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Looking for something new and different? How about a picture that's not a picture.

ASCII Art Generator can take your .gif, .jpeg, or .png image and turn it into ASCII art. Enter the URL of your image, specify the quality and size you want, and decide whether to get black-and-white or color, and just click the button. The resulting "image"–which really isn't an image at all–is available as plain text (no colors), HTML, or as a PHP class.

What you do with your new "image" is up to you. Revisit the days of yore when there were no such thing as graphics cards or displays. Add it to your "I (heart) ASCII" website. Knock yourself out–the sky's the limit.

ASCII Art Generator is an online service, so it should be available to anyone with a modern web browser.

Check out ASCII Art Generator

There are graphics programs, and then there are graphics programs. The various raster-based apps out there, like Photoshop, do a great job with photos and paint-type images that are created at their full size. Unfortunately, these types of images don't scale well, and when you start adding text, they can get pretty out-of control. Enter vector-based drawing programs.

With vector drawing apps, you open a whole new world out there. Now you can change your images from small to large, or vice versa, with no loss of clarity or precision. These images are composed of a number of mathematical formulas that tell the app how to draw it, instead of a bitmap that says that this pixel here is blue but that pixel over there is red.

Tools like Illustrator and FreeHand cost a fortune and have a steep learning curve. Skencil is an open source drawing program licensed under the LGPL and written mostly in Python. It runs on Unix-like systems (Linux, OS X, etc.). It's got all the shapes (rectangles, ellipses, and Bézier curves) and properties (line weight, fill color and patterns) you need, as well as the all-important ability to put text along a path, so necessary for designing logos.

You can grab Skencil as a tarball, or there are some binary distributions available (.rpm) as well. Your system must have a Python interpreter, and Tcl/Tk; there are links for both featured on Skencil's download page.

Download Skencil

I've heard that nobody under 30 or so wears a watch any more. With cell phones, computers, and everything else having a built-in clock–not counting the one that still flashes "12:00″ on the VCR–it just isn't required any more. Who knows: maybe calendars will go the way of the dodo soon.

WinCalendarTime is a nice replacement for the standard Windows clock on the Taskbar. When you click on the clock, a calendar pops up. What day of the week is Groundhog's Day next year? Click and scroll and you'll know in no time. (Set your alarm for 6:00 am to catch "I've Got You, Babe".)

WinCalendarTime is a Windows app that requires Win2k or better

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A mind map (or brainstorming diagram) is a great way to "think on paper". Start with a central idea, and add new ideas to the drawing, using lines to connect related ideas, or to reflect process flow (put on socks, then shoes). Before you know it, you may well have discovered the answer to your problem–you had all the pieces, but never saw how they all fit together.

EDraw Mind Map is a handy tool for mind maps and brainstorming sessions. It comes with a bunch of pre-drawn symbols to use in your mind map, which makes it easy to spend time and effort on your thought process, rather than on how to use the tool. Add lines to show relationships, process flow, and more, and you're on your way to a solution. The goal of a brainstorming session, after all, it got all those ideas out there as quickly as possible with no judgment, so that you can reflect on them later to decide which pieces you want to act on.

EDraw Mind Map is a vector-based drawing program, so you can enlarge and reduce your mind maps without their becoming unreadable or full of "jaggies" as you resize them.

You'll need Windows 2000 or later to fun EDraw Mind Map.

Download EDraw Mind Map

Most Windows applications come with an uninstaller, or at least make themselves available to the system's own uninstall facility. Macs not so much. While some Mac apps are really "application bundles"–a folder that looks like a single file–and keep all their "stuff" with them, many programs leave pieces of stuff scattered all across your system. Preferences, icons, plugins, and other things can be left behind, clogging up your system and definitely not appealing to anyone's need to be tidy.

AppDelete sets out to fix that problem. Got an app you want to get rid of? Drag the application into AppDelete and away it goes. You can also browse for your target app in AppDelete's menu. Make a mistake and delete the wrong app? No problem: AppDelete has an Undo feature which will bring your app back from the beyond. Just try that when you have to delete an app in Terminal.

AppDelete is a Mac application. It is distributed as a Universal Binary, suitable for both PowerPC and Intel based Macs. It requires OS X 10.3 (Panther) or higher.

Download AppDelete

What if you could get an application with all the power and features of QuickBooks. How much would you expect to pay? How about nothing.

The folks at Intuit are making their QuickBooks Simple Start 2008 for Windows available for free. This isn't a cut down or limited version, it's the same full featured app you'd buy for real money. QuickBooks Simple Start is designed for first-time users, so it doesn't import data from other accounting packages, but other than that' it's got everything for your small business.

You can use it to create and track invoices and receivables, while at the same time printing checks and doing your payables as well. Tax time is easy when you're tracking tax-related income and expenses throughout the year, instead of dragging out the shoe box full of receipts on April 14th. Included tutorials make it easy to get up to speed, and you even get 30 days of email support–not bad for a price of $0.

If it's time to upgrade your accounting system from a spreadsheet and a legal pad, this may be just the ticket for you.

QuickBooks Simple Start 2008 for Windows runs under Windows XP or Vista.

Download QuickBooks Simple Start 2008 for Windows

No matter where you wander on the Internet, you leave footprints. Each time your browser requests a web page, it also tells that server a lot about you. Multiply that by the number of websites you visit in a day or week, and that's a lot about you spread all over the place. Is there any way to help keep that from happening?

One way to leave fewer footprints–or at least footprints that nobody knows belong to you–is to use proxy servers. These get between you and the other servers, and as far as the web server is concerned, it's the proxy, and not you, that made that page request. The down side there is that the proxy knows who you are. How about making it so that nobody knows who you are?

Tor–The Onion Router–is just such a tool. Actually, it's a confluence of three different pieces that come together to make you as invisible as possible on the Web. Tor is the actual application that woks on your behalf behind the scenes. Vidalia (notice the nice onion metaphor continues) is a GUI for the
Tor app, And finally Privoxy, a web proxy that works in conjunction with the other two. All together, these pieces running across a network of widely dispersed proxy servers makes it nearly impossible for anyone to figure out who you are or to tie your activity back to you. It's probably as close as you can come to anonymity on the Web.

Tor is a free download, and is available for Linux (and other Unices), Mac, and Windows.

Download Tor - The Onion Router

So how would that couch look over against that wall? Does this rug really tie the room together? Moving furniture around the room to try a new look isn't always easy. Not only is it a pain to drag the couch from here to there, but there's the matter of the two full bookcases you had to empty before you even started the process. And what if you don't like the result?

Sweet Home 3D allows you try out your new design ideas without having to get out the liniment. Rather than moving furniture, you can drag scale images around on your screen to see how your new design looks before you fully commit to it. Once your furniture is placed, you can rotate the room around to examine your handiwork in 3D, to see how it will really look. The app comes with 50 pieces of furniture, or you can even create some of your own.

Sweet Home 3D is a Java app, and will run on Linux, Mac, or Windows, or presumably any other platform that supports the Java virtual machine.

Download Sweet Home 3D

Anything that makes it easier to back up your system is a good thing. After all, the only good backup tool is the one that you really use.

Abakt is a backup tool that does more than just back up files. Because of its powerful filtering capabilities, you can use Abakt to do other things as well based on files and directories you've chosen.

You can create an archive file in .zip or .7z format to backup your important files and directory structures. Choose whether you want to make a full backup, or an incremental backup, grabbing only files that have been modified since your last backup.

In addition to backups, you can also copy, move, and delete files and directories based on filters you have created.

Abakt can also be run from the command line, making it easy to automate backups in conjunction with the Windows Task Scheduler. It can send you an email when a backup is complete, or even shoot your archive up to an FTP server. With this kind of help, it's going to be hard to not make your backups regularly, and you're definitely going to run out of excuses for why you haven't been keeping up.

Abakt runs on all 32-bit Windows platforms, from the lowly Win95 on up. It has also been run successfully on Linux boxes under Wine.

Download Abakt

Is there a screenplay in you? The original inspiration may be from your muse, but the details of making it all work out depends on your hard work. Celtx, an integrated media pre-production tool, may be just what you're looking for.

Screenwriting is a complicated process, and it uses standards and conventions that aren't used in other types of writing. Formatting, vocabulary, it's all pretty confusing. Celtx can help you keep track of things with its five industry standard editors. Each of these tie into a set of index cards, that let you arrange and rearrange your story to make sense of the big picture.

Scheduling tools help you to keep on target with your timeline. You can generate a breakdown of your locations, props, cast members to know what and who needs to be where.

You can even drag and drop documents between projects, so you can produce the sequel at the same time as your original masterpiece.

Celtx is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux machines.

Download Celtx