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The Combat Consultant’s Toolkit

By jonathan | February 26, 2008

Welcome to the Combat Consultants Toolkit. This is a list of tools and services used by Combat Consultants. This is our “kit”, our battle tested set of old dependable’s . Some of the tools and software are not free (and in some cases downright expensive) but they tend to be either the best in their class or at the very least robust, dependable and secure. In some cases - like the Office Suite - it is used for convenience, great features and the fact it is a global standard.

Computer and Hardware

MacBook Pro running OS X (Leopard) and Windows XP (via Parallels Desktop for Mac)

Samsung D900 Mobile Phone - Doubles up as a Dictaphone. See this post for details.

Office Suite

Word Processing, Presentations, Spreadsheets

Microsoft Office 2007 (Win / Mac)

Google Apps (Web)

E-mail & Calendaring

DataGate Hosted Exchange (Web)

Gmail & Google Mail for Domains (Web)

Microsoft Outlook (Win) - Primary e-mail and calendar client

Mail.app (Mac)

Thunderbird with Lightning (Mac / Win, Free) - Also see my list of essential Thunderbird add-ons.

Personal Task Management

MyLifeOrganized (Win)

Omnifocus (Mac)

Project Management

Basecamp (Web)

MindManager Pro 7

JVC Gantt Pro MindManger add-in for Gantt charts

JIRA from Atlassian

Notes and Knowledge Management

Confluence Enterprise Wiki (Web - Free, personal license) - Corporate power free for individuals

Wikidpad Personal Wiki (Win, Free) - superb personal wiki

Image Database & Management

Flickr Pro (Web, $24 per annum) - great blogging aid and image database

Fotki Pro (Web, $30 per annum) - great for albums

iPhoto 8 - (Mac, usually bundled with Mac computers)

FastStone Image Viewer (Win, Free) - It is faster than anything else on Windows and has tons of features including image editing

Web browsing

Firefox 3 - (free, Win/Linux/Mac) - This is my primary browser. Please see my Essential Firefox Plug-ins and Greasemonkey scripts lists.

Opera 9.26 - (Win/Mac/Linux, free) - I still adore the magnificent, memory efficient and blazing fast Opera

Billing and Invoicing

Blinksale (Web) - Superb invoicing application

E-Junkie - best online store

Desktop Blogging Application

Windows Live Writer (Win. Free) - The best blogging client by far. Superb.

MarsEdit (Mac)

Blogging Platform

WordPress (Web, Free) - The best blogging platform. Simple, extendable through plug-ins, lovely themes and extremely easy to install

Online BackUp / Online Storage

Amazon S3 (Web) - Amazon’s infinite hard disk is dirt cheap, fast and generally superb

MediaMax (web) - Prior to Amazon, this was my web storage solution of choice

Technical Library

Safari Library from Safari Books Online has unlimited access to the entire safari catalogue plus hundreds more. If I acquire e-books in PDF format, I upload them to my Confluence wiki.