A Few Cool Things

I've been discovering a lot of cool new stuff recently in my quest to use only free utilities, software, etc. Here's a quick list of some stuff I've found:

• Blogger - you're looking at it. For all the folks that have asked me how to create their own web site, this is the answer. It's free and you can do updates from any computer with internet access. Plus, there are nifty templates for new users and you can tweak them as you become more adept.
• Flickr - a spot where you can store photos online so other people can see them without clogging their inbox. With pictures shared here, you can easily link to them in Blogger (so you don't have to upload them again if you're including a picture in your posts.) It's a good problem to have when there are multiple tools that work well and you have to choose one...
• Picasa - an image management tool that helps you organize things on your local machine and in Hello. It's very simple and intuitive and it does some minor editing, too. For the very new to digital photography, it also helps with sizing images for e-mail.
• The GIMP - a much more advanced image editing suite. It's hard to imagine this is free. It does a lot. At my skill level, it's a serious challenger to Photoshop; and did I mention that it's FREE?
• Del.icio.us - a web repository where you can store and tag your favorite links. If I'm on a different computer and I want to find the drum store I spotted and saved to del.icio.us last week, I just log in and there are all my links. I can select the "Drum" tag and narrow down until I see the one I was after. I can send you a link to my favorites, too. (If I want...)
• Backpack - a Chicago-born software package that also resides on the internet. It's a very simple collaboration tool which allows you to create up to five pages (one page per project, I suppose) then allow certain other people to access and/or update the information as tasks are completed, etc. There are versions that aren't free with more capabilities and the big brother of this tool is actually called Basecamp - meant for professional project teams.
• Firefox - Open source web browser made simpler and a lot more effective than IE or its origin - Netscape. It's a study in usability, especially when mated with Thunderbird (e-mail/news client) and now Sunbird (calendar utility). It works like a less bogged down Outlook. Spam filter included.
• OpenOffice - Here's the free (totally free) equivalent to Microsoft Office. It recognizes and saves in MS formats (.doc, .xls, etc) as well as .pdf - for free, free, free. So far, I see very little flakiness in any of the utilities.

That's enough for now. I've used all this stuff, though and it's all great.