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These are only OU-related sites or sites that seem to be
useful in a general kinda way. If you're looking for course-specific
sites, click on 'Courses' and go to the page for the relevant
course.
Other Student Sites
NB - these are just student sites I've come across and thought
were unusual, (i.e., not involving cats or babies). Course
specific sites are probably listed on the relevant course
page. Tragically, a lot of the sites I had listed here have gone tits-up since I originally made the page, so the list is a bit shorter than it used to be. Hi ho.
The Conker Exchange is
top quality stuff from Elli Broxham and Lorena Hodgson :
: : Matt
Bloomfield's
site
: : : I'm also in awe of the top-quality freeware
buffet put up by John Gardner, who showed that imitation
is the sincerest form of flattery by totally swiping my
idea for a php-based batch html validator: : : then there's
Boycott the USA (Dave Tutssel) : : : PG
and Me (My other site!) : : : Independent
Web Designers' Portal (Wicksie again - most OU web
designers can be found through this portal.) : : : Absolutely
Foobar (Paul Campbell) : : : Recovery
Pages (Vicki Hon) : : : Matthew
Soar Homepage : : : The
Toxic Zone (Chris F Wood) : : : Taitweb (Jason
Tait will be back soon) : : : Independent-Testers (Something
of a group collaboration, this, but mainly Wicksie
again) : : : Scary drunk woman's NIMBY anti-tram
site (Sam Covington) : : : Frances'
Home Page : : : Costas
Georgiou : : : Minitutorials (Gavin
McDonald) has some excellent stuff about firewalls
and much more besides : : : IT Gazette (Another
OU Web Design Conf Collaboration - Mostly Gave
McDonald again, I think!) : : : Doug
Paulley : : : Out
of this World (Barbara Gayfer) : : : Carrot
Studies : : :
Buffy Wallpapers (Vicky Curry) : : : Port
Royal Equestrian Centre (Made by Diane Bainbridge) :
: : Nigel Gibson's fish
page : : : Catherine Eadie's case
mod page : : : David
Prior's photographs : : : Dave
McMann is a man who believes that a squid eating
dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous. Pics
of the man himself here : : : Augsberg (Brigitte
Spatz) : : : Chinamood (Roger
Grocott, whose name I have been spelling wrong for
several months now) : : : Corbières
Web (Veronica Yuill) : : : Gerry
Rice's tale of how he raised 253 children
in what appears to be a run-down beehive. :
: : Technologistical (Andy
Arthur) : : : No
Holds Smutty (Smuttania without modding.)
: : : Eric Hall recently pointed me towards
his pages Juan
Kusov's League of Wails and Lesguis.
There you go, EH. Now please stop stalking
me! : : : Dee
Goodliffe, Carl
Whittaker and Mel
Batson : : : Ian
Macey IT is a new-ish site and fairly
small but he backlinks me and he once
wrote a game for the Dragon 32 so he is
clearly a force to be reckoned with! :
: : Silver
Cuckoo (Joy Clark) : : : Barbara
Smith's WriteSight Page : : : The
Tree Stump (Brynmor Harries) :
: : pyrotechnix :
: : Microcom (Dave
Middleton) : : : The Return of... Dave
Wilkshire's Balls : : : Pauline's
France (Pauline Caldwell) : :
: Jase Gurney's anti-bullying
site and his
other site too: : : : Steve Wells' photo
site : : : Pammie's
World : : : Hazel
Pegg : : : Robodoodle (Can't
remember whose site this is of the
top of my head but when I remember
I'll update this!) : : : Manu's
America (Amanda Nolan) : : : Artisite (Helen
Brooks) : : : David Prior's music :
: : Anne
Aloevera - contains artificial
sweeteners : : : Tony
Pritchard's homepage - Draw your
own conclusions from the car - and his
bird's homepage which seems to
be changing just about every day
at the moment : : : Incubus (Geeky
stuff) : : : Dragon
Lady (er... wow!) : : : SoWeirdProductions :
: : Latou (Linda
Thomas) : : : Groeswen
Education (Phil Edwards) : :
: Barry Drinkwater's IndigoDream.
It isn't indigo and you're not dreaming
: : : Elli Broxham's Generation
Future : : : Oz
Warren : : : The
Mac General : : : Grumpy
Old Students : : : PALNet (Peter,
uh... somebody) : : : Sandy
Garrity : : : Sarah's
Kindalearning : : : My web
design portfolio : : : asciifier :
: : American Auto Barn
You may also be interested in the ODP's
Open University Students and Tutors Page
Software You Just Have to Have (All
freeware unless otherwise stated)
 Generally
Useful Study/Office Doodads: Can't afford MS Office?
Then Get OpenOffice
or else just the viewers for Microsoft Office Products
: : : Can't afford Adobe Acrobat? Cheap pdf's are the holy
grail, as far as i'm concerned. There are a billion progs
out there that claim to be able to do it but the only one
I've found that really rings the bell and wins the coconut
every time is Jaws
Easy PDF Creator. The link will get you an evaluation
copy, but look for it on magazine cover disks because it often
turns up free there and it really is excellent! PDF995
is supposed to be OK too, if a little buggy. It's free though,
so who's arguing? : : : And while you're at it, try this
little monkey that will make your Acrobat Reader open
faster : : : Charting Software - There's a kick-ass thing
called Dia,
which is kinda fiddly to install, but cool if you can do it.
Then there's AllClear
- actually, this isn't freeware but it's great. If you see
a free version of it (e.g., on a magazine cover disk) pounce
on it. It's a brilliant bit of kit! I used it to knock up
a site map for this site in about ten minutes. Fantastic!
: : : Inkscape is a great free vector graphic drawing program
Windows Fixes, Utilities etc. Almost painfully-useful
rescue-cd creation program which could save your life if you
have a real problem with windows xp: Bart's
Pre-installed Environment - and another: Hiren's Boot CD : : : Grisoft
AVG - or try kaspersky, which is on the online apps disk
you got when you signed up! Make no mistake, you cannot afford
to be without an antivirus program EVER!!! : : : Firewall
- Zonealarm : : : Spyware blatter - Ad-aware
: : : This machine kills spammers - Mailwasher
(Get filters for
it here!) : : : SiSoft
Sandra and Sysinternals
- software for exploring the minutiae of what computers do...Not
for everyone but interesting if you like that sort of thing!
: : : Emergency oh-my-god file recovery PC
Inspector : : : Mike Lin's Startup
Control Panel (Excellent equivalent to MSConfig, which
isn't available on Win2K for some reason) : : : Bootdisks
for when you're stuck
Web Design and All That. HTML
editor - Arachnophilia
: : : HTML Kit
is supposed to be a good web page editor too, and John Gardner
has made a free
image mapper that dovetails nicely with it : : : Analog
web log analysis : : : Better-than-notepad text editor with
highlighting for just about any programming language you can
think of - ConText
: : : Top-quality browser add-ins from
Bookmarklets
Somewhere online is an extension for doing wordcounts in dreamweaver,
which is pretty handy for anyone writing an eTMA. I wish I
could link to this but I can't because I just can't find it
anywhere on the web. Meanwhile, you could download
this file and unzip the document 'wordcount' (not the
folder but the html document inside) into the configuration>commands
subfolder of your dreamweaver program folder and it will add
a wordcount function. This is not my work obviously and I
take no credit whatsoever, but it's just to useful not to
pass along.
Multimedia and File Sharing. File-sharing
utility - Bittorrent
is fiddly but groovy! (After installing, get 'torrents' from Torrentbox or LegalTorrents (yawn) or Demonoid or Pirate Bay wherever the hip cats are going these days.)
This really is the best way of getting high-quality peer-to-peer
downloads, and it's contributing to the swamping of the internet! You might also like to try peer
guradian for added security while running P2P applications
: : : My previous favourite filesharing prog, Kazaalite, is
no longer available, but its spin-offs live on if you hunt around the web for a while. There are some spyware-free versions of limewire apparently. They might be good... maybe... : : : An alternative
to the RealOne Player (the media player equivalent of Attila
the Hun), Quicktime player and various free media codecs can
be had from freecodecs
which has absolutely everything you could ever need to play
any media file ever. Don't go installing any of those all-purpose codec packs though: Just get ffdshow and that should be all you need! : : : Incredibly useful media file converter
that does everything - dBpowerAMP
: : : Handy media editing thingies: Goldwave and BlazeMedia
(shareware) - are especially handy for extracting sound from video files. Blazemedia can edit video too, but Goldwave gives a better range of features in terms of audio-editing, file formats, etc. I only installed it because
I wanted to extract a little sound file from a very big video
file. It was the sound of the CTU
internal phone from "24", complete with Tony
Almeida's sigh of resignation. I've set it as my email alert
notification just to prove to the world that I am a sad loser.
Others. Really-cool thing - United
Devices because - as they say in comics - with great computing
power comes great responsibility : : : Drawing software -
Pixia
: : : Digital Image Processing - Irfanview
: : : Voice Over IP - Skype
gives you free phone calls : : : Break FC and all your other programs with Resource Hacker or PE Resource Explorer : : : Flock - web browser of the future
Useful OU/Study Sites
The Open University
: : : Student
Home : : : Library : : : Open
University Students' Educational Trust : : : OU
on TV : : : Course
Choice (students' and tutors' views) : : : OUSA
: : : National
Grid for Learning : : : Marxonline
: : : University
Book Search and the Book Exchange : : : MIT
Open Courseware : : : Centre
for New Media : : : uk.education.openuniversity
(Google Groups Version) : : : OU
Alumni : : : Knowledge
Media Institute : : : Study
Skills : : : MIT
Open Courseware : : : Open
OU (Firstclass and OU related thingiedoodles for non-Windows
systems) : : : ODP/DMOZ pages for the Open
University and its Students
and Tutors : : : Apostrophe
Protection Society (OK, not really to do with studying,
but I think there are a few people on the system who could do with reading this.) : : : Just know that asshole in International
Affairs is wrong but not sure why? This
site will tell you why : : : MCS
Safe Computing Site : : : Freemind Open Source Mind Mapping Software : : : Athens : : : Moodle - allegedly replacing Firstclass eventually. O RLY? YA RLY! : : : Disabled Students Group
More Handy Sites
Free
On-Line Dictionary of Computing : : : Microsoft
Knowledge Base : : : Annoyances.org
(a sort of unofficial help site for Windows problems) : :
: Gibson Resource Center
(check your PC's security) : : : Programs
in the Task List - What are they and what do they do?
: : : Housecall
online virus scan : : : Qualys
is another browser security test site : : : CAUCE
(Anti-Spam campaign) : : : SamSpade
(Anti-Spam resource and general internet research doodads)
: : : Slashdot - News
for nerds : : : Symantec Security
Alerts Signup and Security
Response (includes Online Virus Scan) : : : Spamcop
(Tough on spam, tough on the causes of spam) : : : If you're
really having a bad time with illegal spam, (all too common,
I'm afraid), you might want to report it to the Internet
Watch Foundation, who liaise with the police to bust
these bastards : : : Nigerianscams
is a good site for a specific type of spam mail too : : :
O'Reilly Network
(Geek Students Only!) : : : Essay Crisis? Done no work? Then
plagiarise all the answers from 'HowStuffWorks'
: : : When your PC breaks and the deadline is only 2 days
away and you've nowhere
else to turn... : : : Wikipedia
: : : Free software by the bucketload - Tucows
: : : WinXP tips - The
Elder Geek : : : Tutorgig
(tutorials and stuff) : : : Netsquirrel
(Lots of nibbly little bits of useful info - the powerpoint
slides are especially good.) : : : Best
free font site I've come across. : : : Babelfish Online
Translation : : : The
Teaching Company (I like audio programs like this.
It's a commercial site though, and everything costs!) :
: : Graduate
Careers : : : IT
Idiots (tech knowledge podcast) : : : Web Design on
a Shoestring |