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There are bunches of personal note-taking and information-tracking tools out there, some with more and others with fewer features. While each of them has its advantages, there are always drawbacks. Maybe they're too big, or they're incompatible with your system, or some other such thing. Here's another take on that whole issue.

Wiki on a Stick is a single file. Now, granted, it's a great big hairy XHTML file, but it literally is just that one file. All its brains, as well as its data, is self contained. Open it up in your browser and start editing away. As a wiki, it's got built in support for all kinds for markup, both for formatting as well as hyperlinks. That means you can cross-reference stuff and actually jump from one piece of information to the next, and never leave that single file. Obviously that means this is portable, since there's no program involved–just fire up a web browser on whatever machine you happen to be sitting in front of, and you're good to go.

Since saving your entries involves writing back to your local drive, something that web browsers don't like to let web pages do, you're going to see a bunch of warnings and second-guessing "do you really, really want to do this" messages. Once you get over that shock, it's all really pretty straightforward.

Wiki on a Stick is a free download. It should work on just about any system that has a web browser; it explicitly supports Firefox, Opera, and IE.

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If you want to know which files live where, all you need to do is open Windows Explorer and take a look. If you want a list of those files–maybe to put into a report or some other document, or to do some sort of analysis–you'll need a better answer. Opening a DOS window and running a "dir" will give you the list, but not necessarily in a format that is terribly useful to you.

FileList is a tool that may come in handy here. It's a command line tool, so there's no bells and whistles, but as often is the case in situations like this, what it lacks in nuance it more than makes up for in efficiency. Just give it the directory you're interested in and turn it loose. It generates a CSV file that you can use with Excel or any other tool that uses structured data like that. It grabs all the important info about your files, including name, extension, size, path, dates, and more. Now you've got a list you can work with.

A free download, FileList is a Windows application. It runs under Windows 2000 and later.

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Not every app I use has built-in spell checking, but they all seem to have built-in misspelling. Seems like the classic problem of the nut behind the keyboard. One way to take care of this is to copy your potentially problematic text to the clipboard, fire-up Word, paste your text into it, run spell check, make the corrections, copy it back out, and paste it back into your application. Gets the job done, but it takes a non-trivial amount of time to fire that behemoth up and do the deed. Maybe if there were a quicker way to take care of business, it would be less of a pain in the [insert name of favorite body part here].

SpellMe is a tool that speeds this process up. Sure, you still have to copy your text to the clipboard, but when you start this app, the first thing it does is look at the clipboard and grab whatever's there–no pasting into the app. It does the whole spell check thing, including making suggestions for what it thinks you might have meant, and it'll learn new words when it comes stuff it doesn't recognize that you vouch for.

A teeny tiny application, SpellMe runs on your Mac under OS X.

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Everybody uses PDFs. These Portable Document Format files can be used across platforms, so there's no system compatibility issues, and the Adobe Acrobat Reader app is free, so everybody can access the content of these documents.

There are bunches of tools out there that convert Word DOC documents into Adobe PDF files, making it easy to crank out your very own PDFs. But what about the other way around? You've got a PDF that you need to edit, or with content that you want to re-purpose? Maybe it's time to check out PDF to Word Converter.

With this tool, you can convert files into either DOC or DOCX-format Word documents. It supports all versions of the PDF standard, so there is no file too old or too new to work with. You can convert individual files or do a whole batch at once. And it adds a context menu (right click menu) item that lets you start the process without even firing up the program. It does its best to grab not only text, but also all the images and formatting from your original. And maybe best of all, you don't even have to own Word to use it, so if you're an Open Office or Google Docs user, you're good to go.

PDF to Word Converter is free for non-commercial use. They've got a Mac version, but it's not free, so you're not going to feel the love there. Thanks to Mark for giving us a heads up on this app.

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What goes up must come down. What turns on must turn off. There's a reassuring symmetry to the whole start-and-stop thing. Sometimes, however, one side of the equation takes more effort than the other. Take your computer, for example. If you want to turn it on, you just push that big button and away you go. But when it comes time to shut down, you've got to search through menus and click on this and that–do you really want to shut down?–to make it happen.

An app like Switch Off makes the whole shut down thing go more smoothly. It sits there in your System Tray just waiting for you to bring it into action. Okay, so now you've solved the accessibility issue. But it can also work on its own to turn things off at pre-determined times as well. You can set up a schedule based on a daily routine (system goes down every day at 8:00 pm), weekly events (nighty-night at 9:00 pm on Fridays), or even specific times (6:42 am tomorrow). In addition, it can handle other requests, like restarts, scheduled logouts, or locking your machine. It's got a web interface, so you can shut your system down remotely if you need to–no more "Honey, did you unplug the iron? What about the computer?".

Switch Off is a a free download for your Windows system. It will run under Win2k and later, and is compatible with both 32- and 64-bit systems.

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Sensitive stuff. When you were a kid, your secret decoder ring—just send in three boxtops—was all the protection you needed to keep things private. Things have gotten a bit more complicated since then.

Locknote is a small, secure memo pad. Use it so protect any kind of information you want to keep private: passwords, account numbers, birthday lists, whatever. The executable is self-modifying, meaning that your data is actually incorporated into the program file itself. What this means is that you don't need any additional tool to get your data back—just fire up your data-and-program file, type in the password, and you're up and running. Save stuff for yourself, transfer it to a removable drive, or even send via email. You'll want to keep multiple copies for each type of information you're keeping track of. While it' s not a big-deal security suite, it does offer a quick-and-dirty way to protect data.

LockNote is a Windows application. You should be able to use it on systems running Windows 2000 and later.

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You're out on the road, but you want to be in touch with what's going on back at home or in the office. You know the email is piling up, but you don't want to grab all those messages just yet, since you know a fair percentage of them will be from some Nigerian prince or some guy who's willing to let you in on the latest magical fruit juice drink that will make you healthy, wealthy, and wise (perhaps wise enough not to fall for their scam?). Basically you want to check the mail, but I don't want to read the mail.

Vallen POP3 Mail Checker is a tool that lets you preview email in your POP3 email accounts. It's probably going to be most useful in situations where you're stuck with a low-bandwidth connection—like visiting Mom, where you know there's no broadband—or where you want to see what's going on but don't want to take up the space required for downloading messages onto your laptop or phone. You can also use this tool to kill spam on the server, rather than waiting for it to download and go through your email client's filters.

A Windows application, Vallen POP3 Mail Checker should be happy as an electronic clam on systems running Win98 or later.

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For much of the modern world, all that stands between you and utter disaster is a password. Lots of online accounts depend on an email address as a user name, so if somebody's after your stuff, they're halfway there just by virtue of knowing that address. That means that choosing a good password is even more important.

The best password is the password that has the least meaning in the real world. Your pet's name, dictionary words, the word "password"? Not such good choices. Passwords that include both upper- and lower-case alphabetic characters, numbers, and even punctuation marks are better. And you get bonus points for making them extra long as well. So how do you know if your password is a good one?

Check out The Password Meter. This free online service takes a look at your password and lets you know how it measures up. Sure, there are no "password police" out there to really say that you've made good choices or bad, but these guys will point out places where you could improve things (no repeated characters) and where you've made good choices (including at least three of the four character types listed above). One drawback to this tool is that it caps you at a max of 16 characters for passwords that it tests. The security of your passwords will increase dramatically as the number of characters increases.

If you're a little squeamish about checking real passwords on a non-secure site like this, you can download the tool and run it on your local system. The heavy lifting and analysis is done by a chunk of JavaScript, so it's not really talking to the server.

The Password Meter is a free service. If you've got a browser and care about security, you should be good to go.

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Your mom always taught you it's nice to share. We recently looked at Cl1p, a service that lets you share clipboard-type information across the 'Net. Here's a similar type of setup that lets you share files instead.

Drop.io is a simple file drop. You create an arbitrary directory name on their site and upload files directly into it. Share the resulting URL with anybody else and they can grab any of those files. You don't have to go through all kind of complicated steps to set things up; heck, you don' t even have to register to take advantage of their service. They're not particular about what you upload, so you can use it to share text files, documents, images, audio, or just about anything else.

Drop.io is a free service. All you need to take advantage of it is a browser with Flash installed and a file you want to share.

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Keeping a journal has always been a way to track of your deepest thoughts and feelings. It's also been a way to keep an eye on what you've been up to, as well as great ideas that have sprung from your mind to resounding success or utter failure.

Digital Diary is a tool that can help you to keep track of the comings and goings of your day. While you can tie entries together by topic, it's really set up for free-form text entry. It includes a robust search function, which means that if you can remember a keyword, you can find your notes for a given topic. Within your entries, you've got a WYSIWYG editor that lets you format your notes, adding a bit of color here and a bit of bold there. If you're keeping track of super-secret stuff you can add a password that will keep prying eyes out of your business.

Digital Diary is an application for your Mac. It's a Universal Binary, so you'll be able to use it on your PowerPC or x86 machine.

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