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VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) is one of the bigger deals out there for taking advantage of the Internet. Instead of using the phone company and its network of wires and switches, you use the Internet as the conduit for your phone calls to travel from here to there. Commercial services like Vonage allow you to make calls this way, although you still get to pay for the privilege. Free providers like Skype are out there, allowing you to call other members for free, while paying to call numbers that aren't part of the network.

The Gizmo Project is another free VoIP service. Like Skype, you can call other members for free, or for an additional fee you can call and receive calls from phones that aren't part of their network. There are differences, however, between Gizmo and Skype.

Based on the open SIP standard, Gizmo allows you to also talk with Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, and Windows Live users, as well as IM your AIM and MSN buddies. file sharing is available through the IM window. Free voicemail and conference calling further enhance your options.

If it's time to tell the telco to take a hike, you may want to hike over to Gizmo and take it for a spin.

Gizmo is available for Linux, OS X, and Windows, so just about everybody can use it.

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How secure do your need your system to be? How about so secure that you can't even see there is a system there? That's one of the options with TrueCrypt.

You can encrypt an entire disk partition or storage device, making the entire contents of that volume unintelligible. Beyond that, you can even make that encrypted volume "invisible", so that it cannot even be found through normal means on the system. Taking that to the extreme, you can even, with a little sleight-of-hand, encrypt your windows boot partition, essentially hiding your entire system. Now that's secure!

An obvious use for the functionality that TrueCrypt provides is to make sure your USB drives are perfectly safe to have and move around. If you should happen to misplace a drive protected with this tool, there is no way the data on that volume can ever be retrieved. That's the kind of insurance we can all enjoy.

TrueCrypt is available for both Linux (kernel 2.6.5 or compatible) and Windows (Win 2000 and later, including 64-bit versions).

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There are a bunch of sites out there where you can look up current weather conditions at various locations around the country or the world. There are desktop apps that allow you do the same thing on your machine. So how about one that lets you keep up with current conditions without having to do anything?

Weather Alarm Clock is a slick little application that you can run in the System Tray that will always give you current weather conditions in your chosen location. No more complicated interface, no obnoxious ads–just move your mouse across the clock, and you'll have instant time and weather conditions for locations you select. Add to this a pop-up calendar and alarms you can set and you've got a handy addition to your desktop.

Weather Alarm Clock is available as a free download. It runs on Windows systems and requires Win2k or better.

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Remote access can be a good thing, especially when you're the one gaining the access. The ability to do things remotely can be a life saver. You're at home, but your computer at work should be working–how do you get it going? There are remote access programs out there, like VNC, but those don't always work for you. If your work machine is behind a NAT router and has a private IP address, you're out of luck with most remote access apps.

GetByMail is an interesting tool that doesn't care where your machine is located. Using email to communicate with your system, you can accomplish a lot, even though you machine may be otherwise inaccessible. The only requirement for GetByMail is that each machine involved have a unique email address that it can use. It works with POP3 and IMAP accounts, and even with GMail.

You can run directory listings and change directories, upload and download files, and even run applications remotely. Since it uses email, you bypass firewall restrictions on FTP, SSH/Telnet, and other protocols that often aren't allowed passage through a corporate firewall.

GetByMail is a Windows app and should run on Win98 or later systems.

Download GetByMail

Windows does a ton of stuff before you get a chance to do anything when you boot up your machine. Windows Explorer, antivirus software, various services, just a bunch of stuff. Have you ever wondered what all that stuff is, or maybe more importantly, have you wondered how you can turn some of it off–or on?

Windows looks in a lot of places for the instructions it uses to figure out what to do. But does this app load from "all users" or is it specific to me? Is it in the Registry, or in one of the StartUp folders, or even an old .ini file?

Startup Manager can help you get a handle on all the stuff that is loaded when you start your system. It presents everything in a clean, tabular form, with notations as to what is invoking the program (Registry or file system), any flags that modify the behavior of the startup apps, and perhaps most importantly, it gives you a checkbox, so you can turn an option on or off, practically at will. No more will you have to put up with the annoying "you have turned antivirus off" messages, when in fact you are using your own protection, rather than the throttled-back version that shipped with your machine.

When you can control your system's startup behavior, you pretty much control the system. And after all, it is your system, right?

Startup Manager is a Windows app.

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On a pristine, new hard drive, data is written in a nice, orderly fashion. Over time, as new data is added and old data removed, that nice order deteriorates into a semi-controlled chaos. Rather than the data for a given file all being written together in contiguous sectors on the hard drive, there are bits and pieces of it scattered across the whole drive. While this scheme allows for efficient packing of that data onto the drive, it isn't always the most efficient way to retrieve that data to do anything useful with it. As a file–particularly a large one–is accessed by a program, you can hear the read/write heads jumping back and forth inside your system, grabbing all the chunks of data. along with the disconcerting banging around you hear, it actually slows your system down, because each of those "let's find the next chunk" actions takes real time, because it's a mechanical rather than an electronic task that's being performed.

This spreading of files across the surface of the disk is called "fragmentation." There are defragmentation utilities, called "defrag" tools, that are used to sort through all the "stuff" on the drive, moving it around so that data in a file are stored contiguously on the disk. There are many defrag tools that will do the whole drive; WinContig defragments individual files, bringing them the benefits of defragmentation without the investment of time necessary to defrag the entire drive.

With an easy-to-use interface, you can use WinContig to identify files that would benefit from a bit of spiffing up, and then go ahead and do the deed. WinContig has a small footprint, and doesn't require an installer, Registry entries, or extra DLLs to run, so it's impact on your system is minimal.

WinContig is designed for machines running Windows 2000, XP, or Vista.

Download WinContig

A proxy server is an interesting piece of the puzzle. Basically it sits between a computer and other computers, whether on a local network or the Internet. Requests for data–web pages, data files, and all that–flow through the proxy server between the two end points. This simple setup allows you to do many things that might not be available otherwise.

You can place a proxy server between your network and the Internet. Requests for web pages then flow through the proxy on their way to the Web. By using filtering capabilities, you can control which sites can be accessed through the proxy, You can also limit connectivity to specific times of day.

One of the big things that proxy servers allow you to do is to cache locally web pages which are accessed repeatedly throughout the day. Rather than each request for a page just being sent out across the Internet, a check is performed to see if that page has been retrieved recently, and if so then to serve that cached page instead of going out and retrieving the original. This can be a real time saver during busy times of the day.

FreeProxy works with broadband and even dialup connections, and can use "demand dialing", meaning it will make a connection only when somebody is actually trying to connect to the Internet. It can be run as a Windows service, meaning that it's running without taking-up any screen real estate.

FreeProxy runs on any Windows system from Win98 on up.

Download FreeProxy

Are you an Amazon junkie? How did we ever get along before having the ability to instantly order books, music, and video, to say nothing of cookware, patio furniture, and any of a zillion other things you can order from Amazon? Here's a tool to make it even easier to order from Amazon at the best price possible.

AmazonWatcher will allow you to watch for specific products, looking for changes in availability or price. Enter your item, and choose your criterion: an unavailable item becomes available, or the product price drops below a set level. When you get a hit, the app will alert you, and you can choose to bring up a web page, or send an email as well. You can even order automatically if you want. It's clever enough to figure out what the price is when you get one of those confusing "price too low to display" messages.

Along with the main Amazon site, AmazonWatcher can also watch several of the international sites, broadening your horizons if you're a fan of Region 2 DVDs, for example. The publisher warns that the automatic purchase option may not work with international sites.

AmazonWatcher is available in both Windows (2000, XP, Vista) and Mac (OS X 10.3.9+) flavors.

Download AmazonWatcher

How much junk do you have in your inbox? No matter how tight your filters are, no matter how careful you are with your email address, you're just gonna' get spammed. Unless you don't receive your mail. Huh?

Dodgit is a free receive-only email service that you can use for throwaway and non-critical email. There is no sign up, and no cost. You simply make up a username, like "spamfree", and give out your email as spamfree@dodgit.com.
To check email, just go to the dodgit.com site, type that username into the textbox, and see if there is any mail floating around out there for you.

Now keep in mind that this is not your exclusive address, so anybody else in the world can check it also if they can guess your username, but there are bound to be situations where you need to give out an email address–to register for an account or some such that doesn't really require that you use email after that registration–but don't want to be spammed to death through it. Keep the personal stuff out of those messages, and what's the harm if everybody knows that you are now subscribed to Quilters Quarterly when they don't know who you are anyway.

There's an RSS feed on the site, so you can monitor mail sent to your address without having to repeatedly return to the site. All your messages go away after a week, so you don't end up with mountains of nonsense communication out there.

If you're so inclined, you can sign up for a password-protected mailbox for a nominal PayPal donation, but there is no requirement to do so for basic service.

Dodgit is a free service that only requires that you have a browser and access to the Internet to run.

Check-out dodgit

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant–or on eBay. Never before in the history of humankind has so much stuff been available in one location. Unfortunately, the eBay interface isn't the fastest or easiest way to find things and buy them.

GarageBuy is a desktop application for Macs that allows you to search, bid, and buy in auctions on eBay. Officially certified by eBay, GarageBuy updates automatically during the final phase of auctions, so you don't have to keep refreshing your display manually to see the latest prices. Save your searches (and results) locally so that you can revisit them easily. The Gallery List shows as many relevant images as will fit on your screen at once. Growl support means that you don't have to spend all your time watching things either–notifications for newly found items or price changes can be displayed on-screen, as well as spoken or emailed to you.

GarageBuy is a Universal Binary application, so it'll run on your PPC or MacIntel box with OS X 10.4.

Download GarageBuy