An Update

Do Something Real
At this time of year everyone is full of false promises and hollow gestures. Giving up smoking for a week, going to the gym for a week, going to give more to charity for about 20 seconds. So here's an idea, why not do something real. Haven't got time for the gym, the will power to give up smoking and money is too tight to give to charity.

1. Donate blood once this year, it will take about 45minutes not including the 15 minutes to get to a donor session and 15 minutes to get home. You get a free drink and a snack and you could save a life in the process. Admittadly it might be a life that wasn't worth saving but you get to do it about 4-5 times a year so the odd are that you could save a nice person and its quicker than going to the gym


2. Visit Ceop.gov.uk once a month. Tell everyone you know about it. The more people that know about it, the more effective it can be. It won't cost you anything, you don't need will-power and it will take about 5 minutes of your time. That's 1 hour per year and again you could help a vulnerable child.


3. Download folding at home. It sits on your system using unused processor time for medical research. Can't afford £2 a month for Cancer research, haven't got the time to run a marathon for a designated charity? Help find cures for things like Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's and Parkinson's disease without doing a thing other than having your computer run algorithms without you noticing. Join my team by using "156731" as your team code

Worth a Look
I tend to use free, open source software. I like the whole open source ethos and the fact that it tends to be more secure, safe and stable than a lot of commercial software. This is not the same as the old shareware or freeware. Open source is produced whilst making the source code available for others to tweak and use as they see fit with the proviso that they also make the source code available. This allows for some very slick software because instead of having a team of commercial programmers being paid to do a job, you end up with a community trying to produce the best software they can. This is the software that I recommend:

1. Open Office - Open source office suite with everything you would expect from MS Office but with the addition of a clip-art creator and the ability to add free add-ons such as different dictionarys, templates, importers etc.


2. Gimp - Open source art software, everything you could want to edit your photos or use as an art-package.


3. CCleaner - Currently a free reg-cleaner. This is very good software for cleaning errors from the registry and removing clutter from your hard-drive (old tmp files etc). If this does become "pay to use" please let me know.

There are links to Dictionary.Com, Wikipedia.Com and SourceForge.Net on the right, all very useful sites and worthy of a look.