lewis on you, but TopCashBack is a great way to save money while shopping or doing most things online. There’s been a glut of cashback services launching in the last few years, but this is the pick of the bunch as far as I can see and I’ve had hundreds of pounds paid back just for managing my normal purchases through it. For example, I need car insurance every year and by starting my online purchase of a policy I get around £50 to £70 paid back to me from this site a few months after the policy begins. I need home insurance every year, and again you can get around £40 cashback for going through this site to your provider’s website. That’s just the tip of the iceberg…getting 8% back on all play.com purchases adds up through the year, over £40 back if you join The AA, 4% from Debenhams, 3% from Comet and Curry, and so on and so on. The list of merchants they are linked up with is long and covers most majors stores and brands.You can also refer your friends and get £1 into your account everytime they sign up and use it too. I am now giving my referral fees to charity, so to let me refer you just click here. Alternatively, go direct yourself to topcashback.co.uk (you don’t need to sign up to have a look around).
- iTunes – I know, you’ve all heard of it and possibly many of you use it already. As I said at the top of this post, this is my list of free services that I can’t live without so I have to include it. It’s changed the way I consume music and the way I listen and it’s brought order to my collection of mp3 files in a way I didn’t think possible over the years. Bizarrely, I don’t have an iPhone or an iPod right now and haven’t for a couple of years but iTunes gets daily use. Last.fm (see above) also links in quickly and easily with iTunes so you can keep track of your listening habits with the two together and then carry that over to social media services such as facebook through various apps, if you really want to share your tastes with your friends and contacts. Nuff said…you all know iTunes already.
- Google Analytics – Oh, the thousands of pounds I’ve seen spent on web analytics software while working in client side roles in the earlier years of web….at the time it seemed like good spend to invest in services such as Web Trends and Evisit Analyst (my previous favourite) but then along came Google who bought up Urchin and began to take the market by storm from late 2006 with Google Analytics (GA). Suddenly there was a heavyweight analytics package available, for free, whatever your size of site or operation. It took a little while for people to really trust that GA was definately free and definately powerful enough to meet their needs but in the last couple of years most of the doubts have dropped away and now it’s the sensible choice for most website owners, especially if you also use search marketing such as Google Adwords as part of your mix. It’s so easy to drop into your site too – just paste the code snippet that Google generates for you into each page and away you go.
- Ad Aware - Another great freebie download; this one is made by Lavasoft who are one of the leading providers of anti-spyware and other malware protection. Again, I’ve been using this one for a few years now and always feel ultra-protected knowing it is there and working on my computers. I still use a decent internet security service that I pay for (Norton for the last 4 years) but always run Ad Aware alongside it. Free and quick to download and perfect for home and small business use where network protection may not otherwise exist. I can only recall 2 occasions over the last 4 years where Ad Aware has removed a file that Norton didn’t find, but on each of those occasions I’d have been at risk of someone getting into my machine as both of them were trojan viruses. Great to use as a back stop for your main protection program.
- WordPress – Ok, if you want to start blogging there are a number of services you can use, and WordPress is just one of the giants along with blogger et al. The features and support network for WordPress though are second to none; with loads of free themes and widgets you can have a blog that looks da bomb packed with features live to the world within around 15 minutes. If you want to move on a step further and have a website that uses WordPress as a content management engine then the set-up is also quite straightforward if you find the right hosting company (and I recommend bluehost). This blog site was created using WordPress and it took away the need to any length of time to be taken up on code and left me free to concentrate what precious time I had on content (though you wouldn’t think that from reading my posts!). It’s free to set up and operate a normal WordPress.com blog so release the author and journalist within you now.
- Yousendit.com - Email is great, we know that, but it’s not so great when you need to send a large file to somebody else as invariably there is a mailbox limit either on the size of the file you can send or the size of the file they can receive. Sometimes the type of file you are sending can get blocked by firewalls; the irony of zip files is that they are the easiest way to bundle lots of files together so they can be emailed and are also the most common type of file that gets blocked by company networks. Often most people see the only alternative as burning the files onto a disc and sticking it in the post…hardly the most immediate and effective way to transfer files. Well, post no more and have a look at Yousendit.com. You can set up a free user account quickly and as long as you do not need to send more than 100mb a day you can upload your file(s) to their server, enter the recipients email address and Yousendit.com will send them an email on your behalf with a link they can click on to download the files you want them to have. Yousendit.com will also give you the link so you can send it on to other people too if you need to. The only point of caution is that the files are only available to download for a maximum 7 day period, so make sure your recipient is aware of that fact or else you’ll have to do it all over again…and you may as well have sent a disc!
- Picasa – Google’s very own image management service for you to download; it gets all of your pictures and images that are spread across your computer sorted and catalogued in minutes, bringing order to chaos if you can be a bit snap happy. Images are displayed as thumbnails so you no longer need to guess what each picture is by filename, and you can reorder them, tag them, share them and also use the picasa image editor to tidy them up and fix common photo problems. Facial recognition is also included in the latest release as well as some new album sharing tools. If you haven’t discovered (or don’t need) flickr then this is the way forward.
- You Tube - Like it needs me to tell you what it is! Cannot ignore it though, this is a list of the best 13 digital services out there and I can’t leave it out. Put to one side the fact that there are thousands of hours of entertainment at your fingertips, the use of You Tube for adding video content to a website is second to none (unless you are a boffin who has a Mac and After Effects, but that’s expensive). Take your raw video file, in pretty much any format, upload it to You Tube, get a URL or a piece of code that lets you display a now web-friendly format in your website….hosted for free on their servers too. You should pay hundreds of pounds for that sort of service, but the price is right at ‘free’.
So there you have it..sorry about the length…13 of my favourites. If you think there’s better candidates then feel free to comment and share them, or if you think I’m way off the mark and want to submit your own top 13 then go for it…part II could only be a post away!
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