While I’m thinking of it, here’s some of the great – free – software I put on the kids’ computer… most are cross-platform.
MAME – play old arcade games, relive your mis-spent youth, get your kids to mis-spend theirs
Audacity – free audio editor and mixer. Who needs Adobe Audition?
Google Earth – it’s a bit slow on the G3 tower, but it works.
RBrowser – utterly butterly free Mac FTP software.
Stellarium – beautiful program that draws the night sky, shows you what the stars are. In London we can’t see many stars, so I can stare at this for hours.
TuxPaint – kids paint program, a bit like KidPix but free. And you can have fun making your own stamps, cutting out pictures and making transparent PNGs of them, recording sound effects and stamping them like crazy.
Chicken of the VNC – MacOS X has a VNC server built-in, but not a VNC viewer. This is it. I can now watch what my kids are up to on the computer, move their mouse pointer and genrally weird them out, all from the comfort of my sofa.
TextWrangler – insanely great – and free – Mac text editor.