Pontesbury Broadplace
Pontesbury Broadplace
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Your Webmaster's Favourites This section lists your current webmaster's favourite free sites and why. The comments below do not necessarily represent the opinion of the Broadplace as a whole, nor do they represent a specific endorsement by the Broadplace:- KCEA Radio My all time favourite is http://www.kcea.org/ This is a high school radio station in California. The station makes an occasional announcement of it's name. There is no advertising, and very, very rare emergency Public Service Announcements. And the reason why I like it? This station provides 24/7 music of the Big Band era, mostly 30's and 40's music, you'll get Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Ella............... the list is a very long one, but mercifully, no blathering DJ's. As a surveyor, I often worked through the night, and could work in a site office with cool music without all the blah! It can be loaded and run in the background, while you get on with other things. Navigate to the Music Link, and there is an opportunity to download one of my other favourites, winamp, which you will need before you can play KCEA:- Media Player The winamp site provides a free Media Player, http://www.winamp.com/. It allows you to scan all Radio and Video streams on the web, but be careful, some sites stream unsuitable material. Edit Pad At some time or other we all have to use a plain text editor. The common, bundled editor with Microsoft is Notepad, but it really is pretty basic. Try EditPadLite, http://www.editpadpro.com/editpadlite.html it's free, but will try to sell you an upgrade to EditpadPro. The free editor allows you to have multiple files on separate tabs, it remembers where you've been so you can reopen files, allows indented lines, (don't worry folks, it's for programmers), and much more besides. The Pro version will cost you about £30.00, but I believe includes a spell checker and other utilities. I use the free version. Image Viewer A young Bosnian student, Irfan Skiljan, started this brilliant image viewer some years ago. I first heard of it late one night, listening to ClassicFM. They had a programme discussing websites, and recommended this site. The image viewer is IrfanView http://www.irfanview.net/ and is also free. This viewer will allow you to view almost any image format, and convert to almost any format. You can add text etc, and adjust some colour and brightness settings, but this is NOT 'Photoshop'. You can print from it and run slide shows, change the image size, or density, batch convert file names while retaining the original file attributes, and so on .........it really is a very good image utility. Spam Yes, we all get it, and there are plenty of free programs to deal with it, some are more effective than others. I use Spampal:- http://spampal.org/ . For a free program, this is very sophisticated, and allows a lot of flexibility within your control. If spam is annoying you, you could do worse than give it a try. Novices be careful, because you will need to change some of your email account settings, although they do have an excellent step by step guide. Communications The Broadplace has loaded Skype, telephone and video calls, on to all the computers, so it can be accessed from there, but if you are at home and want to give it a try you can download it here:- http://skype.com/intl/en-gb/helloagain.html The basic program is free, but again if you want to make lot's of reduced rate calls, there are plenty of packages they offer. For me, I have family around the country and overseas, and we frequently talk to them, with a webcam to give pictures. My latest grandaughter was seen by her American grandparents, uncles, aunts, live on webcam using Skype, within hours of getting home from hospital, and absolutely free. Office program You don't have to use or buy expensive 'Office' programs. Many programmers have had an altruistic attitude, and wrote free software for the general public, known as public domain or freeware, or shareware. Some of the more modern ones are well known, for example the 'Linux' operating system, and the oldest one for the web, it's operating language HTML. One other 'open source' program is 'Open Office' and can be found here:- http://www.openoffice.org/index.html . This is a high level program and will read and write to most other common formats like MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc............ In short, you can open a Word document, and also SaveAs a Word document, but it's free, and the slight differences in style are hardly noticeable, so if you want an entirely free 'Office' program, give it a try. File Recovery Ever lost files? For three years running, a senior officer running the highway budget for a large unitary authority took the files home to work on them. Nothing unusual in that, except each year, his home computer messed up the 3½ inch floppy disc, and no one in their huge IT department could unscramble the £20million budget on it. (You'd have though he'd learn the first time) I recovered it each time with this little free program from an Anglo/German firm called Convar. The Program? PC Inspector. http://www.pcinspector.de/ . As you can see from the suffix, the web site starts in German, but there's a tab to go English, and then go to the download page. And even better news, they do a free 'Smart Recovery' too, for those of you who may have lost data on a digital camera card - all types. Back to Top |
