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How much wasted space do you think there might be on your hard drive? Music files you don't listen to any more? PDFs you downloaded, read, and forgot? The list goes on. Most of that stuff would be pretty easy to get rid of. A quick search with Spotlight will help you find all those. But what about some of the stuff that's tucked away in little corners that you don't know about?

Along with all the other bits and pieces of system administrivia are often support files for the applications you're running on your system. In Chinese. Or Danish. You get the idea. You may or may not use English as your main language, but you probably only really need one or two languages worth of support files out there. The rest of them are just taking up space. Maybe its time to reclaim that space with Youpi Optimizer.

Download the tool, point it at your hard drive, and start it up, and Youpi Optimizer will dig through all those obscure files to find the language-specific content and return a list of what's where, and give you the option of getting rid of it. You may be surprised how much of your hard drive may be full of content you'll never use. Once you get rid of it, you can clear up all that wasted space, so you can download more music files that you won't listen to by next week.

Youpi Optimizer is a Macintosh application and requires version 10.2 or later of OS X.

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In the UNIX world, one of the most powerful tools is the command line utility "grep". Grep reads through text files, looking for a specified text string, and returns the lines where that string is found. If you need to find every file that includes the text string "widget" in a given directory, or even anywhere on your system, grep is the go-to tool to use.

Windows users can now harness the power of grep with the Windows Grep application. It includes all the power of the tried-and-true grep utility, but then it adds the ease of use of the Windows interface. With grep on UNIX you have to remember complicated sets of arguments to take advantage of the full power of grep. With Windows Grep you can choose to run it as either a beginner or an expert; beginner mode will prompt you for the parameters you need to enter to find what you're looking for. You and also format the results in the way that makes the most sense to you–include or exclude filenames, line numbers, and more. You can also replace your target text with new text, allowing you to make changes to multiple files simultaneously.

Windows Grep runs under Windows 98 and later.

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You don't have to spend time in Roswell to have to deal with aliens. Just fire up Spheres of Chaos, and you'll have more extraterrestrial enemies than you know what to do with, as well as a light show that just won't quit.

As you work through the various levels of play, you will encounter progressively more enemies that you have to eradicate before you can progress to the next level. Keep an eye out for black holes that can attract or repel you, and if you don't complete a given level soon enough, the bad guys will come looking for you.

Even on lower-end systems, the graphics are impressive. With that many bright colors and patterns, you'll wonder whether somebody spiked your Gatorade.

Spheres of Chaos works as a single-player game, or supports up to eight players at a time in multi-player mode. It's a free download, and it's available for Windows and Linux systems

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We all know about caffeine: you use it, it keeps you awake. That's a good thing when you need the boost of your morning cup; it's a bad thing when you need to go to sleep early for that busy day tomorrow. As you might expect, an application named Caffeine just might have similar properties.

Caffeine is a tool for your Mac that keeps it from going to sleep. We've all got our energy saving settings dialed way up, but sometimes that can lead to nasty results. Giving a PowerPoint presentation in front of the Board of Directors is not a good time to have your machine decide to go to sleep. (If the Board members go to sleep during your presentation, that's a different problem.) Caffeine lets you keep your machine from going into sleep mode, but without your having to go in and mess with your energy settings. Sitting on the end of your Menu Bar, Caffeine's little icon just awaits your click to suspend the ability of your system to go to sleep, for for the screen to dim or screensavers to start up. Keep your machine awake for now, but then when you're done, click it again and your Mac can go back and grab forty winks.

Caffeine is distributed as a Universal Binary and will run on either x86 or PPC Macs; it requires OS X 10.4.

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Over the past several years, there has been a rapid increase in the amount of online course material available. Many colleges have dramatically increased the number of classes provided online as a way to stretch resources, as well as allowing more independently paced study. Re-entry students who have full-time jobs, for example, can "attend" class during evenings and weekends, whereas they might not be able to come to a physical classroom during the day in the middle of a work week.

There are many challenges that come up in making online classes informative and relevant for the needs of their students. One way to try to make the online learning experience better for students is through tools like Moodle.

Moodle calls itself a "course management system." It provides a framework for creating Internet-based courses of instruction and the supporting web sites. Based on a philosophy called "social constructionist pedagogy", which takes advantage of interactions among the community as well as content provided by the instructor, Moodle allows instructors to create opportunity for rich interaction, including elements such as wikis, forums, and blogs, as well as quizzes, surveys, and other activities.

There is extensive documentation available on the Moodle website. If you are responsible for the design or execution of online instruction, it may be worth your while to take a look and examine in depth the types of resources that Moodle can make available for you.

Moodle is available both for Windows and Mac systems running OS X, as well as systems running various flavors of Linux–basically any system that can support PHP, and requires a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL.

Download Moodle

Project Draw is an online vector drawing service provided by the folks at Autodesk. Rather than needing some big horsepower high-end workstation like you might need for AutoCAD, this online application will run on just about any system with a modern browser.

When you fire it up, you get a drawing grid to work with and several palettes of pre-fab drawing objects, including basic shapes, as well as shapes for flowcharts, network layouts, Windows and Mac UI widgets, furniture and electronics layouts, and more. You can use it to design your next network, or to rearrange the furniture in your living room.

Just drag shapes from the palettes onto the drawing grid, and resize them as needed. You can add color, lines, shadows, and text to your drawings. Sign up for a free account, and you can save and retrieve your drawings.

Project Draw works best with IE 6 or Firefox 1.5 or higher.

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No matter what great features Windows XP may have, there are certainly limitations as well. One of those is the fact that on shared systems–those systems where there is more than one user profile–there can only be one default web browser. That may be okay if everybody agrees on Internet Explorer, but it isn't always the case that one size fits all. With the huge number of other browsers out there, from Firefox and SeaMonkey to specialty browsers, it is not at all unlikely that there may be multiple users on a given machine who want to surf the web differently. That means that somebody is going to be unhappy, until now.

DefaultBrowser is a neat little tool that does one thing: it allows each user on a multiple-user machine to choose his or her own default web browser. Log in to your user account, choose your favorite browser, and you're good to go. On the off chance that your favorite doesn't work with DefaultBrowser, you can always "un-choose" it, so you'll then fall back to the system default.

And while we're on the topic of choice, the system-wide default described here applies to the default email client program as well. The publishers of DefaultBrowser also have another tool called DefaultEmail that allows you choose a separate email program for each user on a system.

DefaultBrowser runs only on Windows XP systems.

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Can you ever be too secure? Everything's got a password. Hardware and software firewalls are everywhere. Systems log you out after inactivity. How about adding file encryption to your arsenal?

Encryption tools have always been complicated beasts that made it difficult to secure your files. Complicated setups and configurations make them impractical for many users. AxCrypt is an encryption tool that integrates with Windows Explorer, so encrypting files is as easy as right clicking and choosing to encrypt or decrypt the file. AxCrypt uses 128-bit encryption, so your private data really is private. Users can also encrypt to a self-decrypting .exe program file. This lets you send an encrypted file to another user who doesn't even have AxCrypt on their system. You can also rename your encrypted file, since some filenames say it all–LetterOfResignation.doc, for example. You don't want that one out floating around!

Along with the default encrypt and decrypt version of the application, there is a decrypt only version for folks who need to use but not create encrypted files.

AxCrypt runs on Windows systems, anywhere from Win98 up to at least WinXP or later.

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JPEGCrops is a tool that lets you crop images. This may not seem to be such a big deal, until you decide to print out some of the photos from your fancy digital camera. While most digital cameras produce images with a 4:3 aspect ratio, many common photo print sizes assume a 3:2 ratio. All of a sudden, your glorious jpeg doesn't fit on that Kodak paper. While you could squish the image and make it fit, you aren't going to be satisfied with the results. How about white bars on either side of the image? Kind of like watching a letterboxed movie on your home television. Maybe it's time to crop that image instead.

You can use all the high-powered tools like Photoshop to accomplish this, but at what cost? While it may not be exactly like swatting gnats with a bazooka, you get the idea. Sure, if you have to color correct an image and apply a bunch of filters and other effects, you might as well crop in the high-priced tool, but if all you really need is to crop the image so it fits, a tool like JPEGCrops can get you where you need to go much more quickly, and certainly at a much better price. With a bunch of preset sizes to choose from, it's easy to choose which sections of an image to crop, rather than just letting the kid working after school at the local drug store decide how your picture should be composed.

JPEGCrops is a Windows app.

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Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is a system used to share your computer desktop with another remote machine. There are several free or paid solutions out there to enable this, but they are often complicated to set up, and may compromise the safety of your machine and your network.

CrossLoop is a simple, secure way to connect two machines and allow for remote control of one by the other. The possibilities are great here: in a tech support situation, for example, it may be easier to tweak the remote system yourself than to instruct its user to do the tweaking. In addition, there is also a "view only" mode, which can be used to look over the remote operator's shoulder without actually manipulating that machine–great for demonstrations.

Part of the simplicity and ease of use in CrossLoop comes in its ability to work without having to change any firewall settings, helping avoid the potential for compromising system security. No additional open ports means no additional opportunities for Internet-based mischief to be unleashed on your system.

Additional security comes from the fact that it is impossible to attach to an unattended machine: both the local and remote computers have to explicitly join a session. It is impossible to hijack the remote system, thereby making sure that all players agree to the session.

Unlike some other VNC tools, CrossLoop is a Windows-only application. It requires Win98 or better on both ends of the connection.

Download CrossLoop