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Back in the day, it was enough to keep your baseball cards in a shoebox on a shelf in your closet. From time-to-time you needed to grab a card from the collection and clothespin it to the front fork of your bike to make just the right motorcycle sound for your Stingray. We kick ourselves now, because trading card collecting has become a big deal, and with the right collection, a lucrative one as well. There has to be a better way to keep track of your assets.

Sports Card Collection is a free Windows app that allows you to keep track of your sports cards. Add, edit, search, delete–it's all there. Track not only by player, but also by year, publisher, value, and more. You can also add your own notes for each card. Built-in categories allow you to track baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and more.

Sports Card Collection is for PCs running WinXP.

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iBackup is a free Mac utility to back up your OS X machine. You know you should back up regularly and often, but it's not always so easy to do. With a tool like this, it's easy to stay on top of this important task.

It's easy to backup folders full of data, or even applications, but what about system settings: dock, desktop preferences, firewall? With available plugins, iBackup grabs the right pieces to save those important personalized settings, without your having to dig through piles of plist files buried in obscure directories.

iBackup supports smart folders, so you can easily archive files spread all over your hard drive, based on how you use these files, instead of how they are stored on your system. With the ability to create different profiles, iBackup can back up different lists of files, letting you back up your financial information daily, for example, while saving off your blog entries only weekly, for example.

iBackup is a Universal Binary and requires OS X 10.3.9 or 10.4

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Originally published as Halloween Harry, the game Alien Carnage has recently been re-released as freeware. Featuring both flame throwers and zombies, it was truly state-of-the art back in the early 90's, and is still exciting today.

Halloween Harry, our intrepid hero, is responsible for penetrating the alien ship that has hidden itself under the city. Calling on his extensive arsenal of weapons, including the photon cannon, micro nukes, and even the very powerful Omega bomb, Harry will have the nasty aliens on the run in no time.

Alien Carnage is an old-school game, and will most likely work best on an old-school system; released before Win2k or XP were a twinkle in Bill's eye, you will probably have better luck with earlier versions of Windows. The included ReadMe file has some more useful suggestions about this.

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There are a lot of anti-virus solutions available out there. Unfortunately, they're expensive and they require a fair amount of horsepower to run them on your computer. It seems like a combination of low price, thrifty use of resources, and frequent updates might be just the ticket.

AVG Anti-Virus is a free solution for non-commercial home use. It isn't a resource hog, so your system won't get bogged-down while you protect yourself from nasties. With regular updates pushed to your system, you'll always be prepared for the worst that the Internet has to offer. AVG is constantly on the lookout for problems in real-time with its Resident Shield, keeping an eye on files as they open and applications as they run. The Virus Vault quarantines infected files, keeping them from wreaking havoc on your system. Email scanning keeps an eye on attachments that come along with your messages.

The Free Edition of AVG Anti-Virus is available for Windows (Win95 and later), and some flavors of Linux.

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Morning is a crazy time, with so much to do: roll out of bed, exercise, shower, newspaper, breakfast, kids out the door, off to work. The most hectic time of the day hits before you're really conscious, and doesn't let up until you've run through the list. Startup is hard.

Your computer thinks so, too. When you boot your system up, it goes through all kinds of tasks to check itself out, get situated, and get its head together. And then there's the apps you want it to run too. Maybe you have your email program start automatically. Maybe there are folders you have opened. Network drives to be mapped. Anti-virus and anti-spyware apps. The list goes on and on. Just like you, your computer may work the hardest as it's just getting going.

Did you ever wonder exactly what your system was doing while all this was going on? Run Monitor is a free tool to help you get a handle on start-up. It will provide you with a list of what exactly is happening during this very busy time in your computer's day. In addition, you can take control of the process by adding, changing, or removing tasks from your machine's startup regimen. Add an important new task to start-up, or remove an old one that you really don't need any more–it's up to you.

Run Monitor helps you take control of your windows-based computer's start-up process. If only it could help the kids get dressed faster.

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When you head off on the road, how much "stuff" do you have to bring along? Computers, cables, power bricks, cases–the list goes on and on. In addition, if you really want to get anything done, you need to bring your productivity software with you. Word processor, spreadsheet, email program, and all the rest. By the time you're all packed up, you're seriously wondering why you even bothered in the first place.

While we can't help you with the hardware in your bag of tricks, we do have a suggestion for the software cohort that travels with you.

Floppy Office is a "suite"–more like a collection–of small-footprint productivity apps whose main claim to fame is that they will fit easily on a USB thumb drive, or maybe even on the eponymous floppy disk. These programs boast no installer and are sufficiently self contained that you really can stick them in your pocket and take them along with you everywhere.

Floppy Office includes an Excel-compatible spreadsheet, an almost-a-word-processor .rtf file editor, text editor, compression tool, tiny ftp- and email client and a whole lot more. Choose the apps you want, configure them for the way you work, stick them on your USB drive, and you're good to go. Of course, you may want to use these tools on your desktop machine instead

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Just think how much information you touch each day. You log into your email program. You log into your bank's website. You log in to edit your blog. The list goes on and on. And you use a different, non-trivial password for each account, right? Or maybe not.

The best passwords are those that are long and random. It's easy to guess your dog's name, but a dozen or two mixed upper- and lower case letters, a few digits, and a couple of punctuation marks thrown in for good measure? Pretty secure, both from the "bad guys", but also from you. How can you remember that great, unbreakable password? Maybe you shouldn't even try. A tool like Password Prime may be the best way to deal with all the complexity.

Password Prime allows you to create the complex, not-so-easy-to-crack passwords that you really should be using. Rather than having them all jotted down on PostIt's around your monitor, your passwords can be carefully tucked into Password Prime, where they await you, encrypted, and hidden behind just one password. Rather than having to remember all of those passwords now, you have only one to keep track of.

Password Prime lets you sort to find what you're looking for. Links to your sites are included, so one click takes you where you want to go. Built-in copy and paste functionality makes it easy to log in once you're there.

Isn't it time for some real protection for your information?

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Partitioning your drive is a great way to try to bring sanity to your system's hard disk. By breaking what may be a huge amount of storage into smaller, more-managable chunks, can help you to make better use of this important system resource. One of the big drawbacks to the partitioning exercise is that we do it so rarely, that it's easy to forget exactly what the commands are from one time to the next. We've all spent many a frustrating afternoon with the tried-and-true fdisk utility.

Cute Partition Manager is a free tool that allows you to add, edit, and delete partitions. You can't use it to merge or resize partitions, but you can create oodles of partitions and tweak all their settings to make your system hum right along. Want two partitions? Ten? A hundred? It's easy to set things exactly how you want them. Choose the partition type, set the boot flag, and more.

Install Cute Partition Manager to a floppy, CD, or DVD, boot from the removable medium, and start partitioning. No operating system is required, since Cute Partition Manager uses its own O/S to boot.

As with all down-in-the-guts procedures on your system, be absolutely sure that you back-up your irreplaceable data, since there is always the risk of the dreaded "oops!" moment right after you press Enter.

Cute Partition Manager is compatible with any 32-bit flavor of Windows from Win95 on up.

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Microsoft is always the 800-pound gorilla in any room when talking about software. Their Office application suite is the definition of ubiquitous, being used in offices, classrooms, and homes the world over. If you can't read and write Office-compatible files, you really aren't in the game.

NeoOffice is a free, open source app licensed under the GPL. Based on the OpenOffice.org suite, NeoOffice adds Mac-specific features to make it easier for Apple users to take care of business without having to pay obeisance to the Powers that Be in Redmond. Unlike with OpenOffice.org for Mac, you won't need to add the X11 framework to support the suite–it uses Java instead, which is already part of your Mac.

NeoOffice incorporates a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager and more. These apps can read and write virtually all files by and for their commercial counterparts, so your Word docs can be edited, PowerPoint presentations can be tweaked, and your Excel spreadsheets can be updated. NeoOffice supports page formatting, macros, and most of the other bells and whistles, so you really will be able to take care of business without wondering whether you will be able to share files with your Office-using associates.

NeoOffice is a Mac app and requires OS X ver 10.3 or later.

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You've seen the effect before. Take one picture and change it into another by "morphing" it. As if the images were bits of clay, ready to be molded by your hands, morphing molds one image into another one.

Sqirlz Morph is a free application that lets you morph your beat-up old junker into a Formula 1 racer, or even your plain-old face into that glamorous star you always wanted to be. Starting with "before" and "after" pictures, you set corresponding points on each image–eyes, nose, chin, etc.–and Sqirlz Morph supplies the "tweening", the all-important transition between your tiny chin and Leno's ample one, for example.

For a variation, you can also try "multi-morphing", where you morph several different images together.

Sqirlz Morph lets you save your handiwork off in any of several different file formats, both animated and still.

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