No matter what you do or what your business is, you will need a few software for your business sooner or later, beyond the ones I mentioned on day_one. The following list is a hand-picked and curated list of software that will get the job done in many categories and will cost you no money for what they do.

This tool, provided by Hypothes.is, can be used to leave comments and notes on any web page, regardless of where that page comes from. You will need a Hypothes.is account for it to work.

• Thorium Reader (Windows, Linux, MacOS) to open epub and epub3 books

Students usually ask for a good, on-line dictionary. There are tens of great dictionaries on-line. Some of them are better than the others. Some give more details and some are designed for more advanced audiences. The following dictionaries, not open-source but free, will give you all you need for our courses, and some:

• Vocabulary.com
• Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online
• Cambridge Dictionary

If you want to type a mathematical symbol, and you don’t know how to make it, you can go to the following website, search for it, and then copy/paste that symbol into your word-processor or spreadsheet. e.g. x̄, x̿, ȳ, σ, R̄, etc.

• Wumbo

• jamovi - an easy-to-use statistical software as a SPSS alternative
  • jamovi for Data Analysis - Full Tutorial - tutorial by Barton Poulson
  • jamovi - tutorial by Ross Avilla
• JASP - similar to jamovi
• GeoGebra for math problems and statistics

• Krita: for digital painting, drawing, “illustrations, concept art, matte painting, textures, comics, and animations”
• Inkscape: to create and manipulate vector graphics as an alternative to Adobe Illustrator
• VTracer: Raster to Vector Graphics Converter

• RawTherapee: for photographers to develop digital images, adjust, retouch and tune pictures as a full-featured alternative to Adobe Lightroom
• darktable: similar to RawTherapee
• GIMP: for image manipulation as an excellent alternative to Adobe Photoshop alternative

• Bforartists: a fine-tuned fork of Blender, but a million times better. It has all the strength and features of Blender with a much better interface and a logical menu system that won’t drive you insane

• Scribus: a Desktop Publishing Software as an alternative to Adobe InDesign. You can produce publication-ready documents of any size at the highest quality that the publishing industry expects. Scribus can be used to create flyers, brochures, pamphlets, booklets, magazines, books, etc.

• Tenacity: to record and manipulate audio for any use. Tenacity is a fork of Audacity

• draw.io: to create professional-looking diagrams, flowcharts, and more

• I Love PDF: 100% free, web app tools to convert PDF files to different formats and vice versa, OCR scanned documents, and many more actions on a PDF file. Thank you Gracy for the suggestion! 🙏🏽

• uBlock Origin is an incredible contents-blocker for your browser that can be installed inside of Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Vivaldi, you name it.

This addon (or extension in Google Chrome lexicon) will protect your browsing on the internet and blocks your browser from connecting to sources of advertising, malware, tracking, finger-printing, and many other online problems.

It comes with several filters and lists pre-installed and works right out of the box. It does not need a lot of configurations to work its magic. Your internet life will never be the same after you installed uBlock Origin.

Note that there are imitators on the market. You need to pay attention to the full name and the name of the developer of this gem who is gorhil. Stay clear of any other software with similar, but not exactly the same name, or other authors.

Change your DNS configurations to match the followings (you can get the instructions here). This way, not only you will protect yourself from a lot of issues, but also you will protect everyone who uses your computer for any purpose. Even better, you can setup these primary/secondary DNS settings in your router, the hot point everyone uses to connect to the Internet via Wi-Fi, to protect everyone who uses your internet via your Wi-Fi. How coll is that! 🥳

Again, full instructions can be seen here. For instance, if you have a Windows 10 PC, this is what you need to do, macOS can do it like this, and so on.

All businesses must encrypt their data both in transit and at rest. While the in-transit encryption is too complicated for this list, you can still use very simple, open source, and free software to encrypt your data at rest.

• 7Zip is a compression and decompression tool. It can create compressed archives with .zip and other extensions. But, it also has an encryption feature that can be used to encrypt your compressed folder. The next time you use this tool to compress a folder with all your documents in it, pay attention to its options. One of them allows you to set a password for the compressed folder. That is what you need to use to encrypt your data at rest. At least for now 😉

Most problems in most businesses are directly or indirectly related to how people use or misuse passwords. You can trace a huge number of data breaches, ransomware attacks, and security risks directly to passwords. People use weak passwords, reuse a password for different services, write their password on Post-It notes and stick them on their fridges, give them to their friends and forget they did so, and so on.

Everywhere we look, there are numerous problems with how people deal with passwords. Now, almost all organisations, companies, and even individuals are paying for these mistakes. You need to start using a password manager.

• KeePassXC is a password manager based on the technologies developed by KeePass in the past 20 years. It has an attractive user interface and tons of excellent features. If you start using it today, you have started a decade too late. Nonetheless, better late than never.