It has been more a year of a long online silence since I wrote the last blog post. Pursuing MBA degree while working full-time in consulting turned out to be a lot more challenging and time-consuming than I originally expected. Nonetheless, the school courses are behind now and I am finally back to the world of blogosphere. To celebrate my comeback I wanted to share some of my favorite freeware software companions that were helping me for years automating my daily tasks, while asking nothing in return:
- TrueCrypt – in the light of the latest spying revelations and increasing malware activities this utility allows you to encrypt your confidential data and mount them as drives in your computer (this product replaces now defunct PGPDisk, which back in the 90′s paved the encryption revolution)
- 7-Zip or WinRAR – great archivers, which trump the compression quality and offer a decent AES-based archive encryption.
- Far Manager – my all-time favorite file and ftp manager, which allows quick selective copying of vast amount of files with the powerful built-in editor. The manager is similar to Midnight Commander on Linux, but optimized for Windows and comes in 32 and 64 bit native flavours.
- Flexible Renamer – amazing file renamer, which can help rename your countless music or image files, using their tags or rules based on regular expressions.
- ID3 Renamer – coupled with the Flexible Renamer, this utility allows you easily create or change ID3 tags based on the file names while using regular expressions. Perfect addition for iTunes and other music players, which heavily rely on the media tags.
And the last outside addition to that list – WinAmp – which deserves one last shout out as my all-time favorite music player. An amazingly light and versatile player, which unfortunately AOL team decided to discontinue despite its popularity and loyal customer base.
