Every Friday is 11 Things day at Living Behind the Curve.

One of the classic Internet truisms is that the web is a treasure trove of free software. Unfortunately, many of the free programs available today contain spyware, malware, or viruses. There are still some true gems out there, if you know where to look.

Mer and I put on our thinking caps to bring you this list of excellent free software, in celebration of Embrace Your Geekiness day. Although I am a regular Ubuntu user, I decided to make this list Windows-centric simply because almost everything in the Linux ‘verse is already free. I do use Windows daily at work, however, and can vouch for every one of these programs (except Podcast Ready - that’s Mer’s addition.)

11 Free Things You Can Get on the Internet That Won’t Turn Your Computer Into a Zombie:

1. Documents and Spreadsheets
   The best free alternative to Microsoft Office is OpenOffice. It reads and writes to .doc and .xls formats (Word and Excel formats, respectively), as well as the standard Open Document formats .odt and .ods. In addition to word processing and spreadsheets, the suite also includes database and presentation software. It’s incredibly intuitive, and I find Writer and Calc much easier to use than Word and Excel. For an on-line alternative, try GoogleDocs.
2. Image Editing
   Rather than pay hundreds of dollars for a copy of Adobe’s Photoshop, why not install The GIMP? This image editing and manipulation software has many of the same features as Photoshop, and there is an incredible wealth of user-generated GIMP tutorials on the Internet that walk the user through tasks like removing red-eye.
3. Web Browsing
   Firefox is quickly gaining ground on Internet Explorer in the browser wars, and with good reason. It’s secure and customizable, and works well with almost every site on the web (Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access even functions in Firefox.)
4. Internet Security
   If you’d like to protect your computer from a world of nasties, I highly recommend Sandboxie. When you launch your browser with Sandboxie, all cookies, programs, and anything else that would normally be deposited in the depths of your computer is instead quarantined in a pre-defined area. I use Sandboxie whenever I am working in Windows, and I am frequently amazed by the amount of crap that comes from seemingly innocuous sites.
5. Working with PDF Documents
   Adobe distributes its Acrobat Reader free of charge, but it is a major resource hog, especially when dealing with multiple-page PDFs like eBooks. A great alternative is FoxIt, a PDF reader that prides itself on being both small and fast. If you’d like to be able to create PDFs, try PDFCreator.
6. Instant Messaging
   There are a plethora of free IM clients available, but our household favorite is Pidgin. Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM) allows you to sign into all your messaging clients from within one application, which saves on screen clutter and system resource use. If you frequently move between computers, or would like that ability to chat without a software installation, try Meebo, a browser-based IM client that interfaces with all the major networks.
7. Audio Editing
   If you have ever had the desire to cut your own ringtone, remix tracks into mash-ups, record your own music or even create your own podcast, Audacity is for you. It is the standard among podcasters and amateur audiophiles across the Internet, and the absolute best audio recording and editing software available for the price. Be warned that you will need to install the LAME encoder in order to save files in MP3 format, but don’t worry — the program will tell you exactly what you need to do. Once it’s installed, you can convert between WAV, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, but if all you want to do is convert your music files, we recommend Switch instead, as it offers many more format options.
8. Website and Blog Content Managment
   The widespread use of WordPress may be responsible for the blogosphere as we know it today. As a content management system, it provides an interface for layout and design tweaks, storage for works-in-progress, and its scheduled post feature is a godsend. (That’s not actually me posting content at 5:00 AM every morning.) In fact, it has too many nifty features to list here, so suffice it to say that Wordpress is robust, powerful, and easy to use.
9. Listening to Podcasts
   Podcast Ready is a program that organizes and automatically downloads podcasts that you are subscribed to. From within the Podcast Ready software, you can browse and subscribe to an extensive collection of podcasts. You can also trade favorite podcasts with other Podcast Ready network members.
10. Email
    The cousin to Firefox, Thunderbird is Mozilla’s email client. More similar to Outlook Express than the full version of Outlook, it’s a nice simple client for anyone that relies on a local copy of their POP3 or IMAP email. The best web-based client, of course, is GMail. I run Thunderbird once every few months against my GMail accounts to create a local backup of all of my email.
11. Music, Movies and Video
    VLC is a cross-platform open source media player that natively supports most media file types, including MPEG, AVI, MP3, AAC (and therefore iTunes’ M4A files) WMV, MP4, MOV, WMA, WAV, FLV (Flash Video), MPEG, and DIV-X.

A final note - many of the programs listed above are available as portable applications. Portable apps are designed to run from an external USB stick, leaving no trace of themselves behind once the drive is removed.

So, what is your favorite free program? Tell us all about it in the comments.