The following are programs and ideas that are either useful or just plain interesting.
Mind-expanding information
Dr. David Donnini’s research work – A very challenging and insightful work by an investigator over in Italy. It needed a good home, and I felt compelled to clean it up some, and host it here. Dr. Donnini was kind enough to give me his permission to do so.
Gary D. Thompson’s historical astronomy pages – Thompson’s writings are the best compilation of ancient astronomical reference material I’ve ever seen.
Web and Graphics Tools
Notepad++ – Quite simply the best text editor available.
Xara Xtreme – Now called ‘Xara Designer Pro,’ it is a powerful vector drawing program, but has suffered from not having vector features added in a few years.
Filezilla – Filezilla’s authors deserve a little recognition here. Just don’t store your passwords in it. If your computer is ever hacked they can be seen in plain text.
KeePass – Best password management tool available. Many products want you to keep them on the cloud, and this doesn’t, although you could use DropBox, or another solution, to make the file available on all your devices.
Astronomy programs
CyberSky – The astronomy program I used for a majority of my work because it is not too expensive, and has features the following ones lack.
Stellarium РFabien Ch̩reau and his team has created a fantastic tool, and they have a right to be proud!
Starry Night – Another astronomy program worth being aware of, but it was once too pricey for my purposes, and too hard to use. The price seems to have come down, and I don’t know about the usability, but it was pretty.
Programming Sites
Catch22.net – Many good tools and tutorials available.
CodeProject – For all things coding. Here’s a list of my articles on it.