Softwares I have found useful

Here is a non-complete list of software and hardware and a brief explanation why I like them

OpenSUSE linux distribution

There are lots of distributions and I one can like any of  them. When describing SUSE(pronounced: suzy) in one sentence we usually say YaST. SUSE has an extreamly useful setup tool. Of course this tool is also portable but the rest of the system is also tuned to it, so if you take it out of its environment you might not find it functional. During the years I have found it fledged improving and pleasing to use. From the major linux distributions I have also tried ubuntu and I can confidently suggest OpenSUSE over it.

LaTeX and ConTeXt document preparation system

I don't want to steel anyone's opinion, but so smart and beautiful that you will wonder how could it have existed without you knowing about them. In a few years time you get so used to LaTeX, that you will use it for everything. For letters, long documents or notes. ConTeXt is latex if Leslie Lampert would have written it 15 years later. It is more consistent in design, but it lacks the packages you liked in LaTeX that much. You can find examples in this site both for LaTeX and ConTeXt typesetting.

A usefulness of a text-input document preparation system is fairly questionable these days. Not because of OpenOffice, as LaTeX beats it both in design time and end result, but because the usual way how we read these documents changed. Nowdays we want to put movies, 3D objects, maps buttons or even code into our documents, and the text-input is at the best "not yet" prepared for the new staff. If you once see a good Apple Keynote presentation you will never understand how could we ever tried to use TeX for presentations.
I like LaTeX and ConTeXt because the excellent trade-off between the design time and the end result. If you don't have lot of time to write a document or you are not in the mood of doing something too complex LaTeX will probably give you the best results.

Scribus desktop publishing

Where LaTeX is just not enough. With scribus you will not finish fast, but if you learn it well enough you will be able to go beyond LaTeX and OpenOffice. In general I would not suggest you to typeset books or long documents in scribus, but in cases where you are limited in size and you still want to something convincing it can be useful. Documents, like CV-s, menus, covers are nicely typeset in Scribus.

MPlayer the movie player

An excellent video player utility it is very simple in design and it plays all movie formats including but not limited to WMV and QuickTime on linux! This is all it would need to become a useful tool but its capabilites go far beyond.

Portable Document Format (PDF)

One of the very popular document formats. You can read lot about it at wikipedia. It also has historical significance, but I mostly like it for its contemporary advantages. First of all it works on the screen. Though many people think of PDF as a for print format it excellently fits electronical publishing. It has support for movies (we hope that we can enjoy it on linux as well from Acrobat Reader version 9.), 3D objects through U3D (at the time of writing this document it already works on linux), maps and annotations.

Why is it better than ODF? 

With OpenOffice you can edit your documents on-the-fly, but it will never give you a result which is convinient to read on screen. Unless, of course, you export it to PDF first. Most of critics that PDF gets is concerning the editability. Though PDF is believed to be a read-only format it is not true. You can do the editing through annotations, which some times give you better results than simple editing does. It also supports JavaScript so its capabilites are fairly extentible.

Why is it better than HTML?

HTML is a document format designed for the needs of electronical publishing. As flexible it is as difficult it is to use it. First of all, you create a document with images, movies, perhaps something else. To give this document to somebody you need to give the whole directory, compress it to avoid encoding problems, de-compress it. If you manage to transfer html you can still lack some of the plugins necessery for its reading. PDF is a complete format everything you can possibly put into it can be read with AcrobatReader. Even more documents (with pdf portfolio). In one single file.

Macromedia Adobe Flash

I am not particularly in faviour of this format but it is present in 99% of computers your documents will ever reach. It is farly more popular then PDF or ODF. You can also converp PDF-s into it straigt forward. This is especially useful if you don't want to convert all your documents to HTML (mostly manually).

Emacs editor

There is an old joke that states: With all the plugins and development Emacs is now slowly becoming an operanting system. All it's missing is a handy editor. Of course we are exagurating a little bit. Emacs is a fledged editor, designed in the times, when it was not in the fashion to grab the mouse after each sentence, and when you didn't have the space to make commands all that obvious with a menu or a colorfull icon. In exchange after you've learned all the hotkeys you can complete your tasks remarkably fast. It is something similar to television. If you stop watching it you stop missing it.

TrueCrypt

Philip Zimmerman had a good discussion on protecting your privacy. Anyway if you decide to encrypt your harddisk, I think TrueCrypt is a good software to start with. It is easy to install and use. TrueCrypt uses some interesting models. I like the idea of a finite number of encryptions and the fact that your partition is filled with random data befor formatting. TrueCrypt also supports plausible denial, but thats security is a the best questionable.

If you use OsX I would rather recommend PGP.

swftools

A set of applications for automativly generating Adobe Flash. I like it because it can generate a Flash document directly from PDF. As 99% of the computers has Flash installed, this allows the visitors to watch all the documents in PDF quality. It also saves me the time of converting the documents into html. All the documents in this page have been generated with it.