Free Media Players and Media Tools

Some time ago I posted this introduction to free software, promising a series of articles about good free products available for all your computing needs. The promised posts have been slow in coming, but the next in the series is ready for release! You can find other posts in this series here.
This post will lost [...]

It’s Official: Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview Release 3

Despite the fact that I have technically already posted on this topic, Zotero announced yesterday the next and last pre-release of the Sync-preview line of software. The biggest edition is Rich text notes editing, apparently provided through a program called TinyMCE. Isn’t open source wonderful?!
Check out the full announcement.

Related Nerdlets posts:

Zotero: An Introduction, now with [...]

Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview Gets a Text Editor

I upgraded to Zotero’s latest Sync Preview some time ago, and was blessed today with automatic update. To my delight, this update includes, among other things, a full text editor for note taking. It works a lot like a basic/primitive word processor or WYSIWYG HTML editor. I’m pleased as punch; now I feel better about [...]

Free Office Software: OpenOffice 3.0 Released!

In honor of the release of OpenOffice 3.0 I thought I would make it my first post in the Don’t Pay for Software Series.
What is OpenOffice.org?
It is an office document suite, similar to (but better and free-er than) Microsoft Office or (for those of you who still use it) WordPerfect. Now don’t be nervous because [...]

Don’t Pay for Software

I am still a little surprised that people are willing to shell out hundreds of dollars on computer software when there are often dozens of free alternatives available. Most of us use computers for pretty basic tasks: emailing friends, browsing the internet, editing photos, listening to music, writing letters, and maintaining blogs. All of these [...]

Big Leaps with Zotero

I am repeatedly impressed by the work going on at Zotero. The latest feature: online access to your data. That’s right, the data that you have synced with Zotero’s servers can now be accessed anywhere in the world; all you need is a web browser.
And here’s the beauty of it: any browser will do, even [...]

Dropbox: Part Sync, Part Backup, All Good

Backup is important. You never know when your hard drive will give out (and it will, someday), or when some killer virus is going to wipe your data, or when you are going to be a bonehead and accidentally delete that all-important file.
Backup is important, but an online backup offers further advantages. It can be [...]

ESV Firefox Plugin

Mozilla, the good people behind Firefox, have recently introduced an experimental Firefox extension called Ubiquity, designed to help users interact with web data in a social world. Justin Taylor points out a new plugin from Crossway that takes advantage of this technology to make looking up (and interacting with) Bible verses easily. This is great [...]

Drop.io Gets a Plugin

I recently posted a description of the fabulous and easy-to-use drop.io. Well, it just better with a Firefox plugin. Check out their site here.

Related Nerdlets posts:

Zotero: An Introduction, now with SBL support
Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview Gets a Text Editor
Zotero 1.5 Preview Released
Why Open Source?
Web 2.0 and Teaching

The Power of Firefox Extensions

Not too long ago I posted about features available in Google’s Chrome that are not available in Firefox.
I stand corrected. All of the aforementioned features are available through Firefox’s extension system. This is another great example of the power of Firefox extensions, a power that is only possible through Open Source (API’s are just [...]