The last years I’ve relied on Tiny Personal Firewall as my firewall program (the old 2.x version that used to be free that is). That was until today when I decided I needed something that felt a bit more powerful and adjustable. I’ve tried a lot of firewalls out there, but I’ve never been able to find anything that I’ve felt satisfied with. I think the closest I came was Kerio’s free personal firewall, the only problem with that is that it freezes up a lot for me for some unknown reason, and it feels really slow and unresponsive when using it.

Today I discovered a hidden gem amonst the bloatware: Comodo Personal Firewall. Their page might make it seem a bit generic and dull, but it truly is a great program. It has a lot of customization options regarding program and access rules, and every time a new program tries to use an internet connection you’ll get a popup dialog asking what to do (optionally, you can turn this off and rely on the firewall’s internal database of safe programs to allow). Granted this isn’t a new feature or anything, even Tiny Personal Firewall had this, but it’s the overall impression that it conveys which makes it feel a bit more advanced. Something like that. Anyway, download it if you are in need of a light weight firewall program that doesn’t suck ass.

Thought I’d mention some neat programs or sites that I personally use, and that you may not have known about. I love discovering new, awesome (and preferable free) programs myself, specially finding programs that you’ve always wanted for something, but wasn’t able to find.

First, some web sites I couldn’t live without:

• Dictionary.com
  I probably use this daily, a very nice dictionary and thesaurus in one.
• DV-Depot
  More or less my only source for DVD purchases, except the occasional buy at Amazon.
• IMDB
  I guess there’s no need to mention this, but for those of you who don’t know, it’s the only place to go if you want information about any movie.
• IPLocate
  A nice way to convert hex values from webchat users in IRC, to find their real IP. At least the webchats for IRCNet puts the user’s IP address in hex value as their ident.
• Open Clipart Library
  Lovely place to find free clipart, all in excellent quality.
• Regular-Expressions.info
  If you want to learn the basics, as well as the more advanced sides about regular expressions, this is the place to do it.
• XHTML Character Entity Reference
  Sort of an online equivalent to Windows’ charmap, very handy.

And here’s a little list of programs I use for this and that, not all free:

• AutoGK
  Makes it almost too easy to encode your DVDs or other video files to xvid or divx.
• DVD Profiler
  Great program to organize your DVD collection, and share it online as well.
• EditPad Pro
  How anyone could live without this I don’t know.
• Everest Home Edition
  Great tool for getting information about your hardware.
• Exact Audio Copy
  The best way to rip your music CDs.
• FlashFXP
  My favorite FTP client.
• FlashSFV
  Small, fast and free SFV checker.
• GSpot
  Program to identify what codecs a video file uses.
• Firefox
  Obviously.
• Media Player Classic
  My media player of choice, superior in everything.
• Mp3 Tag Tools
  I use this one a lot. Really great program for mass tagging mp3 files, with lots of different settings and ways to tag files.
• Netlimiter
  This one I use 24/7. It’s a program to limit your programs’ use of bandwidth.
• StrongDC++
  My favorite direct connect client, has support for segmented downloading. A bit of a memory hog though.
• Subtitle Workshop
  Program to edit and synchronize subtitles.
• Thunderbird
  Easily the best e-mail client available.
• TMPGEnc
  Great tool for working with, and encoding mpeg video files
• µtorrent
  As previously mentioned, I just started using this as my default bittorrent client. Small, free and awesome.
• VirtualDub
  The only program you need for working with, and editing different video files.