Epsidode 50—Techno Granny and Chat Friends from Pittsburgh and Australia on Open Source Technology and Free Software

Epsidode 50—Techno Granny and Chat Friends from Pittsburgh and Australia on Open Source Technology and Free Software

Once again my chat room saved me when a guest did not show up. Guest was to be Joe Polk of Pennsylvania Technology Assistance Program. Penn Tap. I am sure there was some technological difficulty that prevented him from joining me but chat listeners once again saved Techno Granny from a talkcaster’s worst fate—dead air time.

My Knights in shining armor: Travis Knight, from Pittsburgh, (no really his last name is Knight, I think, internet anonymity, you know.)
Ben Wilson, Teen Talkcaster from Sydney Australia and his publicist Rodger, also from Sydney Australia.

Below I have included the chat and also a link and list of Open Source Technology that you can use.

Travis> Wordpress
Ben Wilson: mozilla and firefox are same thing
technogranny: Mozilla, Firefox, Wordpress,
Travis: yep blog
Ben Wilson: I use wordpress and it rockes!
Travis: i do think so
Travis: Wordpress is very flexible
Travis: Has thousands of templates
Ben Wilson: http://wabw.blogspot.com
Ben Wilson: My blogger
Ben Wilson: and my wordpress:
Ben Wilson: http://popcultureplanet.wordpress.com
Ben Wilson: There are good differences but I love em both!
Ben Wilson: Over 1000 downloads overall this month!
Rodger: cool
Rodger: Here we go...steelers.
Ben Wilson: Here we go!
Ben Wilson: I have that song on my ipod.
Travis: They are going to the superbowl again
Travis: hopefully this year
Rodger: www.ning.com
Travis: I love Firefox
Travis: so many plugins and extensions available
Travis: one sec and i will put some in the chat
Ben Wilson: I Love flamedog too!
Rodger: tehe, flamedog
Rodger: Falmedog. what we call firefox
Travis: https://addons.mozilla.org
Ben Wilson: Go travis!
Travis: addblocking, color checkers, fire ftp, blogging for wordpress etc
Travis: Firefox is the decendent of the Netscape browser using what they call the
Gecko engine.
Ben Wilson: wow, this is going great!
Rodger: Yeah, joanne, you don't need carl or any guest
Travis: oddly enough, it was owned by AOL for a while then they spun it off and it thrived
since nothing AOL ever held has done well.
Ben Wilson: Travis the brain
Travis: yep
Rodger: Joanne's knight in shining armour.
Rodger: get it, his last name is knight!
Travis: I wanna visit Bondi Beach in Austrailia
Ben Wilson: Ich hasse deusch!
Rodger: Ya, nein meine freind.
Travis: Here is a nice listing of open source
Travis: http://www.opensourcewindows.org/
Rodger: WHOOOOOO!!!! VLC ROCKS!
Travis: audacity is great
Ben Wilson: Cool, gimp, paint, audacty!
Travis: Good night Austrailia, Good morning Pittsburgh.
Ben Wilson: Goodnight pittsburgh!


List of open source technology which can be found at:

http://www.opensourcewindows.org/

Web Browsing
Mozilla Firefox
The premier free, open-source browser. Tabs, pop-up blocking, themes, and extensions. Considered by many to be the world's best browser.


Video Player / Video Podcasting

Miro
Beautiful interface. Plays any video type (much more than windows media player). Subscribe to video RSS, download, and watch all in one. Torrent support. Search and download from YouTube and others.


IM - Instant Messaging

Pidgin
Connect to multiple IM accounts simultaneously in a single app, including: AOL IM, MSN, and Jabber.


E-mail

Mozilla Thunderbird
Powerful spam filtering, solid interface, and all the features you need.


RSS

RSSOwl
Solid cross-platform RSS client.

Peer-to-Peer Filesharing

Cabos
A simple, easy to use filesharing program. Gnutella network.

Gnucleus
A very good Gnutella search and download filesharing program.


Azureus
A powerful, but complicated BitTorrent client. So many features you'll lose your mind.


Video Playback

VLC
Plays more video files than most players: Quicktime, AVI, DIVX, OGG, and more. Pretty good interface.



MPlayer
Similar to VLC-- plays loads of video formats.


Media Player Classic
Compact, but powerful media player. Plays anything under the sun. No install necessary.


DVD Ripping / Video Conversion

Media Coder
Great tool for ripping CDs, DVDs, etc and converting between tons of video formats.


Word Processing / Office Suites

OpenOffice.org
Big, full featured suite of tools for word processing and spreadsheets. Compatible with and a free replacement for Microsoft Word documents. Also supports OpenDocument Format.


AbiWord
A word processor. Leaner and quicker than OpenOffice. Compatible with Microsoft Word documents and OpenDocument Format.


Podcasting

Juice
Solid podcasting client.


DVD Ripping

Handbrake
DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter.


Sound Recording

Audacity
Simple sound recording tool.

Graphics / Photo Editing

GIMP
Photo editing application that rivals Photoshop in features.


Paint.NET
Graphics editor with a very nice interface.

Inkscape
Vector graphics application.

FTP / SFTP

Filezilla
Excellent FTP program.


IRC

X-Chat 2
IRC client.