Favourite software
Here are links to some of the software I use. Try them if you haven’t already done so.
- Firefox, the web browser, works on most platforms.
- Gimp is an excellent free package for manipulating images and photographs.
- The LaTeX document preparation system takes more effort to learn than a word processor. But the output quality is vastly better. And for larger documents, LaTeX is quicker and easier to use. There are various LaTeX environments and variants for gnu/Linux, Windows and Mac os and packages such as BibTeX for handling references, and classes such as beamer to produce presentations instead of documents. Maths support is largely built in, but there are classes to support hyperlinks, animation, music, drawings, chemistry, chess, …
- The R statistical computing project. This is a large, well-developed, free environment for statistical computing. Even if you’re not interested in statistics, you may find it useful for producing high quality charts.
- Simul8 is not free, but it is a rather good discrete-event simulation package.
- Thunderbird is my current email client. It is free. Check the Lightning calendaring extension.
- The Ubuntu gnu/Linux operating system is faster and safer than Windows and nearly as cool as Mac os. It is also free for anyone to install and use.