Well - everyone, including my wife, thinks I spend wayyy tooo much time at my computer and they always wonder what the hell is it that I do ! Well over the years the technology has improved so much that now I can do pretty much anything using my computer. Be it watching TV, writing a blog, reading news, seeing a gallery of photos, planning a trip, checking mail or just listening to music. Here are the tools that I use - I bet there are more, but here is what I use.

Watching TV/Videos

  • NFL : I use SOPCast to watch those games that aren’t aired in my area. As I write this blog entry, I am watching the Colts vs. Bucaneers game. Want to know where I find the appropriate channel addresses to watch the games? Here is a link to the page that has links to all the games - This is updated weekly.
  • Bollywood Stuff :Want to watch Zee TV, Sony and other hindi movies? Check out muft.tv
  • Joost : Ye, I do have a Joost account. A friend of mine invited me to it and I have been using it for a while. It is a great software tool and I really like it, though it does have a long way to go where content is concerned. The quality is really good. I think Joost is now open to anyone who wants to use it - they can download the software from the official site
  • YouTube : YouTube of course is the tool that I use to search for all the videos that I might have missed over the week. It is awesome though not as awesome after Google bought it out - They had better content before that !! Nevertheless - they still do have some good stuff. For example they have an official page for clips from late night shows like Conan and Jay Leno.
  • Online shows : ABC, Fox, CBS and all others now host their recent past shows on their websites. So if you missed the last Desperate housewives episode or Heroes or Lost episodes then check out the respective channels - though they are put up online a day later

Photography Tools

  • Adobe Photoshop CS2 : A Graphic Designers best friend ! This is by far the best softwareI have ever used ! Read my blog entry about Adobe Photoshop here
  • Panoramas : I take a lot of photographs and I use the best stitching tool that I have come across so far - Autostitch. I love this tool and the guys over at University of British Columbia have done an awesome job ! There is no other tool that I consider better than Autostitch
  • HDR Composition : Recently I started taking a lot of HDR photos and to compose them I use Photomatix. There are a lot of other tools there including Adobe Photoshop, however I think Photomatix does a good job - it has some presets for noobs.
  • Online Hosting : My brother hosts a web server at his house and we run Gallery. We have been using Gallery from a very early version and we have a lot of photos now ! I also use Flickr and Picasaweb.

Downloader/Conversion Tools

  • SUPER : SUPER is an awesome tool that I found a little while ago. You can convert a lot of media from one format to another. The biggest plus - its FREE - woo hoo ! I love these guys who make awesome software and distribute it free of charge !
  • flvconvert : flvconvert is another great tool based on an open source tool called ffmpeg that allows you to convert flash videos (flv videos used by nearly ALL online video sites like YouTube etc.) to mpeg or avi files. You can then transfer these to your iPod or any other PMP.
  • Audacity + lame encoder : Audacity is another free tool that I use. I love ringtones and Audacity is what I use to create my own ringtones from the mp3 files that I own.  lame is the encoder that is used to export the snipped songs as mp3s. You can then transfer these to your phone. Someday soon I shall write an entry about how to create ringtones.
  • AVI MPEG RM WMV Joiner/Splitter : Join or split the video files. Sad to say its a paid utility.
  • SDP Downloader: Some time ago, I wanted to download some wma and wmv files and I couldn’t. I grabbed this tool and voila !
  • Firefox +DownloadHelper add-on : Download all those flv videos from any site using the DownloadHelper add-on with Firefox 2.0

There are ton of other tools that I use. I shall update this blog entry whenever I find out about them and use them !