Bayle Shanks's website: notes-computer-computerToolsIntro

Useful computer tools that might be useful for almost anyone.

Software

Word processing: I use Emacs. Everyone could benefit from Emacs, but it's kind of hard to use, so if you're not a techie, only use it if you're prepared to put some effort into figuring it out.
hg for version control/revision control. This is mainly used by techies these days, but it could be useful to anyone, if you have time to learn it.

Internet software and tools

Firefox is a good web browser. Here is a list of my favorite Firefox addons
Mutt is a good command-line email client, if you're into that.
Identi.ca is a "microblogging" service that lets you send and receive short (140 character) posts from people. You subscribe to specific people. All posts are public. It's supposed to be good for finding new people, because you see when someone you are subscribed to says something to someone else.
Doodle helps you schedule group meetings
Google Calendar for a sharable calendar
Unison is an open way to synchronize files on different computers. ifolder is a server-based synchronizer/file sharer. Dropbox is a proprietary alternative that also does versioning. Synchronizing your files is a good way to backup your stuff, because there will be more than one copy of the stuff at any given time. You should still make occasional offline backups, though.
If you want to have your own small website, nearlyfreespeech is a good webhost. For small sites, nearlyfreespeech is __really__ cheap (maybe ten cents to a couple of dollars a year), but it does require some setup; if you don't want to pay or have to setup anything, you can just use Google Sites.
- If you want to have your own blog, wordpress is good software. You can either use it on wordpress.com, or you can download it and run it on your own site. Another popular one is blogger.
Wikis are nice for working on open group projects. Pbwiki, wikidot, and wikispaces are places where you can setup a new wiki. For small closed teams, Google Docs is a similar concept.
If you have a blog or a wiki that anyone can comment on, you need to screen out spam. Two good ways to do this are ReCaptcha and Akismet.
To keep up with various websites, you can "subscribe" to "feeds" in Google Reader.
Delicious lets you keep some of your bookmarks online and cross-reference them against other user's bookmarks and tags. Even if you don't use it yourself, you can use it to see which bookmarks other people have associated with various tags
Skype lets you call people as if on the phone
Google groups lets you videoconference with people

See also collaborationTools for more advanced tools.

Shopping

Amazon is a good place to shop for stuff online. Usually if you buy stuff from Amazon (but not from some third-party sellers listed on Amazon) that is more that $20 (total in your shopping cart, not individual item), you can get free shipping.
- Amazon is also a good place to find out which products are good (or at least popular); here's how: search for your item on Amazon; then select the department with the most hits; then change Sort By to Bestselling. For example, to find the most popular external hard drives, search for "external hard drive", then set the Department to Electronics using the spinner on the top right, then change Sort By to Bestselling.
- To use Amazon to suggest to you which books to read to introduce you to a subject you don't know about, search for the name of the subject to find some books about it. then look at the Amazon subject categories, which they presently place on the upper part of the left sidebar, and select the ones that seem relevant, so that you get a bunch of browser tabs, one for each relevant subject heading; in each tab should be the results of your initial query, restricted to that subject heading. For each relevant subject heading, see if it has a narrower child, and if so, replace it with its child. Look through these lists to find keywords and phrases which identify the subject you want. In new tabs, query each relevant subject heading for for each keyword/phrase/set of keywords (i.e. now you have n*m tabs, where n is the number of subject headings and m is the number of queries you thought of). Now for each tab, sort by bestselling, and browse through the first 14 or so hits, opening the description of each good one in a new tab (you can close the query tabs as you finish with each one). Now you have a bunch of tabs with candidate books. Go through each one and scroll down to the Product Description, then the Product Details and the What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?. Now, in each tab, check out "What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?", and open (in a new tab) books that a lot of customers buy that you aren't looking at yet. Now, unless you are sure just based on the titles that these books are on-topic, look at each tab in turn; discard the books (and close the tabs) for any books which aren't really what you are looking for, or which are way too long (page count is usually in Product Details). Now look at the remaining tabs and look at the Amazon Bestsellers Rank. Often the tabs you have stratify into classes of bestsellingness. Eliminate all but the top one or two strata of bestsellingness (you can keep any book that you really like or that is more specific to what you are looking for than the others, though). Now you have a smallish set of bestsellers on your topic. For each one, look at the customer reviews, and eliminate those for which the reviews make you not like it, and consider eliminating those with too few reviews; if you haven't yet, look at the page counts too and eliminate the ones that are too long. Now you have a smallish set of well-liked bestsellers on your topic. Look through these by hand and make a list of which ones you may want to read. If possible, check them out by "looking inside" (clicking on the book picture on the upper left) or on Google Books so see if you actually want to read them.
ebay is good too, but you have to learn how to use it properly.
etsy is a good place to buy pretty things.

Hardware

External USB hard drives are relatively cheap now (~$100 for 1.5 terabytes as of 2010/04), so if you don't have much space on your hard drive, just buy an external one. Remember that any hard drive has a significant chance of crashing, though, so occasionally back up all that stuff on your external drive.