Category: Applications

Betterbird: Vastly Improved Fork of Thunderbird
article #1520, updated 68 days ago

Try it. https://www.betterbird.eu/. The Thunderbird team has been ignoring huge quantities of bugs and usability issues for decades. They kicked out a profoundly gifted developer several years ago, who has been leading Betterbird, a careful “soft fork” of Thunderbird, which maintains all helpful interoperability while fixing many, many bugs. Betterbird is lighter and faster, it does CardDav address books natively to Gmail and other providers, it has a far better HTML email composer, and much, more more!

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Install Edge browser via Powershell
article #1491, updated 259 days ago

This works well as of this writing. I imagine the URL will change in the future.

[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = "tls12, tls11, tls"
md -Path $env:temp\edgeinstall -erroraction SilentlyContinue | Out-Null
$Download = join-path $env:temp\edgeinstall MicrosoftEdgeEnterpriseX64.msi
Invoke-WebRequest 'https://msedge.sf.dl.delivery.mp.microsoft.com/filestreamingservice/files/a2662b5b-97d0-4312-8946-598355851b3b/MicrosoftEdgeEnterpriseX64.msi'  -OutFile $Download
Start-Process "$Download" -ArgumentList "/quiet"

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Cross-Linux Package Management: Snapcraft
article #1184, updated 1856 days ago

Lots and lots of interesting apps can be installed easily, and across distros, with Snapcraft:

snapcraft.io/store

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End-of-life of common Microsoft products
article #1055, updated 2186 days ago

Recently a Microsoft page on the subject went missing, and the replacement doesn’t seem to work in any browser. Here’s a regularly updated one from ZDNet with just Windows and Office:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/when-will-microsoft-pull-the-plug-on-your-version-of-windows-or-office/

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A Great Alternative to Visio
article #1035, updated 2271 days ago

This one is very good:
http://lucidchart.com

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Print-to-PDF using Ghostscript
article #959, updated 2549 days ago

This page appears a bit outdated, but it should still work:

https://www.stat.tamu.edu/~henrik/GSWriter/GSWriter.html

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New web browser
article #765, updated 3097 days ago

Looking rather interesting so far; it is very multiplatform:

http://www.qupzilla.com

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Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Reader direct downloads
article #695, updated 3286 days ago

Here’s Flash Player:

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/distribution3.html

and here’s Reader:

http://get.adobe.com/reader/enterprise/

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"Too Many Different Cell Formats" in Excel
article #640, updated 3416 days ago

Microsoft says:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/213904

that this is due to accumulating cell format IDs over time, when Excel documents have been used and updated over and over again. Microsoft says that this can be prevented in new Excel files by keeping Excel up to date, but does not give an automatic solution this way. Instead, when the problem is seen, we have to run a utility on the Excel file throwing the error. I found a very small binary in the SkyDrive account referred-to in the article above, called XLCleaner; this works quite well. I did not choose any of the checkboxes in my testing, they look like they might alter spreadsheet contents, and they did not appear to be necessary.

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