free – View from the Potting Shed

PhotoDemon – a small, featured-packed portable photo editor

I’m always on the lookout for a decent, free image editor. Especially one that I can recommend to web clients who are looking for something simple to editor and resize images.

I often recommend IrfanView, a small, free image viewer that packs in a number of useful features. But for cropping images, it’s a little fiddly.

This week I came across PhotoDemon which describes itself as a 100% free, 100% open-source portable photo editor. And while I’m not thrilled on the name, I have to say, I am very impressed with its ease of use and features.

Resizing images is simple. Cropping images is intuitive. Saving images to other formats is a breeze. It even supports layers and has a variety of visual effects.

For many tasks, this gives my usual photo editor, Corel PaintShop Pro, a good run for its money. It also looks more user-friendly than GIMP, the usual go-to for a free photo editor.

So, if you need a simple to use photo editor that you don’t even need to install, I can recommend PhotoDemon.

Trying OnlyOffice after years with Microsoft

Microsoft has increased the price of its Microsoft 365 Family subscription again, which has nudged me to rethink whether I still need it.

I am keen to explore alternatives that feel lighter, more accessible and less tied to the bigger companies like Microsoft, Adobe and Corel.

So I have started testing OnlyOffice – a free, cross-platform suite that immediately surprised me with its clean design, generous scaling options and effortless compatibility with my existing documents.

This is the start of a tentative experiment to see whether it could replace Microsoft 365 for me.

Goodbye WinZip, hello PeaZip

This week I said a sad but necessary goodbye to a faithful Windows utility that I have been using for the last 35 years or more, WinZip.

WinZip was just getting too bloated, too unfocused and too slow for me. And crucially, at times it no longer did the one simple thing I wanted from it: unzip a zip file.

So this week, I uninstalled WinZip and moved to the free, open source PeaZip. And I wish I had done it sooner.

Melkhior’s Mansion (the Atic Atac remake for Windows PC)

Back in the mid-1980s my friends and I would often tease each other about which was the better home computer, the Commodore 64 or the ZX Spectrum.

Clearly it was the Commodore 64!

Atic Atac

There was one Spectrum (and BBC micro) game, however, that I was very envious of: Atic Atac from Ultimate Play The Game.

Installing Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on an old Asus X551CA laptop from 2013

One of the items that I inherited after Mum died was her old laptop, an Asus X551CA that I bought her for Christmas 2013. This month I replaced the battery, upgraded the hard drive and installed Linux.

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