Just wanted to chat about what kinda software I use and invite you to join in. Specifically, I'm looking at free or open source software so that we don't have to spend money on stuff.

-Open Office. Supplements Microsoft Office and is pretty much the same thing to the average user.

-Gimp. Supplements Photoshop. I'm not much into drawing, but it's pretty neat.

-Imgburn. Disk image burning program. You can copy disks, burn an image to a disk, create an image from a disk, or put a bunch of files on a disk.

-Daemon tools lite. Allows you to mount an image of a disk. If that's over your head, then imaging that I took a picture of a disk, put it on my hard drive, then put that picture in my disk drive.

-Launchy. A nifty program that lets you quickly find stuff. You hit a key combo (alt+space by default) to bring p a little window where you can type stuff. As you start to type what you're looking for, Launchy searches certain directories to try to guess what you want. For example, I type "ut4" and it give me the link: "Unreal Tournament 2004".

Speedfan and coretemp. Both monitor cpu temperatures. Coretemp is very lightweight and can automatically log your temperatures to a text file for analysis at some alter time. Speedfan monitors temps of any and all temperature sensors it can find in your computer. It also tries to read voltages and fan speeds and even lets you control the fan speeds, along with some other random stuff in that field.

Prime95. Overclocker's friend. It performs torture tests for your computer, which is another way of saying that P95 makes your computer or certain parts of your computer work as fast as possible to make sure that you don't overheat or make errors when your computer is loaded down. Monitor temperatures if you're gonna stress your computer to make sure you don't melt it.

VLC. General purpose media player. Not as profesionally done as Winamp, but very customizable.

Firefox. I have heard from many that firefox is a billion times greater than Micrsoft's Internet Explorer and have yet to hear someone say "Firefox sure does suck compared to IE." Also, there's an add-on caled adblock, which allows you to block pictures and animations that pollute the pages you view.

Opera. Just playin around with it. it has this nifty quick launch page, which is 9 tiles that are previews of web sites you set them to look at. Also, you can use your mouse movements while holding the right button to perform gestures that navigate forward, backward, make new tabs, etc. However, it doesn't have spell check, like Firefox has.

Zone alarm free firewall. Basic firewall, but it seems to be quite secure. Some people don't like a few things about it, but I find it good if you're not changing networks all the time.

AVG free antivirus. Well, the name kinda says it. I've heard good things about it and it has caught a few things so far...

-Pidgin. Instant messenger client. Supports a host of different IM servies, incuding Google talk, which is what tipped the scales and made me switch from the free version of Trillian. I like trillian, but don't wanna pay money just so I can install the Jabber plug-in to chat on Google.

-Notepad++. Fairly light-weight word editor. I mainly use this for coding and for reading simple text files.

What about Blender? Can't forget Blender!

Awesome 3D modeler that has an interface quite daunting to the unexperienced, but actually really awesome once you get used to it. Fully modular toolbars, windows, and menus for the win!

And 7-Zip. None of that annoying "You have not yet registered WinRar/Zip. And because you never will, we will pester you until the end of times. Suck it, loser." Plus the absolute best damn compression you'll ever see.

Oh yeah, forgot about XMPlay as well. Very low profile media player that somehow seems to squeeze a few extra bits of sound quality into your music, while offering a plethora of supported sound file types and offering plugins for all the others, and having a pretty good selection of other plugins and skins, though personally, I have no need for them because I can just start it up, minimize it to task tray, and forget about it. Very nice if you're pressed for ram but like to listen to your own music when playing games.

yeah, there's some great open source software out there.

Altough I don't like speedfan....

VLC is the best!

7-Zip: The best compression tool out there, and it is free.
IrfanView: Fantastic image viewer/modifier
XMPlay: The best audio player I have come across
LeafChat: A good free IRC client, though I'm not sure if it goes as far as being open source

I also like open source game engines/source ports.
DarkPlaces: A very good engine for Quake that is constantly being improved
D2X-XL: A nice engine for Descent 1 & 2
Kmquake2: Heavily modified engine for Quake 2 that updates visuals and has much higher limits than the old one

And we can't forget the Tenebrae mod for Quake 1. It adds per-pixel shading, glare, and some other random effects that let you squeeze a little more life out of that old game. I'll have to check out those Q2 mods.

Tenebrae is pretty much the same as DarkPlaces in terms of features and look, except dead and horribly unoptimized.

Oh, never even bothered with Dark Places once I learned to Tenabre. I'm gonna go away and do some Googling... for some complete unrealated purpose... te he heee.....

Back when I was a fan of Tenebrae, DarkPlaces didn't look nearly as good as it does now. After all Tenebrae has been dead for years, DarkPlaces has had time to catch up and get far ahead.

if i knew how to use blender D:

Well, you can't learn it simply by sitting around wishing you knew how to use it, you gotta go out and learn it yourself.

Doesn't that require actual effor? C'mon.

It would require effort, dunno about effor though.

if i had the time i gots my self a job now and pretty much the hole summer iv ben hanging out with my friends

The world isn't black and white. You could always get yourself some free time from the friends once in a while to play around with making models.

Only as a reward for averaging 10 kills per minute in UT3 against average comps.

Anyways, when I told my brother about a modded Q2 engine, he came accross quake2xp, which seems to be along very similar lines as kmquake2. Both have 3rd person views, bloom, widescreen support, and so on. However, I am tempted to say that quake2xp is a little more polished; I also like how you can change the parameters for the bloom, unlike with UT3 between blinding and washed out.