| New/Recommended Software |
|---|
- Why you can stop paying for antivirus software
- "You don't need to pay for antivirus software anymore. Microsoft Windows Defender, a free service that is built right into Windows 10/11, is now as good as the paid antivirus/antimalware solutions that have been collecting your money for years."
|
- Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware
- "Can detect and remove malware that even the most well known anti-virus and anti-malware applications fail to detect." Free and highly recommended - Install (and keep uo-to-date) even if you have other good anti-virus protection. It is especially good at finding/destroying malware that other programs cannot - run in safe mode if you think you may have an infection.
|
- Glary Utilities
- "Offers numerous powerful and easy-to-use system tools and utilities to fix, speed up, maintain and protect your PC. It allows you to clean common system junk files, as well as invalid registry entries and Internet traces. You can manage and delete browser add-ons, analyze disk space usage and find duplicate files ..." and much more. Free and highly recommended.
|
- VideoLAN 3.0
- A free cross-platform media player. Version 2.0 has many new features:
- "This is the first major release in three years. It activates hardware decoding by default to get 4K and 8K playback, supports 10bits and HDR playback, 360° video and 3D audio, audio passthrough for HD audio codecs, streaming to Chromecast devices (even in formats not supported natively), playback of Blu-Ray Java menus and adds browsing of local network drives." Free and highly recommended
|
- uBlock Origin
- A cross-browser, cross OS ad blocker that has been described as an HTML firewall. It has many nice features not the least of which is its low CPU/memory footprint. Oh, and as a bonus, it vastly speeds up the loading of pages with heavy ad graphics/animations. Many web sites which depend on advertising income are now detecting the presence of the ad blocker and and either asking for you to turn it off for their site (which is easily done in UBlock Origin) or not allowing you to see their content until you do disable it. uBlock Origin is available as a free extension for all major browsers on all major OSes, including Chrome/Firefox for Windows, Apple (Safari), Microsoft Store (Edge), and there are even Android versions.
|
- LibreOffice
- "LibreOffice 24.8, a feature-rich major release of the LibreOffice 6 family with better performance, a large number of new and improved features, and enhanced interoperability with proprietary document formats," i.e., MS Word, Excel, etc.
|
- Belarc Advisor
- "builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, network inventory, any missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, security benchmarks, and displays the results in your Web browser." Very useful.
|
- The new Firefox
- FireFox is now faster than Chrome. And now with its ability to sync across platforms, it is a serious contender to Chrome.
|
- rustdesk Remote Desktop for Windows
- Access your computer from another Windows, Linux, or mobile device (Android or iOS)! FREE with no ads!
rustdesk gives you remote access support with full audio and video.)
|
- Dropbox.com
- Excellent! Free and highly recommended. Site/software for saving data online. "Any file you save to Dropbox also instantly saves to your computers, phones, and the Dropbox website. Features:
- 2 GB of online Dropbox storage for free, with subscriptions up to 1TB available.
- Your files are always available from the secure Dropbox website.
- Dropbox works with Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry.
- Works even when offline. You always have your files, whether or not you have a connection.
- Dropbox transfers just the parts of a file that change (not the whole thing).
- Manually set bandwidth limits -- Dropbox won't hog your connection.
- Shared folders allow people to work together on the same projects and documents.
|
- Google Drive
- Google Drive replaces Google Docs & Spreadsheets. As before, you can:
- Use an online editor to format documents, spell-check and more.
- Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text.
- Download documents to your desktop as Word, PDF and more.
- View your documents' revision history and roll back to any version.
- Invite others to share your documents by e-mail address.
- Edit documents online with whomever you choose.
- Publish documents online to the world, or to just who you choose.
|
- Paint.NET
- "Free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins." I now use it in preference to my old favorite Paint Shop Pro - great for simple tasks like cropping/resizing/optimizing - highly recommended.
|
| New Sites/Articles |
|---|
- Best presidential biographies
- Reviews of 240+ presidental biographies and now branching into others (mostly public figures). Very well-done, both in content and design. Judacious reviews.
|
- oryxspioenkop.com
- Open souce intelligence info, especially in regard the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
|
- Ancient Origins
- "The goal of Ancient Origins is to highlight recent archaeological discoveries, peer-reviewed academic research and evidence, as well as offering alternative viewpoints and explanations of science, archaeology, mythology, religion and history around the globe." Great stuff!
|
- Thoughtco.Com
- "ThoughtCo is a premier reference site with a 20+ year focus on expert-created education content." Interesting!
|
- Historic Supreme Court Decisions
- "C-SPAN's 12-part television series produced in cooperation with the National Constitution Center, exploring the issues, people, and places involved in some of the most significant Supreme Court cases in our nation's history."
|
- Abraham Lincoln: A Life
- Michael Burlingame's Abraham Lincoln: A Life, published in 2008 in two large volumes and nearly 2,000 pages, is believed by many Lincoln scholars to be the most exhaustively researched and fully documented biography of Abraham Lincoln ever written.
The work as originally submitted was even more extensive, but largely because of space limitations, it was considered necessary to condense both the narrative and the accompanying documentation. ... this site [contains] the author's original unedited manuscript.... accessible by individual chapters, ... in searchable, read-only PDF format. |
- Standard Ebooks
- A volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, and free.
|
- SlickDeals.net
- Perhaps the best site for finding great deals on computers, electronics and many other things.
|
- History of Philosophy (without any gaps) podcast
- "The series looks at the ideas, lives and historical context of the major philosophers as well as the lesser-known figures of the tradition." Peter Adamson has produced the most comprehensive, accessible, serious and occasionally humorous, podcast treatment that I know of, at least in English. Currently he has done over 450 episodes, and he has gotten into the Italian Renaissance, with several hundred years of history and several years of podcasting to go. Reddit has an annotated list of philosophy related podcasts, if you are interested. Another good one: Ancient Greece Declassified
|
- Practical.Engineering
- One of the very best YouTube video collections covering many different engineering topics. Highly recommended if you have any interest in engineering topics.
|
- LibriVox
- LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain.
|
- KhanAcademy.org
- Excellent site for learning in many areas. "With a library of over 2,600 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and 211 practice exercises, we're on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace. "
|
- MIT's OpenCourseWare
- "A free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world." Incredible content!
|
- Ted.com
- "Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers" - great stuff!
|
- FreeRice
- An Internet word game has generated enough rice to feed 50,000 people for one day. The game, FreeRice, tests the vocabulary of participants. For each click on a correct answer, the website donates money to buy 10 grains of rice.
|
- Washington Post Puzzles
- Crosswords, sudoku
|
- USAToday Puzzles
- Many puzzles, including crosswords, sudoku
|
|