Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for Windows computers. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

With their active and growing online community help is easy to find, and here are tutorials , and plugins available.

It started as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool. It has been compared to other digital photo editing software packages such as Adobe® Photoshop®, Corel® Paint Shop Pro®, Microsoft Photo Editor, and The GIMP .

The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with a small amount of C++ for installation and shell-integration related functionality. The source code is available under the terms of the MIT License .

There are many RSS Readers available on the net, the one I use is Great News . It's not heavily promoted, check it out, you'll like it.

Full page reading

You don't tear newspaper into pieces to read them. Why should reading rss news articles be any different? GreatNews is optimized for full page reading, so you can scan through rss articles quickly. Combined with functions like "Open Next Unread Channel", you don't need to waste any time to find where all the unread articles are.

GreatNews is extremely fast

Even with hundreds of rss feed subscriptions, GreatNews's response is always instantaneous. You can opt to show news from all channels on the same page. And you have full control over how many articles can be displayed at once. GreatNews takes care of pagination for you.

Ergonomic Styles

Fed up with flashing ads and banners? Want a clean and simple layout? GreatNews offers several built-in display styles for you to choose, ranging from Newspaper which carters to natural reading habit, to Brief which offers quick reads to those in a hurry, to Firefox Sage for Sage lovers.

Although Internet Explorer is still most used, the OpenSource Browser Firefox is catching up fast

Download is far smaller than IE and it's quick and easily installed. Download and install (free download)
- Firefox 3 delivers helpful new features to make your online experience more productive.
- Firefox continues to lead the way in online security, and now includes active protection from online scams to keep you safer.
- Choose from over a thousand useful add-ons that enhance Firefox. It’s easy to personalize Firefox to make it your own.
Recommended add-ons:

Office programs must be the most used programs together with internet browsers in any home office.
Since the release of the 2.x version I use OpenOffice to avoid the high cost of the commercial office suites. And I learned that OO is just a brilliant alternative office program. Little sidenote
you can save a document in OO with the built-in module save as.. to PDF with just one click.
During the first week online of OpenOffice 3 were already 3 million downloads recorded, with around 80% windows users upgrading or trying OpenOffice.

The look and feel is very similar to MS Office so the learning is not too hard.
The OpenOffice team prepared a presentation (OpenOffice 2), check it here.

On october 30. there is a big update of my Ubuntu Linux installation due and right after that I will upgrade to OpenOffice 3 as well.