maple’s.fortunes

When There’s Nothing Left to Burn, You Have To Set Yourself on Fire

Well, the title of this post really has nothing to do with the content of the actual post itself. I have decided to mention some of my favourite programs in hopes of converting some of you away from Microsoft. In light of recent events pertaining to certain failures and crashes caused by Microsoft products, I have been slowing switching over to various free, open source programs. For those of you that aren’t the most technologically inclined, open source means that the source code of the program is available to you, as the user, to take and modify as you please. Anyways, back to the topic at hand, a couple months back I switched over to Mozilla Firefox. Now I know what some of you are thinking, “How could a nerd, such as Joel, not already switched over?” Well, due to certain circumstances I was not able to do so.

Mozilla Firefox is a wonderful web browser! It is a lot safer that Microsoft Internet Explorer, and is way cooler. It has tabbed browsing and a built in RSS reader. There are numerous extensions and plugins that do everything from tell you the Google page rank to controlling your media player, whatever that may be. I also switched over to Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client. After many years with Microsoft Outlook, I finally made the switch after getting tired of the constant errors, and sudden crashes of the aforementioned program. So far, I am extremely happy with the switch. The built spam blocker actually works, unlike Outlook’s. It has a nice clean, sleek look. It, like Firefox, has extensions, plugins and themes.

When I first downloaded Thunderbird, it did not have a Calendar, which one of the features I liked about Outlook. I went to the Mozilla site, and got a Calendar extension. I then came across Mozilla Sunbird. It is a stand alone calendar application. It works great! One thing I really like its ability to export the calendar as an iCalendar file, or a vCalendar file. It also has other exporting options, but I don’t really care about those. Anyways, Outlook did not allow the exportation of its calendar, at least not in these file types. Now, for the significance of these files, anyone who has an iPod out there, and uses it for more than music already knows the significance of these file types. These file types are the ones required by iPods for their calendar application. So, now I can have my calendar with me all the time. I had wanted to before, but Microsoft Outlooks would not allow it.

The next program that is worthy of my mention is iTunes. I switched over to iTunes when I got my iPod, but quickly learned what I had been missing out on. Back in the day, when we still used the HP as our main computer, I used Winamp. Its a pretty cool program, but not nearly as cool as iTunes. The odd occasion I would use Matchmaker Jukebox or whatever it was called. Now, in my opinion, this has to be one the worst media players, followed by Real Player. I then switched over to Windows Media Player, at around version 7. It was obviously cooler than Winamp, otherwise I would not have switched over. Anyways, since then I have been using it, right up to version 10. I used it right up to my iPod. iTunes does all that Windows Media Player does and more. Its ripping system is far better considering its not wma files. I know that you can rip into mp3 in WMP, but the quality is lacking. The AAC format of iTunes is far superior to wma. Anyone who has an iPod already knows why iTunes is better, and maybe some of the non iPod owners do as well, but who knows. Anyways, iTunes is a great program, and cane be found here. It is however not open source, which is fine.

With these programs and applications one can really start and move away from Microsoft. I know some people who will read this will think, “Why doesn’t this babbling idiot just switch to Linux?” I would love to switch over to Linux, but since this isn’t just my computer I can’t. But for those of you that can, go for it. I would also recommend Open Office. I have no personal experience with these programs, but from what I have heard they sound like pretty sweet programs. I would also switch over to them, but once again, this is just my computer, so we run into a situation there. Anyways, you’re probably all bored by now, so I’ll be finished.

Leave a Reply