Simply The Best

Many times people ask me:

"Greg, what is the best {something}?"

Most of the time I have an answer. That's because "I know the stuff". I'm an early adopter. I do research. I just bought a new computer and was asked "how long have you been thinking about this?" well my answer was since I was born.

This section of the site is my collected knowledge on the subject of the "best" in software, technology, and other "stuff". Most of the artiles in it are old, this just provides simpler navigation to find all the nuggets of wisdom.

Best Cell Phone Provider in Denver

Like I said...people ask me for my opinion. And I give it here instead of in email because now the rest of the world gets to enjoy the glory of my opinions: > Your website says you have an opinion on everything...I need an opinion > on cell phone service providers in Denver.... We use Cingular and are pretty happy with them. The coverage is solid around Colorado, though Sprint is putting out ads saying "best coverage in Denver". I'm not sure who is best around Golden specifically, but vaguely remember both sprint and cingular working fine up there. I just got a new sim card that will work in more international places - but I haven't tried that. Verizon is also known to be pretty good. With Verizon you may have better international roaming options since they are part owned by Vodafone (largest international carrier). T-Mobile is CHEAP, but the coverage is worth what you pay (i.e. the coverage is not good). If you don't care about getting consistent service and just want a lot of minutes for not much money, t-mobile is good. They also have cheap options for data coverage (e.g. to use with a blackberry) if you like that kind of thing. Cricket is cheap considering the unlimited minutes and the coverage on the front range is decent. However, roaming is not free nor do they cover a very large part of Colorado and if you care about having any features (voicemail, call waiting) Cricket quickly becomes just as expensive as a moderate amount of usage from another provider.

Best Email Client

Mozilla Thunderbird is the Best EMail Program Version to use: 1.02 Hailing from the old Netscape Mail component, Mozilla Thunderbird brings a stable, powerful, and full featured mail client. The two biggest topics in email these days are spam and viruses. Thunderbird includes a "junk mail" filter that is very accurate: it marks most spam as such and very little "ham" gets marked as spam. Plus, it learns as it works and you "teach" it. By being based on the more secure Mozilla html engine, Thunderbird isn't susceptible to all of the virii that target the Internet Explorer based engines of Outlook and Outlook Express. Also, let's say that you want some security in 1) who has actually sent an email and 2)the privacy of the contents of the email - then you should use enigmail, a GPG signing/encrypting plugin to Thunderbird. And if you need it to send me an encrypted message,

Best Free PDF Creator or Generator Software

I can't believe this is the first time I'm writing about this, but google did not return any docuents (though it will in a few days...). Sending files in a manner that allows them to be preserved and viewable on any computer presents a problem to everyone. You can use text or "RTF" and get limited formatting options. Or HTML and get different rendering on every system. Or you can use PDF, but to do that you have to use expensive Adobe software, right? Wrong. There are several providers of "free" and "Free" software programs. Recently I had been using Primo PDF which is not "Free" software but it is "free" (as in, it doesn't cost anything). Update: More recently I have been using PDFCreator. PDFCreator works really well and actually makes smaller PDFs than PrimoPDF even though Primo gives all sorts of confusing options for "optimize for X" output. PDFCreator's main drawback is that the download from sourceforge is confusing. It's amazing - that sourceforge download page has been up for years and it's still confusing to many people (self included sometimes). Update 2008 More recently I've been using the built in capability to print to PDF from Ubuntu. Thanks, GNU/Linux!

Best Free PowerPoint Replacement

I recently received this email:

What is the Open Source equivalent (or better) of PowerPoint? Where should someone go to download it?
Are there any difficult questions when downloading it?
If someone creates a presentation in the OS version, then takes their file to another computer, can PowerPoint play it or does the other computer need to download the OS version?
Anything else that should be thought through?

Perhaps the title Best Office/Productivity/Diagramming Software isn't sufficiently targeted at all the replacements, so let me restate that if you need a Free replacement for PowerPoint that can import/export PowerPoint files, OpenOffice.org's Impress tool works great! You can download it right on that page. It does request a donation, but you can skip that. The installation is pretty simple, though it does request that you register (free process) which helps them understand their users more. You have the option of skipping the registration.

Learning to Use Impress

There are Tutorials available online which are pretty decent. The person who wrote those is a former teacher.

Import/Export and PowerPoint compatability

While it can import/export to PowerPoint format, it doesn't do that by default. And sometimes you'll have problems with the import/export function, so it's best to get all of your friends to use OpenOffice.org as well. Unless you have some really really good reason that you use PowerPoint, OpenOffice.org is a much better piece of software that doesn't require any expensive licensing fees.

Generaly speaking, though, you can run the files that were created by OpenOffice.org on any Microsoft Office computer. Just be sure to select "Save as type" of the proper Microsoft Office program.

Templates for Impress

While I'm on the subject, it's always nice to have some templates for Impress so that your presentations look pretty. I've written before about Pretty OpenOffice.org Impress Templates and recently found More Pretty OpenOffice.org Impress Templates.

Best iPod Car Adapter

I get asked questions about stuff. Sometimes, the answer might be useful to other people - so why not share it here... Like this question about car adapters for ipods:

> I want to buy a car adapter that lets me play my iPod. I know how the iTrip > works, but also assume there are lots of other options. What's the best in > your opinion for large city use? Do you know of sources I can review > (consumer reports is one, but any other reliable tech source)?

The iPod Lounge (now iLounge, due to busy Apple lawyers) has these kinds of reviews: http://www.ilounge.com

iPod Car Adapter

I think the best ipod adapter really depends on your car situation:

1. Own the car and it's the primary one you drive - take it to a stereo place and spend $50 on something that will directly plug into your radio
2. Leasing the car, or want to use your iPod to feed to a stereo in lots of different situations:
• If you have a tape player, get a tape adapter - better sound and the possibility for the tape fast-forward/rewind buttons to do something to the iPod.
• If you have no tape player or want to be able to play your ipod through your friends cars/stereos - get a radio adapter. The big drawback being frequency problems in media saturated cities

Some of the devices have integrated chargers. I don't frequently drive for more than 6 hours and that's my current iPod battery life. Between my iPod and Nikki's, we probably have 15 hours of combined battery life - so that's not really a problem for any trip we might reasonably take. Given all that, I don't like the idea of the car chargers because my suspicion (valid or not) is that quick charge/drain cycles like on a daily commute will diminish your overall battery life. I know new batteries aren't supposed to be susceptible to this...but when there's a class action lawsuit about the iPod battery life why not just be a little more vigilent in caring for your batter? As to specific models - I'll leave that to the folks at http://www.ilounge.com who do it for a living. I just don't keep close enough track of the current models.

Best Office/Productivity/Diagramming Software

Version to use: I use the 2.0 version Yes, it's true. OpenOffice.org is my favorite "productivity" software. I use it practically every day. You may say, that's nice, but where are the templates and the "text to columns". Well, poke around for a little while on OpenOffice.orgDocs and you should be able to find any feature that's missing.

Best PHP CMS Program

Drupal is the best php, mysql or postgresql, CMS system. Version to use: 4.6.5 (4.7 is due "soon"). I've used a couple of CMS systems over the years, including a home brewed one and I've tested even more of them. After trying out all of these, my feeling is that Drupal.org. You may have noticed that our family website is based upon it. I've also built the

Best Website Hosting Server Provider

I have used a variety of web hosts over the years for different websites that I have created or helped with: HalfpriceHosting, HostDime, Lunarpages, and now DreamHost. Most of them are more similar than they are different, but with some of them I feel that they are really trying to be the best they can and provide the best value in a package that is fair to their users. DreamHost is my current favorite, so let me tell you a little more about why I chose them. Now, not everyone has the same needs, so maybe this advice isn't best for you. My websites are relatively low volume. I don't need 99.999% uptime. I want something that is going to be pretty cheap, that is going to be easy for me to edit/update, and that has the features I care about (which can also be stated as "has a lot of features").

• First, stuff that's the same or better than other places: disk space, bandwidth, network speed, servers, email accounts, ftp access, databases, subdomains, etc. All that stuff is in there. Further, they use a "rolling improvement" kind of process. If they improve something for new accounts, it also applies to old accounts.
• Second, they are constantly increasing the disk space, bandwidth, CPU minutes, etc. that each user is allowed to have. For some they even state a minimum level if increases in those areas per year. That's service I've gotten from other places only after I called their customer support. DreamHost just gives it to me.

Next, the places where DreamHost really shines:

• scp access - I hate using FTP to load files to my host because anyone on the network between my machine and my host can read my FTP password and once they have that I might as well hand them the keys to the server. I now use scp to load files when necessary which means that my username/password are at least safe enough that I don't have to worry.
• Shell access - when I try to load a big package like Gallery on previous hosts the process was something like download compressed software file from website, uncompress it on my computer, upload the uncompressed files to the server. That process of uploading could take several hours and often got interrupted due to timeouts on the FTP server. Now, I use shell access and wget to download the compressed file directly to the host and then uncompress them on the host. This saves hours from each week of my life and time is the most limited resource in my life.
• Users are monitored and bad users are put on probation and can then removed. This is the main source of complaints against DreamHost, but for me, it's a real plus. On my old host I would always see that the workload on the server was in the 2-8process/cpu level. So far my server at DreamHost sits around a 1 process/cpu and part of that is my old host was a really old server. The other part is that DreamHost measures CPU minutes and database Conueries and if your shared host goes above a threshold of usage for these values, it gets moved to an Evaluation Server where they keep track of your actions and my require you to pay more for a dedicated server or allow you to tweak parameters on your site to get under a reasonable level of usage. To me, this is great. While I hope I might see whole tidal waves of traffic I doubt I will and in the meantime the guy who is hogging server resources is making my account respond slowly. With DreamHost, the response times have been solid.
• Their server farm has been designed with security and redundancy from the start. One of the few complaints I read about DreamHost prior to signing up (and which has slightly annoyed me as well) is that configuration changes in their proprietary control panel take a while to be implemented. For one, why would they develop a proprietary control panel when everyone else uses CPanel? Well, CPanel is very expensive, so to reduce costs, DreamHost has just continued building their in house system. That system can take 15 minutes or so for changes to take effect. At first this frustrated me, but then I read this forum post about how their configuration control sits on a redundant set of protected machines in the data center and then individual web hosts are built from this central control. So, if a server dies they can quickly rebuild it to get your services up and running again. That is the kind of trade-off that I am willing to take and it just took a few days to get used to planning ahead on control panel changes so that they don't slow down my work flow.
• I can run PHP and even PHP5. Nobody else I've used does that. And if I want to run some special flags on my compilation of PHP, they allow me to run PHP as a CGI and use my own custom built binary. I _love_ that fact though I hardly think I'll use it. It's just the way that UNIX was meant to help the world they are taking advantage of it.

Cost is the same at dream host as it has been at other hosts, even including all of these extra services. And this is really the best part, I signed up with a promotion code from someone else, so my cost was less than their advertised price. Naturally I want to pass along that promo code to other people, so here's the skinny: Follow the link over to DreamHost and towards the end of the signup process you use the KNADS promo code and that will get you a discount depending on the kind of plan you select: If you do the math, it gets the monthly price of hosting under the cost of a six pack of beer. Hells yeah.

The Best "Everything" Program

Version to use: Whatever you can get from the website Cygwin gives you the ability to run "Linux" tools on MSWindows. Old favorites like bash, wc, find, and awk run beautifully and help me daily in my work.

The Best Advanced Text Editor

Version to use: hey, it's a mature product - whatever you've got is probably good. Once you get tired of Crimson and want to do more inside of your editing environment (like cvs updates/commits, or send/read email, or compile programs...) it's time to use XEmacs which is the better fork from the popular Emacs software.

The best antivirus program

Clamwin is the best antivirus program - if you are at least somewhat technically savvy. Version to use: .88 I have used all the most popular commercial anti-virus program and they are almost all resource intensive applications. They will all slow your computer and give you weird popups about stuff you don't care about. The basic problem with current versions of clamwin is that they won't do "realtime" scanning. So, this is a problem for people who 1) open files/downloads/attachments without first scanning them to see if they are safe 2) use virus rich technologies like ActiveX, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, and Outlook Express. I don't do any of those things, so I'm safe. Nikki is less safe, but I hide those things from her and don't let her use the computer very often :)

The Best File Compression Programs

BZIP2 and 7zip are the best compression tools. Versions to use: 7zip-4.15 release :: bzip2 whatever Cygwin provides. 7zip provides a reasonable user interface, can handle many popular formats and zips smaller and faster than most anything else. However, when you're on a unix/linux machine or if you are using Cygwin and want to do a bunch of programs in a directory, there's nothing like using "bzip2 -9 *" to get your files tiny quickly, though BZIP2 doesn't have a gui...

The Best File transfer programs

WinSCP and ncftp (via Cygwin) are the best file transfer programs Version to use: WinSCP-3.7.4 :: ncftp whatever Cygwin includes If you have the choice, you really shouldn't be using ftp to transfer your files on the internet. Instead, you can use SSH/SFTP via such GUI tools as WinSCP. But, let's say that you don't care about the privacy of your data. Go ahead and use something fun like ncftp (available via Cygwin which includes "tab autocompletion" on the remote site and "-r" recursive site downloads.)

The Best Light Text Editor

Version to use: something above 3.7 If you have to do lots of crazy stuff in your "light" editing, you might like UltraEdit, but it costs too much for the features in my opinion. Instead, Crimson Editor provides a nice fast editor with plenty of features, but not so many it hurts your head.

The Best Messaging/Chat Program

Version to use: 1.2.0 (though they update often, I may be out of date here...) GAIM provides a multi-client chat interface. That means that if you have accounts on any of the chat platforms, you can use GAIM to access that account. It isn't magic, you can't talk to people on MSN if you have an AIM account, but if you have both, you can run one interface and still get to all those people. It also provides fun things like RSA encryption via the Gaim-encryption plug in. There's lots more options investigate them. Recently, I found out I'm not supposed to use outside IM clients. Instead, we use POD which is, um, bad. Also, Google has released < a href="http://www.google.com/talk/">Google Talk which has the benefit of a decent UI, integrating with my GMail contacts, hopefully opening up IM protocols to standards, and providing VOIP. Not half bad. If you need an invite, let me know and I can help you out.

The Best Music Player/Ripper

iTunes is the best music player/ripper Version to use:4.7 EDITI'm not sure which version to recommend - new versions offer podcasts but take away from your ability to use the media to the full extent of the fair use provisions. That's lame. Songbird is probably going to be my new favorite, as soon as it's released. Sign up for their mailing list and you can be in on releases, too. If you use MP3 or AAC or WMA as your main type of music,iTunes is pretty unbeatable. If you want to rip MP3s from CDs, it also does a very good job. You will need a fast machine because iTunes is a resource hog, but the "smart playlist" and "party shuffle" features are pretty unbeatable. It sets the standard that every player is shooting for except for foobar2000(since foobar2000 just wants to be "lightweight"). iTunes includes some privacy and DRM features that I disagree with. But these only apply to AAC/WMA formatted files and I use MP3. Just be sure you understand what you are signing up for before you start using it. I wish I could use OGG Vorbis, but that won't play on my iPod...what's a gadget nerd to do?

The Best Nation: ProcrastiNation

I'm a somewhat notorius procrastinator. Thank goodness Paul Graham has taken up the subject and written about why procrastination isn't really a bad thing, it's just a matter of priorities. And moreover, that if you are "ambitious" then you should avoid doing tasks that pull you away from your important work.

Some particularly good sections:



That said, I just spent a fair amount of time 1) improving my knowledge of Drupal and 2)implementing the project module as a personal todo list. Whoops.

The Best of Denver and the Baker Neighborhood

Best Denver Coffee

Kaladi Brothers: this is the best coffee in town…we go there for takeaway coffee and buying beans, not as much for sit-down.

Metropolis: slightly closer to the Baker neighborhood, this is a great sit-down coffee shop with fabulous coffee. The free wifi is nice as well.

Best Denver Mojito

Cuba Cuba: a great date night place for dinner and drink, or a great bar to have a few (slightly pricy but oh so worth it) drinks.

Best Denver Tapas

9th Door: The 9th Door: possibly my favorite place in downtown Denver, especially the happy hour. Honey drizzled fried goat cheese ball, anyone?

Best Denver bagel

Moe's Bagels: a local favorite

Einstein Brothers Bagels: OK so it’s a chain, but they do have a delightful Santa Fe breakfast sandwich.

Best Baker Neighborhood Bakery

Look away from the "Fat people are harder to kidnap" bumper sticker at the register of the Buffalo Doughboy Bakery and enjoy a prosciutto and swiss croissant or a pastry filled with apples and walnuts.

Best Denver Thai food

Tommy's Thai: Great food, great price…mmmmmmmmm! For delivery/closer to home option, Thai Basil is pretty tasty as well.

Best Denver Vegetarian Restaurant

Watercourse: A great breakfast, lunch and dinner spot with wholesome yet delicious home cooked options. My personal favorites include banana bread French toast with fresh fruit or the tofu scramble with brie and basil (I was scared at first, but it’s seriously delightful). If you don’t believe healthy food can be delicious, you gotta try Watercourse!

Best Denver Pizza

Pasquini's on South Broadway is a good sit-down option, while Proto's Pizza is a fancier option with great thin crust creative pizzas. Another favorite, of course, is the Buenos Aires Pizzeria with its delicious pizzas and empanadas. Their sister restaurant is an Argentine steakhouse which is also a great place to try.

Best German Resutaurant

The Cafe Berlin is perhaps the only real German restaurant in Denver but that's not the only reason it's the "best." It also happens to be delicious. Just don't be surprised by the meat - the "vegetarian option" comes covered in meat gravy and the split pea soup has meat in it as well. It's all delcious, but it's defintely a place to go when you are ready for some hearty meat dishes (feeling veggie? see watercourse above).

Best Denver (diveish) bars

Breckenridge: Wednesday nights are $2 draft nights. The 471 IPA is a little slice of heaven.

The Hornet: OK this bar fits under the category of the best I’m-meeting-someone-and-don’t-know-where-to-go slash fallback bar…

My Brother's Bar: Great burgers and drinks near downtown/REI

The Stadium Inn in the DU neighborhood is the diveiest of the dive bars if you're ever in the mood to a) fee like you're in college again or b) get tipsy on $2.50 gin and tonics.

Best Downtown Denver Haircut

Visit stylist Hannah Wheeler at the historic, funky Parlour and enjoy a gratis glass of wine or beer while getting a great haircut and chat session.

Best Denver Auto Repair

Addison Auto is an independent auto repair shop for both mechanical and body repair. Plus it's my parent's shop:)

Best Entertainment near Baker Neighborhood

Mayan Theater: watch an independent film 3 blocks from home while sipping on some vino/beer.

First Friday Santa Fe Gallery crawl: The first Friday of every month, the numerous galleries along Santa Fe stay open until 9pm while hordes of people wander the streets sipping wine and checking out art.

Botanic Gardens: the perfect place for a picnic and wandering around this huge and varied garden.

Best Denver Independent Bookshop

We’re no longer friends if you keep going to Barnes and Noble after checking out the Tattered Cover's two locations around downtown. This is my happy place where I go browse books and drink coffee when I’m stressed at work.

Best Denver Wine Shop

The Whole Foods of liquor shopping is Divino on South Broadway. Wine tastings on Saturdays and recommended wines for as low as $7.

The Best Remote Shell Program

Version to use: .57 PuTTY allows SSH connections to remote machines so you can get a system prompt. Plus, Simon is a pretty cool guy. I sent him an email with a question and he got back in a day or two with a reasonably helpful response, bless him. Putty needs no installation, so some people like to use StartPutty.com to instantly run PuTTY on a machine that may not have it installed or in a place like a library where the computer may be locked down to a browser only, but if you can pull up StartPutty, you can probably run the program even with normal access to the machine.

The Best Web Browser

Mozilla Firefox is the Best Web Browser Version to use:1.5.x

You can also use the 2.0betas - they're getting pretty good :) but many extensions aren't compatible :( Mozilla Firefox is growing in popularity and should easily hit Blake Ross' desire of 10% of the market share by the end of 2005. But, it still has to be mentioned. Opera works well, but doesn't render pages that are poorly written, its user interface is too confusing for new users, and they either charge for it or show banner ads and they used to charge for it but recently made it "free as in beer" but not "free as in conversation". Bummer, that. You may feel like Firefox is just another browser - even if it's the one that the US Government's CERT recommends to avoid IE's virii. Then you start using extensions like StatusBar Clock and FlashBlock and you're going to say, dang, this is pretty cool. But wait, there's more.

You should download the Google Toolbar for Firefox along with Firefox and that will get you a nifty spell checker for textareas, pageranker, all sorts of fun stuff. Add this to your userContent.css so that links that open from different kinds of actions/targets are clearly visible from the mouseover pointer style:

---

/* Change cursor for links that open in new window */
:link[target="_blank"], :visited[target="_blank"], :link[target="_new"],   :visited[target="_new"] {
   cursor:  crosshair;
}

/* Change cursor for JavaScript links */
a[href^="javascript:"] {
   cursor: move;
}