So recently we’ve changed up our family budget to be more inline with Dave Ramsey’s outlined budget in Financial Peace University. With that change has come some expected pain and discomfort. It’s also brought some unexpected learning experiences (and joy).
You see, we’ve added “blow money” to our monthly budget for each person in our family – it’s not much, but it’s more than we budgeted before (which was $0). Our daughters (of course) love the idea — and my youngest has liked the idea so much that she has blown through her blow money for the month inside of a week.
I thought this was going to turn into one of those moments where I was going to teach her that if she was more careful with her money, she might still have more to spend.
I was wrong.
My daughter decided she didn’t like being broke. She also decided she had certain skills in making chocolate lolipops that her friends at school might be willing to pay for. So she explained her idea to her mom on the way home from school and got to work on them when she got home. Later that evening she explained her plan to me, and I told her I was proud of her. I also told her I’d be impressed when she had cash in hand (thinking that it was cool that her mind was clearly working like a little capitalist, but also thinking that she may not go through with the actual selling bit).
The next afternoon she proudly announced she made $3 selling chocolate lolipops to her friends.
I guess in the end, I’m the one that got schooled by my capitalist daughter: she taught me that no matter how dire my financial situation might seem, worry doesn’t help but creativity and action does.
I just discovered that calling Response.End in an ASP.NET page will interfere with page output caching — it’ll cause the page to not be cached.
Resolving this issue is as simple as removing the call to Response.End or Response.Flush.
Well, maybe I could live without them, but I wouldn’t enjoy it!
Here’s a list of tools that are either freeware or opensource, from a variety of different categories. These tools are almost guaranteed to have nice GUIs and be lightweight — I’m very picky that way.
Security and privacy tools
Keepass
http://keepass.info/
Free, open-source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager.
Truecrypt
http://www.truecrypt.org/
Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows XP/2000/2003 and Linux
Network tools
SSL Explorer (Community Edition)
http://www.sshtools.com/showSslExplorerCommunity.do
Open-source, browser-based SSL VPN solution.
Wireshark
http://www.wireshark.org/
Wireshark is the tool you turn to when you want to really see what’s happening on your network. It is an award-winning network protocol analyzer developed by an international team of networking experts.
uTorrent
http://www.utorrent.com/
EXTREMELY lightweight and functional bittorrent client. Most of the features present in other BitTorrent clients are present in µTorrent, including bandwidth prioritization, scheduling, RSS auto-downloading and Mainline DHT (compatible with BitComet). Be sure to turn on ip filtering in uTorrent and update your filters regularly.
Firefox
http://www.mozilla.org
Yep. It’s Firefox. I’m just not a big fan of IE. Call me crazy.
Royal TS
http://code4ward.net/CS2/Default.aspx
Royal TS allows you to organize and manage multiple remote desktop connections. Incredibly useful when managing LOTS of boxes.
Desktop utilities
ALzip
http://www.altools.net/
If you’re looking for one tool that can handle a myriad of compression methods, from RAR and ZIP to TAR and TGZ and nearly 30 other formats, ALZip just might be for you. In fact, archive format support is ALZip’s forte. It’ll even open ISO and other CD images. All the usual archive application options are here, as well: context menu additions, password protections, virus scanner integration, and assistance in creating self-extracting archives.
Belarc advisor
http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html
Builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, CIS (Center for Internet Security) benchmarks, and displays the results in your Web browser.
Microsoft Powertoys for Windows
Download here
Mostly for the ‘command prompt here’ and the ‘TweakUI’ powertoys.
CutePDF writer
http://www.acrosoftware.com/products/cutepdf/Writer.asp
The reader is free from Adobe. Now you can write PDF’s as easy as printing something.
Gizmo drive
http://arainia.com/software/gizmo/overview.php?nID=4
Free application Gizmo Drive mounts almost any virtual hard drive you can throw at it, including ISO, BIN, CUE, and the new virtual hard drive (VHD) images supported in Windows 7.
Video / audio
Handbrake
http://handbrake.fr/
HandBrake is a GPL’d multiplatform (Mac OSX, Linux, and Windows), multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter. The cool thing about this puppy is you can go straight from DVD to the ever-portable MP4 format.
DVD Decrypter
http://www.doom9.org/Soft21/Rippers/SetupDVDDecrypter_3.5.4.0.exe
Versatile DVD ripper. Copy a DVD to an ISO, rip the whole disc straight to the filesystem, rip specific streams from the disc – a very valuable tool. Fantastic when used in tandem with Handbrake
Videora iPod converter
http://www.videora.com/en-us/Converter/iPod-touch/
The software, developed by the creators of Videora, can convert all types of video files (avi, divx, xvid, flv, x264, vob, mpeg, DVD’s, YouTube, etc.) into the proper video formats (MPEG-4, H.264) that play on the iPod touch.
Windows Live Photo Gallery
http://download.live.com/photogallery
Yep. It’s a Microsoft product that actually makes sense. I can grab photos off the camera, organize them on the fly and upload to Flickr/Facebook all from one app. And it’s free. And it rocks.
Apple iTunes
http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/
Buy music, movies, TV shows, and audiobooks, or download free podcasts from the iTunes Store 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Organize and play everything on your Mac or PC. Then sync it to your iPod and bring it along. Anywhere. In true ‘give away the razor, sell the blades’ fashion — this is free software with a hook. You can buy music, but organize all music and video in the MP3/MP4 formats for free.
Subversion
http://subversion.tigris.org/
The goal of the Subversion project is to build a version control system. The software is released under an Apache/BSD-style open source license.
TeamCity
http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/
By the same guys that brought you Resharper and IntellJ IDEA — TeamCity is build management on the cheap.
UnFuddle
http://unfuddle.com/
Unfuddle is a secure, hosted project management solution for software development teams.
Tortoise Subversion client
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows. Since it’s not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like.
Firebug
http://getfirebug.com/
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
Consolas font pack for VS2005 and VS2008
Download here
Yes. That’s a font pack.
Diet and excercise
Traineo
http://www.traineo.com/
Traineo is a free and simple website that gives you the motivation and support to reach your weight loss and fitness goals. Great tracking tools, graphs, and community
The daily plate
http://www.thedailyplate.com/
Search more than 194,800 foods, and discover your healthiest options. Helps you eat smarter and track your calories.
Nutrition data
http://www.nutritiondata.com/
In summary, Nutrition Data does three things better than anyone else: 1. Helps you quickly find food composition data. 2. Helps you understand that data. 3. Helps you share that data with your friends.
Del.icio.us bookmarks
http://del.icio.us/
Bookmarks, but … better. Tag, share, search, and discover new bookmarks. Your bookmarks will always be where you need them — online.
Miscellaneous
WordPress
http://wordpress.org/
It’s the software that runs this site. It’s also the software that runs www.wordpress.com (so you can use wordpress even if you don’t have your own hosting account!). WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.
TaxACT
http://www.taxact.com
OK, this isn’t actually free, and it’s not actually software — at least I don’t use the downloadable version — but it’s dirt cheap (less than $20!), incredibly useful, easy to use, and I don’t know what I would have done the last 2 years if I didn’t use it.
My latest tweets- danesparza: @DrBobParsons You might like this tutorial on Rails: http://tr.im/nx5t June 5, 2009
- danesparza: Adam Lambert totally deserved to win on American Idol tonight. I mean c'mon -- Kiss AND Queen? You outdid yourself, buddy. May 21, 2009
- danesparza: http://tr.im/i061 - Obama just fired GM's CEO? Seriously? He totally stole my April Fool's day prank! Damnit! March 30, 2009
- danesparza: "2 nuns, a shotgun, & Haley Mills... That could be fun!" March 30, 2009
- danesparza: @pfunder What is this 'MySql' you speak of? March 28, 2009
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