I just added a phpBB3 mod which adds RSS feeds to a phpBB3 forum to the forums on this page. Like most phpBB3 mods, it’s a bit of a chore to install. More so since currently there is no easyMod for phpBB3, so everything has to be done manually. But if you follow the instructions in the install.xml to the letter, everything should be fine. Read more

Mozilla Thunderbird is a mail client for reading your POP3 or IMAP mail. With a simple add-on installed, Thunderbird will also retrieve webmail from the most popular webmail services like Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. Thunderbird supports multiple accounts, mail tagging, spam blocking and mail and address book import and export with other popular mail clients. Read more

OpenOffice.org is a full-featured office suite that’s available on multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and several UNIX variants. The user interface closely resembles that of recent Microsoft Office applications, as does most of the functionality. Let’s face it, when looking at office suites there’s no ignoring MS, it’s the one area where the folks from Redmond do really shine. Read more

The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an application with feature comparable to Adobe’s Photoshop and able to both read and write its PSD file format. It allows you to create original professional digital artwork, process digital photographs and convert and fix many types of bitmap images. The GIMP supports layers, works well with digitizers like WACOM’s popular pen tablets and offers an enormous number of tools and filters. Read more

Mozilla Firefox started out as the stable, lightweight, extensible answer to the two main web browsers at the time. The somewhat buggy Internet Explorer, which was seriously lacking in features, and Opera which was suffering from troublesome bloat, incorporating many functions unneeded and unwanted for many web browser users. Read more

Inkscape is the perfect tool to quickly create vector based images and natively saving them in the SVG file format, or exporting them in a variety of bitmap formats. Not quite as full-featured as professional applications like Adobe Illustrator or Corel Paint, it is perfect for simpler jobs and will fit the bill for most users looking to create nicely scalable graphics, logos and text art. Read more

Audacity allows you to quickly and simply edit audio files, like podcasts or system sounds. It has all the basic filters and controls you need, including excellent noise reduction. It supports multiple tracks, reads and writes all popular audio file formats and is easily configured for recording your own sound fragments or podcasts. Read more

XAMMP is a very user-friendly packaging of one of the most popular web servers out there: Apache. It comes in a neat little installable package with the popular MySQL database server, PHP for scripting your web pages, FileZilla FTP server and several other useful servers and applications which are all ready to go after installation. Perfect for personal use or use in a small business, easy to setup and maintain and with support for many languages. Read more