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I'm doing a fair amount of computing for a Philosophy grad student, and on this page I'll comment my choices in software & programming solutions.

Use LinuxGet FirefoxUse GimpTry a text processor for a change
Fall in love with UbuntuToo cool for Internet ExplorerGet NvuFree your data, use OpenOffice.org

LaTeX

I've been using LaTeX for almost three years now, and it's definitely the tool for me. Currently, I'm using MikTeX 2.6 with TeXnic Center installed under the Windows XP HE SP2 that came with my (aging) laptop. I'm not a TeXpert, but check out the layout of the papers published in PERCIPI, the graduate philosophy journal I am co-editing at CEU, if you want to see what LaTeX can do for you. (Should I mention that all Springer typesetting is done in LaTeX?)

If you need more reasons for changing sides, you may want to check these out:

Or, you can ponder over this joke:

"Dad, what is a word processor?"
"Hmmm... have you seen what a food processor does to food?"

I've been using it to write my papers for school. The profs seem to prefer Office format, though, in order to comment on my work (obviously, this renders their insistence on double-space typing really awkward). As a consequence, I'm using LaTeX2rtf -- a very good translator from LaTeX to .rtf -- and polish the end product with OpenOffice.org (currently using 2.2). The results are definitely not as pretty, but they're just graduate papers, so who cares.

For now, I'm trying out the Foxit 2.2 .pdf reader, which allows commenting in the freeware version (although it prints out a red stamp on the first page) AND loads incredibly fast, compared to the Adobe Reader.

HTML

I'm responsible for the CEU Philosophy Graduate Conference and the aforementioned graduate journal, PERCIPI, websites. Recently I've been involved with the redesign of the CEU Philosophy Department website (I've transferred the contents from the old one, to the "new" one). I may not be very experienced, but I came to realize that the best thing to do if you want a website is to forget about specialised programs and get down 'n dirty with ol' Notepad. This, I think, is a lesson LaTeX taught me: you cannot get the same kind of control over your own work with WYSIWYG editors, including (and obviously not limited to) the MS FrontPage, the free (and decent) Nvu, or especially the Netscape editor, which I found particularly frustrating. Granted, it is a bit slower to hand-code tables than to draw them, but it's worth the effort.