Tag: students

Software for starving students

Lifehacker shared a great resource for starving students, broke professionals or anyone else needing good, quality software for free sometime last week.
Software for Starving Students lets you download an ISO file with numerous open source programs like Open Office, Audacity and Gimp for PC and Mac.
Since it is an ISO file, you’ll need a program that knows how to burn ISO (disk images) to CD but after that you’re free to install and use all the software for free.

Software for Starving Students is a free collection of programs organized for students (but available to anyone). We’ve gathered a list of best-in-class programs onto one CD (one disc for OS X, one for Windows), including a fully-featured office suite, a cutting-edge web browser, multi-media packages, academic tools, utilities and more.

Granted the software is available elsewhere on the web but this takes care of hunting each program down seperately.
It could also make a great birthday gift for a starving student or other friends needing to work with “industry standard file formats” without having the money to shell out for the “industry standard software.”
Some of the software I’m starting to use on a regular basis includes:

  • ClaimWin – Virus Protection
  • DeepBurner – disk burning software
  • Filezilla – FTP Client
  • Firefox – Internet Browser
  • Gaim – all in one IM client
  • GimpShop – a variation of Gimp for photo editing. I actually use the original Gimp, but this is a very similar version.
  • InkScape – an alternative to Illustrator for vector graphics.
  • PDF Creator – make PDFs from any program that prints
  • Thunderbird – email client
  • WinLame – lets me encoded and decode MP3 files

Now if I could just find a great open source program for video editing and animation. Blender looks to be super powerful when it comes to animation but I don’t have the first clue as to how to use it. I better hunt down some tutorials and get to work.
If you’re interested, check out this short movie done entirely with Blender and other Open Source software.

Students protest

Students from Irving, Dallas, Plano and Mesquite ISD protested at City Hall for a 2nd day today.

The students were protesting new measures discussed by the House to make helping illegal immigrants a crime.

Many Hispanic leaders are asking the students to remain in school now, after two days of walk-outs and protest on Saturdays and Sundays.

After thousands of North Texas students left classes for a second day in response to proposed legislation that would make it a felony to enter the country illegally or to help illegal immigrants, community leaders issued a plea Tuesday afternoon for the students to take more “constructive” action.
In a quickly-arranged news conference in City Hall’s Flag Room, the leaders talked about the need for students to end the walkouts, and gave several students the opportunity to speak about their feelings.
“The walkouts have been very effective, but it’s time for everyone to go back to school and start writing letters and making phone calls to your senator or congressman,” said Domingo Garcia, a Dallas lawyer and current National Civil Rights Chairman for LULAC.
Garcia said a civil rights march will be held in Dallas on April 9, and encouraged students and others who felt strongly about the issue to plan on taking part in that event rather than missing additional classes.

I wonder how much of the protest was heard about in Washington. And sadly I wonder if it has made any difference.

An interesting sidebar: KTVT had video of several students saying they were organized by using Myspace.com. Makes you realize how powerful a tool it can be if used properly. Several thousand students organized the rally on Dallas City Hall with Myspace. It’s a powerful tool for sure.