My 'must-have' stuff for Vista - making it more cool

I got my brand new Lenovo T61p with Vista Ultimate pre-installed. The laptop's great. And Vista Ultimate is cool. But there are still a lot of things I miss that are like 'required/critical/necessary'. So, after I finish installing all my admin/power user stuff(read: windows admin tools, scripting utilities, editors etc.), I started customizing Vista to make me drool over my screen(since I've stopped working actively for a few months now, I figured I needed something to ensure I stick to my screen :D). I started with some regular stuff like Firefox and iTunes and etc. and then went on to some light-weight stuff(my laptop has got only 2GB of RAM(yet ;-)) that really makes Vista very pretty and worth showing off. Oh btw, all the cool stuff is ONLY FREEWARE, so donate if you like any of the software and support those guys!

So here's my list of 'must have's, in sequence:

1. Firefox - This is my first install, as all the other stuff are usually somewhere out there on the internet and I hate *other* browsers ;-) ..well, then I install a few necessary add-ons:
showIP,greasemonkey,AdBlockPlus,LiveHTTPHeaders,Netcraft,TabMixPlus and some others depending on my mood :P (although, please be aware that installing a lot of add-ons can screw Firefox big time)

2. FlashGet download manager. Super simple. Super light. Super sexy.

3. ALZip from ALTools. This is a cool archive manager...works with CD image formats along with a host of other formats....and its light weight. Its tied for first place with 7zip. (ALTools guys also have a host of other neat stuff worth giving a try)

4. VLC Media Player - forget about the rest. Period.

5. InterfaceLift and vladstudio - my favorites for wallpapers. They have cool stuff at really high resolutions(>1900 x 1200)

6. Google Pack - includes Picasa, Google Desktop, Google Photos Screensaver, Google Talk, Google Earth (basically all Google apps) plus other 3rd party applications like Adobe Reader, Real Player...saves me a lot of time and they keep adding new stuff to this list.

7. CoreUtils package for Windows - I used install "UnxUtils", but they're kinda out of date now...and I install these instead...must have for people who work on command line a lot. The guys at GNUWin32 also have a lot of other useful packages.

8. Console - a cool replacement for the "command prompt" shell in Windows.It's tabbed, transparent, sleek and sexy. Has pretty useful features as well. Working on the command-line was never this sexy.











9. My Exposé - OS X style. F9 or move to a corner to get the Exposé effect of OS X. Simple and sexy.












10. Foxit PDF Reader - Recently discovered this wonderfully light-weight and super fast PDF reader. You wont touch Adobe Reader again. I haven't.

11. Dark Room - From their web-site: "Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment". That's exactly what it is. Just great when I want to pen, umm...key down my thoughts.

12. Omea Reader - Atom/RSS/newsgroup Reader. I like it and I use it. Never faced any issues. It's either this or RSS Bandit

13. Video Codecs - DivX, Xvid, CCCP(community codec pack) and its never complete without GSpot, no, please, I meant the codec info tool.

I'm sure there's plenty of other cool stuff out there which I might have never tried till now, but if I do, I'll definitely update this place.

Merry Christmas and season's greetings!

life, my stuggle, my questions. contd..

One of the biggest issues I've had with myself is the struggle to find answers to my questions about life and why we are here. Every time, I end up not finding answers to my questions and then end up drawing the wrong(apparently) conclusions that all this is not meant to be.

Today, I noticed one of my friends' status message on GTalk which read "Not every question has an answer accompanying it". I invariably stumbled upon a reaction/reply to that message which in turn made me realize why I couldn't find any answers to my questions about all the crazy stuff- I couldn't find the answers not because they were not available, I couldn't find the answers because I am not ready for them, because I'm not capable of feeling and understanding and identifying them even though I might have seen them already. It's very simple once we look at this analogy- consider a 12 year old who just knows that airplanes are a lot heavier than us and struggles to find answers to his question- "When we can't fly, how can those things fly???". His reply might be "according to my logic its not possible". Actually his reply should be - "according to MY logic, its not possible"- because he is simply not there yet to understand the physics of an airplane.

This makes my belief in the saying "discoveries are always made by accident" a bit more stronger.

Yes, every question does have an answer. The answers are all in our sub-conscious selves. It's just that we are not ready to bring them out to our conscious selves.