Handy software

[TreverT]

It occurred to me that a thread for sharing incredibly useful software might be useful. This is for those running their pipe biz fulltime or serious part-time, who do their own maintenance work. If you've found a handy piece of software, please post it, especially if it is freeware!

First up is Solway's Free Internet Radio player:
http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/soltvradio.html
This is a simple freeware utility that can receive commercial-free internet radio from hundreds/thousands of channels around the world. It comes pre-set with quite a few, including the BBC radio channels, and is easy to add to. What this has to do with pipes is that when you make pipes all day, day after day, you run through your own collection of CDs and music pretty damn fast, and NOBODY wants to be forced to listen to local babbling disc jockeys. I love Iceberg Internet Radio, and plugged all my favorite channels from there into Solway, so now I can just open Solway and tune to Classical Baroque or Celtic or Latin-Jazz or Progressive Metal as the mood strikes me.

Kompozer is a very useful freeware HTML editor that also handles CSS.
http://kompozer.sourceforge.net/
It isn't Dreamweaver, but if your needs are simple, it is incredibly easy to use and simple to create and maintain a website with.

Obviously everyone knows OpenOffice by now. I switched from MS Office and haven't looked back. I like that word "free", not to mention not being tied to an OS and its perpetual upgrade cycles.

[pierredekat]

Sweet.

I've been using TurboCAD 6 -- a vector-based CAD program capable of creating, editing and saving the AutoCAD-standard .DWG file type -- since about 2000, and I finally decided it was time to upgrade.

They're up to TurboCAD 14 now, which will set you back about $200. But I snooped around on Ebay and found TurboCAD 11.2, new-in-the-box and fully licensable for $9.99 plus $5.95 shipping.

Just bought that this morning.

For HTML editing and publishing, I've had good luck using Seamonkey, which is the old Netscape/Mozilla suite of mail, browser, and composer. Seamonkey is, of course, free.

For photo editing, I've been using The GIMP. It's not terribly user-friendly, but it is free, and it will do absolutely anything you could ever want to do to a picture: crop, scale, rotate, add text, paint, sharpen, flip, do gif animations, etc., etc., etc.

Worth noting is the fact that Seamonkey and The GIMP -- both maintained by their respective guru organizations -- are multi-platform, so there are builds for unix, linux, mac, windows, etc. That's always nice for folks running different operating systems on different computers.

Cheers.

[LexKY_Pipe]

Do you use the Turbo Cad in pipe designs? Just curious?

[pierredekat]

Do you use the Turbo Cad in pipe designs? Just curious?

Oh, man, it's the coolest thing since sliced bread. I do a rough drawing of the block on one "layer" in the drawing. Then I lay out the stummel -- in a second layer -- however I want or need to.

Then I do the stem in third layer of the drawing, the boring in a fourth layer, the dimensions in a fifth layer, and so on.

Then I can turn the layers on-and-off so that I'm only looking at whichever layers I want to see at any given time.

And the spline curves are amazing! You can lay out some kind of crazy curve, and then tweak it, and tweak it, and tweak it -- with the greatest of ease -- until you get it just the way you want it.

Finally -- and this is the cool, cool thing -- when you get the drawing the way you want it, you print it out to scale, tape it to your block, and use it as a template.

[geigerpipes]

One program I found very usefull if you have a newsletter is a little free program called G-Lock Easy Mail
The free version only allows you to have one newsletter group wich is enough for me...you can do html based or normal text based newsletters with easy and comfort.

Last.fm is a radio station that playes tunes generated from a group or a style that you type in

[Nick]

Oh, man, it's the coolest thing since sliced bread. I do a rough drawing of the block on one "layer" in the drawing. Then I lay out the stummel -- in a second layer -- however I want or need to.

Then I do the stem in third layer of the drawing, the boring in a fourth layer, the dimensions in a fifth layer, and so on.

Then I can turn the layers on-and-off so that I'm only looking at whichever layers I want to see at any given time.

And the spline curves are amazing! You can lay out some kind of crazy curve, and then tweak it, and tweak it, and tweak it -- with the greatest of ease -- until you get it just the way you want it.

Finally -- and this is the cool, cool thing -- when you get the drawing the way you want it, you print it out to scale, tape it to your block, and use it as a template.

How cool! I used to mess around with a 3d drawing program like that. But the free licence expired. One thing that would be really cool though with the cad files would be to run it through a computational fluid dynamics program. Totally cool!

[ScoJo]

Oh, man, it's the coolest thing since sliced bread. I do a rough drawing of the block on one "layer" in the drawing. Then I lay out the stummel -- in a second layer -- however I want or need to.

Then I do the stem in third layer of the drawing, the boring in a fourth layer, the dimensions in a fifth layer, and so on.

Then I can turn the layers on-and-off so that I'm only looking at whichever layers I want to see at any given time.

And the spline curves are amazing! You can lay out some kind of crazy curve, and then tweak it, and tweak it, and tweak it -- with the greatest of ease -- until you get it just the way you want it.

Finally -- and this is the cool, cool thing -- when you get the drawing the way you want it, you print it out to scale, tape it to your block, and use it as a template.

How cool! I used to mess around with a 3d drawing program like that. But the free licence expired. One thing that would be really cool though with the cad files would be to run it through a computational fluid dynamics program. Totally cool!

Geek.

[Nick]

*MURF!*

Pot...Kettle ....black

Don't tell me you didn't think of that Scott?

[ScoJo]

[LexKY_Pipe]

pierredekat

I would be interested in talking with you in some detail about the Turbo Cad. Please send an email to Craig@LoscalzoPipes.com

Thanks

[Frank]

First up is Solway's Free Internet Radio player:
http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/soltvradio.html
This is a simple freeware utility that can receive commercial-free internet radio .....

Many thanks for this little gem Trever. I rediscovered Radio Luxembourg! Like an old friend coming home.

To quote an unknown musician, "I'd sooner walk a 5 mile detour than have to hear a lick of rap!"