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http://www.openculture.com/
- Hyperlinks to free cultural and educational media: eBooks,
videos and movies, free online courses, textbooks, language
learning sites, music and public domain recordings.
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www.refdesk.com
- older portal to reference info: govt info, biographies, encyclopedia,
science, health, press, genealogy, quotations, science, databases galore
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Christian Books
- If you'd rather not order from Amazon, try this
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Slashdot.org
- Visit regularly to see the latest in tech news
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Drill Assistant
- An old but free program that helps you study and quiz yourself. Essentially,
it works like this: in your word processor, you pair up
questions and answers. They could be Greek words and English
equivalents, States and Capitals, Kings and the dates they
reigned, Book Titles and Authors, Elements and Abbreviations,
anything. (This program does support font changes, so you
can use it for language study if you want to.)
There are 3 different ways of drilling: (1) Display
question and press [spacebar] to see answer, (2) Multiple
choice, or (3) Fill-in-the-blank. I used it to drill myself on
Greek Manuscripts (A, B, C, D, ...) and their longer Latin names
(Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, Ephraemi Rescriptus, Beza, ...)
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Winmerge
- A free and open source difference tool for Windows. I use this tool
regularly and often. It shows differences between two individual files
or two folders, or two folder trees, so it can handle
recursive branches and sub-branches containing thousands of files.
It also has filters to avoid matches at the file level, or to avoid
selecting or trying to match certain files, based on filename. If you
use a source control versioning system (like git or subversion), it
can also ignore the hidden directories created by these tools.
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Ediff
- Ediff is a not a standalone utility, it's a function that runs
under Emacs. If space is not a factor, it's worth
installing and learning Emacs just to run Ediff. Ediff is the
most powerful file-comparison utility I have ever seen. For
example, this
screenshot
shows Ediff comparing 2 files. The first paragraph of each file has
the lines reformatted to a different width, but with the reformatting,
there is no textual change except for one word. Ediff shows the
margination-only reformatting in one color, and each word change in
another color.
Ediff can also take two files which are similar, display the
differences between them, and then automatically create a third
"merged" file which contains all the identical content of both files,
while highlighting areas where the two files are different. With
one-key commands, you can select parts of File1 and other
parts of File2 to put into the output file. (See this
screenshot.) If you change your mind, you can undo changes, reverse
changes, and edit the merge file at any time while you are paging
through either of the first 2 files. This is really potent stuff! (For
additional info, visit my Emacs Ediff page.)
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Beyond Compare
is commercial software for Windows for comparing different directories
(folders), FTP sites, individual files, or the contents of ZIP files.
All comparison is done side-by-side, plus you can edit the files being
changed. Beyond Compare will run for free for 30 days to let you
evaluate it for purchase. If you decide to keep it, the price is $30.
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Araxis Merge
is also commercial software for doing 2-way and 3-way file comparison,
diff, merging, and also folder or directory comparison.
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KDiff3
is an open source, fully free diff and merge utility that has been compiled
for Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX.
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Wikipedia
has a large entry page comparing different types of free and commercial
file and directory comparison tool. If you don't see what you like in the
links above, try here.
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The Proxomitron
- About 15 years ago, I used this constantly. Now I have not used it for years, but
I use the link so I do not forget. The Proxomitron was web proxy that filtered and
changed html, JavaScript, and anything sent to the browser. When active, it kills
pop-up windows, kills most advertising banners, kills/limits automatic MIDI
music (who remembers that!?), freezes animated .GIFs, kills slow web counters, kills
GeoCities advertising banners, prevents getting stuck in frames, stops "Status Bar"
scrolling, unhides destination links, kill frames, hide referrals from Javascript,
much more. Check Wikipedia
or look at at the Resources. However, plugins do much of the same work for Chrome
or Firefox, and are easier to configure. But if you want to get under the hood ...
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The Internet Archive
- a/k/a "The Wayback Machine". Over 330 billion web pages, 20 million books,
4 million audio recordings, 4 million video recording, and more make this an
incredible resource. The Wayback Machine portion shows how the web used to look.
It contains an image of many web sites by month, date, and year. Wanna see what
was posted on microsoft.com on Oct 22, 1996? This will show you!!
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Link Sleuth
- fast, free tool for finding broken links on web pages
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WebMake
- Perl program, written under the GNU GPL, for building websites
For developers only. I used to use it, once. Real gurus are
using the Template Toolkit
for generating web pages quickly, nowadays.
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htmlpp
- another HTML preprocessor, also written in Perl, and somewhat
easier to use than WebMake. This is what I still use now.
The author is the late Pieter Hintjens, a genius programmer.
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PPWizard
- PPWizard is another free HTML PreProcessor, only this one is
written in REXX. It's very good and has better user and author
support than either WebMake or htmlpp.
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