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Whenever you visit a webpage, your browser stores a copy of everything on that page — the html, the images files, the audio files, etc. Those files are stored in a cache, where they sit until they're deleted (either manually or automatically). With IECacheViewer, you can view, search, copy, and delete information from your Internet Explorer cache. The cache may hold an image file you thought you'd forgotten to download, a script you're interested in examining, and also cookies from various websites you've visited.

Another use of IECacheViewer is security. By sorting the times in your IE cache, you'll be able to determine which sites have been visited, and when. It's a way to help recall a website you want to visit again but forgot to bookmark, and a way to check to see if the babysitter is actually babysitting, or is spending all night surfing! IECacheViewer Basic is free.

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Varot is a free tarot card program for those who are interested in exploring the unknown and the mystical. The program will deal one of nine different tarot layouts, and if you're a beginner, the program will help interpret the cards displayed. If you're familiar with tarot, you can customize the meanings of each card to fit your own needs.

If you come up with a particularly intriguing spread, you can save it to the built-in database for future examination. Varot offers a printable report for each layout.

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Calendar Magic is a fascinating program which brings together all the world's most popular calendars. There's the standard Gregorian calendar, of course, but you'll also be able to explore the Julian calendar, Islamic, Coptic, and about two dozen other international calendar options. Just start with today's date, and do a one-click conversion to another calendar style. The calendar recognizes common holidays and events ("observed days") from over 230 countries, and displays special occurrences like Olympic years.

As well as being an educational aid, Calendar Magic is practical, and can store important personal dates (like birthdays), then issue reminders with an alarm. Most people will be fascinated by the "This is your life" information, including day-of-the-week on which you were born, number of days you have lived, your Zodiac sign, some biorhythm data, and the day-of-the-week on which your next birthday falls. Your "Chinese age" and your date of birth in many other calendar systems are also displayed.

Calendar Magic is designed to be easily printable, so you can customize your calendar and then print it out for home use.

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There are quite a few desktop notes programs available, but very few are free, and even fewer are as full-featured as PrestoNotes. PrestoNotes can be configured by color, size, font, transparency, and "always on top". Its most unique feature is that an automatic reminder can be attached to each note, so you can trigger a visible or audible alarm to alert you to a note's contents. Never worry about missing that important birthday or anniversary again!

PrestoNotes will allow you to send and receive notes over a LAN or the Internet. You can also email the content of notes, print them, or search them. The program is multilingual and available in eight languages. If you want to use PrestoNotes in a professional environment, the software developer will customize your version of the program with the logo of your choice, at no cost.

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Do you love to shop online? If you do, you'll love Rebate Reminder, a handy program to help you keep track of all the rebate submissions you've mailed in. Simply create a new category with the name of the store where you purchased the rebate item, and Rebate Reminder will let you add information about the item you bought (store, brand, description, serial number, model number, SKU, UPC number), and about the rebate itself (amount, promo number, address, date purchased, date mailed, plus more). If you have additional details, for example, if you called the rebate center with a question, you can leave a note with details in the file. If you want to be really thorough and careful, you can scan copies of all your rebate documentation and then link to those scans from Rebate Reminder. There's really no detail which has been overlooked.

Rebate Reminder uses Microsoft .NET framework, which can be downloaded from the Microsoft website at no cost by Windows users.

(And if you need to buy some stuff with rebates to be reminded of, check out Free After Rebate and Rebate Blog.)

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One tool everyone should have is a program to assist with downloading files. Dead Simple Downloader will help you download even the largest files from the crankiest servers with ease. To use the program, paste the url of a file you want to download into the program, and DSD will take over from there. If the connection is broken, the program will be able to resume the download later, and if the server can't be reached, DSD will make repeated attempts to connect. You can set the program to run at a specific time, or let it run in the background while you continue to work. If the file you're downloading requires a username and password, the program can submit them automatically. Once your file is downloaded, it will be recorded in a download history list in case you need to revisit the download site in the future.

Dead Simple Downloader is highly visually customizable. It comes with 21 different color schemes, and 59 cursor choices. It doesn't need to be installed so it's not processor-intensive, and it displays a graph of bandwidth usage during the download. You can enable automatic throttling as well, so a download doesn't prevent you from doing other work. The program has a thorough, integrated help file, and help is available on the publisher's website as well.

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It's not the most exciting program you've ever used, but it might be one of the most useful. Converber is a "unit converter". Simply put, it will convert an amount in one of 1173 different categories to an amount in another category. Whether you're baking bread, building an igloo, or harvesting plutonium, you'll probably have some use for Converber.

The 1173 conversion units are organized into 32 categories, and you can bookmark conversions that you use frequently. The user can designate the number of decimal points required, or request the answers in scientific notation, so it's a handy homework aid. Converber even converts currency, with rates updated daily.

The program is standalone, and doesn't need to be installed. It comes with extensive help files, and supports multiple languages.

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If you regularly use words like "dividend", "margin", "IPO", and "booyah!", you may want to try this free stock market ticker for your desktop. Add stocks from your portfolio to the stock ticker and watch them scroll across your desktop in almost real time (all quotes are issued at a 15 minute delay). You can add an unlimited number of symbols to your ticker, although you're limited to the stocks tracked by Yahoo Finance. Information displayed by the ticker includes volume, highs, lows, and opening.

The program comes with five skins so you can find the one which best suits your needs. The bar can be set to be "always on top" if needed, and can also be dragged to any location on the desktop. It's easy to resize if you want it to take up less space. Free Stock Ticker has a very small computer footprint, requiring less than 1mb of disk space.

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"Nosebreaker" is the odd name of this highly addictive game for Windows. The premise is simple - try to arrange the colored balls in groups of the same color, then click on the group to remove it. The object is to remove all the balls in as few moves as possible. It sounds sort of silly, and perhaps even easy, but it's type of you end up methodically playing in your dreams.

The latest version of Nosebreaker allows you to choose to play with the traditional round balls, or to play with squiggly shapes called "splashes", or rectangular bricks. You can also "buy a color" for an isolated ball by charging against the points you've accumulated. The game is a nice, slow-paced way to relax after a hard day at work, or, (what the heck), even at work.

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Icons are those tiny little images used to represent programs and files on your computer. They can be as tiny as 16 pixels squared, and are nearly impossible to create in a normal graphics editing program. Icon Art is a free program which will allow you to design full-colored icons and compact cursors in an environment specifically designed for their tiny size. Start from scratch and design an icon using Microsoft Paint-style drawing tools, or import a larger picture from the clipboard and convert it to an icon. There are even gradient colors and multiple color depth options.

Icon Art creates both static and animated cursors as well. Add text, make your cursor or icon transparent… Icon Art can do it all. You can create icons as tiny as 16 pixels squared, and as large as 64 pixels squared. Icon Art comes with full documentation, and can be updated regularly with new icon samples. It's free for non-commercial use.

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