Software

Virtual Skipper Online – a free version of a regatta simulator

Virtual Skipper Online is a free version of a unique regatta game, Virtual Skipper 5, where you get to take the most famous boats in the world on offshore races on 14 of the best competitive watercourses including Valencia, Marseille, Trapani and Malmö – all venues of the America's Cup. You can play the game solo or tap in into the VS5 online gamer community to play in the multiplayer mode with people from every continent.

CDBurnerXP

CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn all kinds of CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs and bootable discs. It has a logical, multilanguage interface, so it is fairly easy to operate, even for beginner users. CDBurnerXP is available only for Windows systems as of now, but it runs on versions as old as Windows 2000. It's a truly free software - even if you need this application for your company, you can freely install it on all computers.

Soldier Front – a free full game download for hardcore gamers

Soldier Front is a 3D first person shooter game with very realistic game play and graphics. A unique feature among FPS free games is character growth, where the player can save their statistics and rise throught the military ranks just as a real soldier. The game also allows you to choose which task force you want to belong to (SAS, SEAL, UDT or Delta Force). Each setting comes with different weapons, statistics of recoil and rate of fire.

OpenOffice

OpenOffice is one of the best reviewed and oldest in the family of productivity software suites. It takes care of all the typical office needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. The software is available for all possible operating systems and in many languages. It can open & save your files to an international open standard format and to many additional formats common to other office software packages as well. The best thing about it - it can be downloaded and used for any purpose completely free!

Pod to PC or Pod to Mac

If you've ever held gigs worth of content on your iPod or iPhone and lost the originals on your computer - you will love this app. You might know by now that if you connect your fully loaded iPod to your freshly wipped computer, iTunes will automatically want to erase everything on your mp3 player and start fresh. iTunes will also not allow you to transfer music or videos from your iPod back to your computer if you've erased the original file from your desktop. Pod to PC or Pod to Mac will let you do it all! The applications are built to allow you to transfer music and videos from your iPod or iPhone into your Mac or PC directly into iTunes.
audacity

Audacity

Audacity is an user-friendly, free & open source audio editor. It is currently available for almost all operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and others. The software gets great reviews and ranks up there with some of the best in it's genre because of it's "clean interface, excellent features, and support for 32-bit floating-point audio" (and a great price - FREE! - if I may add). With Audacity, you can easily record/import audio, edit the files, add effects, and export to your desired file format.

Inkscape

Inkscape is a great free & open source alternative to expensive Adobe & Corel programs. It has similar capabilities to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. If you’ve ever thought about learning graphic design on your own, Inkscape is the program to have. It not only has a full range professional features, but it’s extensive user documentation & multitude of tutorials available online will never let you get lost.

Cyberduck

I think Cyberduck is the most user-friendly FTP app out there (too bad it is only for Mac). I was introduced to it a few years ago when I was just barely grasping the concept of FTP and I could connect to different servers & upload files within minutes. Currently the software allows you to browse servers using the following protocols: FTP, FTP/TLS, sFTP, WebDav and browse & upload to Amazon and Mosso's Cloud Storage.

WinSCP

WinSCP is an open source free FTP & sFTP client for Windows. Beyond file transfer, WinSCP offers file management & file synchronization functionality. One of it's biggest advantages its simple user interface - which mimics Windows Explorer (there is one that mimics Norton Commander as well) in both looks and functionality - making a it extremely user-friendly for an avid Windows users. For me, drag-and-drop feature and the ability to see my folder structure is very handy. Even the tool icons look the same as in Windows Explorer, so you will never get lost, even without a manual or a geeky friend next to you.