Poor Coder Tools

Across the years you tend to accumulate a series of tools through day to day computer use. This of course starts when you have little or no money so feature rich applications which are free/unrestricted are an important part of your collection. I have summed up my collection of tools below and links to where you can get them. One of my favourite sources is the beloved source forge.

Audio

  • Audacity – Edit sound files and save them in a large array of
  • Goldwave – Almost identical to Audacity but I find it’s far more stable and user friendly. It is far more older however and its technically shareware although it doesn’t seem to limit things much.

CD/DVD Tools

  • IsoBuster – Useful tool for ripping straight cd’s or dvd’s to ISO/BIN/TAO images. Useful for bulk file copy’s or that quick ‘hey let me copy that cd’ process.
  • CDex – Copy’s audio tracks off cd’s and saves them in various formats.
  • WinBin2Iso – A tool to make bin files into iso file. Useful for bin files ripped from iso buster to convert them to iso.

Computer Diagnostics

  • CPU-Z – A tool to diagnose the hardware on the computer, ram slots and types, motherboard model number, etc.

Image Editing

  • Paint.net – Free tool which mimics photoshop/paintshop elements.
  • Inkscape – Vector based graphics editor. Also opens and edits PDF files.
  • Dup Detector – Finds duplicate images based on a percentage of similarity.

Music

  • NoteCard – A useful tool for remembering music sheets.
  • Bome’s Mouse Keyboard – A tool which turns your keyboard into a keyboard which can have midi out to other programs.

Networking

  • Bout HTTP Tunnel – Fantastic tool for forwarding traffic through other ports. Used this in a case where the client network would not allow ICQ/MSN traffic so I set up a tunnel through http port (80) to my home server which then connected to msn. Was a tad hard to set it all up but worth it for the communication 🙂
  • Free Download Manager – Download tool with all the features of one you would buy but for free!
  • Freecap -Tool to redirect all traffic of a selected program that uses SOCK through a selected port.
  • FTP Explorer – Old school FTP program.
  • hrPing – Command line ping tool with added functionality.
  • Network Stumbler -Net stumbler is a wireless tool which picks up broadcasted wireless networks. Its useful for war driving around the place with a laptop.
  • Shareaza – Peer to peer client which accesses gnutella, gnutella2 and edonkey.
  • TcpView – One of those very useful tools to see all the open connections much like the command net tool but in a windows GUI.
  • FastResolver -Tool to obtain host name and mac addresses from ip addresses.
  • FPipe -A utility to redirect traffic through different port.
  • Ghostwall – Small firewall program which allows you to quickly block traffic by ip/port/etc. Useful for not letting some programs out, rather than not letting things in, if you know what I mean 🙂
  • UltraVNC – VNC client and server which offer a large amount of features for free.

Programming

  • .Net Reflector – Tool to look through .net binaries, very valuable.

System

  • AutoStreamer –  Tool to modify Windows XP installs and allows you to create bootable windows install cd’s.
  • Sysinternals Suite – Large set of tools which allow you to explore the windows operating system.

System – Filesystem

  • Explore2fs – WIN32 explorer for Linux ext2fs partitions
  • Free Undelete – Free tool to undelete files.
  • True Crypt – Create encrypted volume files, drives or hidden drives which you can mount as a normal drive. I find this program fantastic and use it at work for all my personal files.

Text Processing

  • Notepad 2 – Improved features on the notepad program.

Video

  • Virtual Dub – Famous free video editing suite, I use this all the time for re-encoding and joining files.
  • Media Coder – Tool for converting from just about any video type to another one. Using presets you can re-encode your videos for IPod.
  • DVD Decrypter – Tool for quickly ripping DVD’s to disk.
  • Media Player Classic – The best media player program. Period.

I’ll probably amend this list as I go on and find new tools.

Enjoy