Programs I can’t live without
When getting to a new computer there are program that I simply must install or it would restrict the way I work on computers.
Total Commander – With the old roots in the Norton Commander structure and Directory Opus for the Amiga the two window file manager tradition is where I was born and bred. It has so many features that I simply don’t know how to do without it; pattern based mass renaming, support for all compressed formats, FTP, fully configurable button-bar, extensive search.
VLC – Videolan plays all the media-formats you feed it without the need to install the vast variety of codecs available. It’s all built in, nicely packaged and available for free. I wouldn’t mind a more cosmetic and skinned front-end, but the engine inside is second to none.
Firefox – I refuse to work with Internet Explorer. I believe in competition and a vital part of that is to steer away from the leading provider and support a challenger where I can do this without too much effort. So as you notice I do run Windows (XP, Vista and now 7) as all efforts to run Linux failed horribly. It has improved SO much but so many times did it fail on lack of support for a piece of hardware. I am well beyond the average user but even I am reluctant to go to the shell window and start issuing a “sudo” command, no to mention the “classical” “make and install” combination.
Must have plug-ins:
- Swedish and English dictionaries. I know you can’t always tell I use it 
- Google Gears – Offline support
- IE tab – allow using IE for specific pages withour fireing up IE itself.
- Twitterbar - If you are a tweeter, twitterbar is fantastic. When you find a link to share, enter a comment in the address field and fire away the comment + link as a tweet.
- Xmarks - Synk your bookmarks between computers. It can do passwords as well but I never spent the time to get that to work. It’s worth the effort to install it by the bookmark synker alone.
Microsoft Office – Yes, Open Office cannot give me what I need – sorry! Pivotables based on an underlying SQL query to a MySQL database is yet to show up in OO, so there is no option for me.
Nokia Ovi Suite – I gues this replaced the PC Suite. Being a Nokia junkie, I do of course need this.
Vuze – Nuff said. Good shit that you need
Dropbox – You get access to a slice of diskspace on the web and a brilliant sync function to it. The stuff that I have at home and at work which I need to have consistent across is there. Source code for a project, EXE files that in the virus infested net never seem to get through in any other way, plus you can provide a link to a file or directory for someone.
Avast Antivirus - Going cheap, this is the best no money can buy in terms of safekeeping your environment.
ACDSee - My favourite program for handling the family pictures. I have used it since version 2, where it’s now in version 9. Very good! Favourite feature is the ability to rename files from an EXIF property.
Picasa – Picasa is a free picture managing program. Very good and the 3.5 has a truly nice face recognition feature. If it could do a few of the things ACDSee can, then I would terminate the use of ACDSee but so far they are complimentary.
Snagit – Snap pieces of the screen. The new “snipping tool” in Windows is a light version of Snagit and works really good (however a bit primitive) but nothing beats Snagit.
Thunderbird – Mail and news monster. Second to none. My mail is relayed to GMail so I can read it on the move, but mail at home is read using Thunderbird using IMAP. I then collect and delete it from the server using POP3 from Outlook. Might seem like a clumsy solution and to some extent it is. I am sort of halfways between webmail and client based mail, wanting the best of both worlds.
TweetDeck – Recent acquaintance. Really convenient for following feeds from twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and so on. Actually made it possible to follow both Facebook and Twitter without much human CPU load.
I would want to say I use Spotify and Voddler a lot, but I honestly don’t. I have accounts, have both programs installed, friends working for Spotify and honestly support their cause with all my heart, but I consume local media using MediaPortal (TV, movies and sometimes music) on the HTPC and MediaMonkey (music) and SqueezeBox (music – hardware but the HTPC also run as a SqueezeServer)
Webservices
iGoogle – My opening page is the iGoogle page where I have a set of gadgets that shows the information I need on a regular basis
- Twitter gadget - Read your twitter feed in a compact way
- Stock portfolio – Monitor one or more stocks. I am naturally following my employer.
- GMail – THE online webmail. I collect my mail using POP3 (with no delete) from my normal accounts. Gives a common interface to all of it and also a storage repository.
- Latitude - Google’s positioning service that sits on top of the Google Maps
Picasa 3.5
The face recognition part of Picasa 3.5 made me uninstall the Swedish speaking 3.1 I had and go for the English speaking 3.5 (as it seemingly takes forever to get 3.5 translated).
Anyway – it worked for some days on my 4 core CPU computer and it did a fairly good job even if I have spent hours and hours to manually adjust things. Very few false positives but very many unidentified.
There are a few things I would like to see addressed in an update:
* When it allocates a face to a name as “Suggestion” you can select if the programs assumption is correct by two easy to understand symbols. Pressing No it tries to match the face to another name and so on. Sometimes the face belongs to a person that just happened to be in the picture even if this is unintentional and you don’t want the person registered in your list, like if you took a shot as something or someone in a public place with lots of unknown people around. In the “unnamed” category you can select “Ignore Person”, but in the named albums this is not possible. PLEASE add “Ignore Person” to the right button menu for the people added to albums as suggestions. As it it now, these unknown faces ping pong between albums, tying to find a home it will never reach.
* The the right click menu for the “Suggestions” there is an option of adding a person to an album (“Add to People Album”). I have 466 identified contacts which makes this function totally impractical for any contact that does not have a name that starts with an “A”. Scrolling the list to later characters takes forever.
* Also for the “Suggestions”, you can double click the thumbnail and add the name to the persons on the picture. Sometime naming the people there, you still have the person in the album listed as a suggestion, even if you just filled in the name manually. This only happen sometimes and I find no system in when it works or not. I get the feeling that not all changes made to the picture opening a “Suggestion” is trapped by the program.
* In the same context, opening the picture of a suggestion and clicking the “X” symbol of the identified people on the list (even all of the people on the list) the suggestion is still there. As an example; my daughter in a group of people. None identified but the program has her suggested as on of the faces, but the wrong one. I open the picture and “X” away all the people that aren’t relevant to keep (right or wrong, I use this a “Ignore people” on a picture by picture basis). I then define my daughters name to the correct face. Not the picture contains *one* identified person – my daughter – and I press escape to get back to the list. Now, the album still has the suggestion to accept my daughter as being identified in the picture but a) she is already identified and b) the definition of the face to the suggested on is not there – I just deleted it.
* If I from the “Unnamed” category has chosen to Ignore Person, I can still see the same person from the same photo as a suggestion in one of the people album. When ignored in the Unnamed category the face should universally ignored.
* Also in the context of opening the picture of a “Suggestion” the option of manually adding people is not there.
* When I enter an album, sometimes I find that there is a person that is added that doesn’t belong there (so person X is present in the album of person Y). However, opening the picture I see that the person in the album isn’t even present in the picture. So all faces are properly named in the picture, but it’s still there in the wrong album.
* Similar to my reflection above, I have cases in the album of my wife where the thumbnail shows a picture of my daughter. My wife is present in the picture so the thumbnail correctly points to picture of my wife but shows another person in the same picture in the thumbnail. I right clicked my wifes album icon as listed under “People” but the thumbnail is still wrong.
It might be that I do something wrong but the results still indicate room for improvement. I do think these are errors in the implementation.
One other thing which should be considered is differentiating unnamed and unrecognised. I found it so that pictures feature a person whom I know but do not recall the name of (class mate of the children, person on a party I don’t recall the name of and so on). I would like to be able to have a convenient mean to allocate references to “identified but unnamed person X”.
