I discovered Miro (formerly know as Democracy TV) when I could not have complete control of our TV remote control (wife and son is in control) in our bedroom. Nothing left for entertainment, I grab my Ubuntu notebook and searched for internet TV for Linux, and there I found Miro. Miro is not only for Linux but also for Windows and Mac OSX. I searched the channel guide and found all the technology channels that I want, and discovered new channels that I now love.

Quite simply, Miro is a free application for channels of internet video (also known as ‘video podcasts and video rss). Miro is designed to be easy to use and to give you an elegant fullscreen viewing experience.

There are thousands of free internet video channels that you can watch. You’ll be able to download all the videos that each channel offers and when new ones are released, Miro will grab them automatically.

Unlike tiny videos on websites like YouTube, Miro videos are usually very high quality and look great when watched full screen. Since Miro downloads videos completely before you watch, your videos will never skip or stutter while they are playing.

To download Miro click here

Below is a demo video on how to use Miro:

IZArc is the ultimate freeware archive utility supporting many archive formats like: 7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BIN, BZ2, BZA, C2D, CAB, CDI, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, IMG, ISO, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MDF, MBF, MIM, NRG, PAK, PDI, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP, ZOO. With a modern easy-to-use interface, IZArc provides support for most compressed and encoded files, as well as access to many powerful features and tools. It allows you to drag and drop files from and to Windows Explorer, create and extract archives directly in Windows Explorer, create multiple archives spanning disks, creating self-extracting archives, repair damaged zip archives, converting from one archive type to another, view and write comments and many more. IZArc has also build-in multilanguage support.

Main Features of IZarc:

• Create an archive
• Add files to an existing archive
• Delete files from an existing archive  
• Extract files from an existing archive  
• Test an archive file  
• Convert archive
• Convert CD Images
• Repair broken archive
• Searching for any files in many archives
• Favorite Folders
• Obtaining a detailed list of files and information like compression rate, path, or size from an archive file
• Supports both long and short 8.3 filenames
  
• Disk spanning from and to multiple diskettes or other removable media
  
• Implementing the possibility to sort the list items by name size, date and etc.
  
• Full Drag & Drop support  
• CD/DVD Images support (ISO, BIN, MDF, NRG, IMG, C2D, PDI, CDI)
• Integrating in Windows Explorer context menu  
• Automatic installation of most software distributed in archive files
• Add/View comments in an archive
• By double-clicking onto a file in the file list, it’s opened with the program associated to this file type
• CheckOut feature
  
• Create a self-extracting archive
• E-mail an archive
• Checking for new updates
• Build-in multilanguage support
• Virus Scan feature
• UU/XX/MIME Encode/Decode
• Create Multi-Volume Set
• Merge Multi-Volume Set
• UnSFX (Convert self-extracting (SFX) .EXE files to standard archives)
• Encrypt files using Rijandael - AES (256-bits) encryption
• Zip encryption (WinZip 9 compatible)
• BZip compression for ZIP archives
• Decrypt (.ize) files

 Download IZarc here

I am a very fond supporter of free and open source software. I have been using Linux and open source software for almost five years. The experience was very satisfactory aside from it being very educational. I have saved a lot ever since I used free and open source software and turned that savings into buying new and better hardware instead. Realistically there are hundreds if not thousands of free productivity software available out there. Due to its abundance it may be hard for a new switcher to find exactly what they need. WHDb has created a list of the most used proprietary software and their free alternatives. Here is what WHDb has to say:

The following fifty proprietary programs are listed in no particular order within broad categories along with their open source alternatives. In some cases you could probably write your own book on frustrations with the proprietary programs shown here. In other cases, you’ll discover that the open source alternative isn’t quite up to snuff yet. And, in other cases still, you’ll learn that some proprietary programs are real gems, but that the open source advocate can replace those gems with equally shiny objects from the open source repertoire.

Click here to read the full list.