Freebie Friday: FileZilla

FileZilla - Free FTP client

There’s a good chance that, at some point in time while interacting on the Internet, you’ve transfered files to (upload) or from (download) a web server. Whether you realized it at the time or not, there is a pretty good chance that the web server was using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) behind the scenes. FTP is one of those protocols that has been around nearly as long as the Internet itself and is still used frequently today. Anyone who works on web servers, or works with a company that hosts files on web servers, needs a reliable way to transfer files to those servers — that’s where an FTP client comes into play. There are several FTP clients available, and many for free, but the undisputed champ of free FTP client applications is, without doubt, FileZilla.

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Brian Dunham is a Cisco and Microsoft certified network and systems engineer with over a decade of experience in the Information Technology field. When he is not in front of a computer he can be found out in the wilderness canoing, hiking, fishing, or camping.

Contact: brian.dunham@netris.us

Freebie Friday: Lightworks

lightworks

This Freebie Friday features software that is a bit more specialized and not as “general-purpose” as most previous entries in the series. It goes out to all you videographers and YouTube content producers. A while back I had the task of editing some videos, syncing them with music, adding some overlay effects, and preparing them for YouTube publication. Now, I did not then, nor do I now, fancy myself a video editor / producer, but I rarely turn down a challenge. Prior to this assignment, I had only worked with the now-defunct Windows Movie Maker. I knew this would not cut it for the project I was working on, so I started looking for an alternative — enter Lightworks.

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Brian Dunham is a Cisco and Microsoft certified network and systems engineer with over a decade of experience in the Information Technology field. When he is not in front of a computer he can be found out in the wilderness canoing, hiking, fishing, or camping.

Contact: brian.dunham@netris.us

Freebie Friday: LibreOffice

LibreOffice Logo

OK, I’m not going to lie: this one is pretty obvious. With a long-standing presence in the free and open-source software community, it was only a matter of time before I featured LibreOffice in a Freebie Friday post. Libre has its roots in the once go-to free office suite, Apache OpenOffice. However, once Libre was forked from OpenOffice, the community followed and it has become the standard free office productivity suite.

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Brian Dunham is a Cisco and Microsoft certified network and systems engineer with over a decade of experience in the Information Technology field. When he is not in front of a computer he can be found out in the wilderness canoing, hiking, fishing, or camping.

Contact: brian.dunham@netris.us

Freebie Friday: Greenshot

Greenshot

Working in IT, I often have a need to take screenshots and annotate them. Usually this is because I’m working with a user that has overlooked something on their screen and I need to point it out to them, or I’m making a walk-through or tutorial (like those found in some of my how-to posts). I used to accomplish this by taking a screenshot using the Alt + Prt Scr hotkey (a.k.a. the old-fashioned way) and then importing the screenshot into an image editor, like Adobe Photoshop, for annotation. I found this to be a fairly cumbersome and time-consuming process, so I started looking for a solution. It wasn’t long before I found Greenshot.

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Brian Dunham is a Cisco and Microsoft certified network and systems engineer with over a decade of experience in the Information Technology field. When he is not in front of a computer he can be found out in the wilderness canoing, hiking, fishing, or camping.

Contact: brian.dunham@netris.us

Freebie Friday: Notepad++

Notepad++

As I’ve mentioned in a previous Freebie Friday, I’m a big fan of OneNote, but sometimes I find myself in situations where I need to type something out really quickly and OneNote is not a good option. An example of this would be when I want to quickly write a powershell script or any other type of script, really. While OneNote does have some code formatting ability built-in, it definitely leaves something to be desired. So in these situations, I reach for Notepad++.

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Brian Dunham is a Cisco and Microsoft certified network and systems engineer with over a decade of experience in the Information Technology field. When he is not in front of a computer he can be found out in the wilderness canoing, hiking, fishing, or camping.

Contact: brian.dunham@netris.us

Freebie Friday: WinDirStat

WinDirStat

I’ve been working in IT for quite a while now and one of the most common issues I’ve seen that can cause a computer to throw errors, slow down, or become unresponsive is running out of free space on the system disk or partition. While the disk cleanup utility has been included in Windows to address this issue for some time now (I believe it was introduced with Windows 98), I’ve always felt that it leaves something to be desired. I found myself seeking more visibility into the directory tree and which files were consuming the most disk space — enter WinDirStat

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Brian Dunham is a Cisco and Microsoft certified network and systems engineer with over a decade of experience in the Information Technology field. When he is not in front of a computer he can be found out in the wilderness canoing, hiking, fishing, or camping.

Contact: brian.dunham@netris.us