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Ever since the beginning of time—or at least Windows 95—we've all used Windows Explorer to get around in the Pride of Redmond. (I always kind'a liked Program Manager, but that's the 16-bit solution that's come and gone.) If you don't want to live your life at a "C prompt", you need a desktop manager, and Explorer is the canned solution that comes with Windows.

XYplorerFree is an alternative to Microsoft's idea of how to get around in Windows. It incorporates the main functionality of Windows Explorer, but then adds more. With the use of tabs, you can browse multiple directories or volumes, without having to open multiple windows on your desktop. How about integrated search? Rather than having to use a dedicated "Find" functionality, you can enter search queries directly into the address bar, and it supports Boolean searches and regular expressions as well, so you can really find just what you're looking for, without having to dig through a bunch of stuff you're really not interested in. Color coding files allows you to visually group your work, so you can pick out your mist important documents.

XYplorerFree runs under Windows, requiring Win98 or later. Note that the download link for the free products is at the bottom of the page.

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Everybody plays Sudoku, but I can never remember how to spell it. I suppose it's inevitable that variations on this popular game will come into being, and one of the more interesting ones, visually at least, is Crystal Sudoku.

Rather than keeping track of numbers, with Crystal Sudoku, you are tasked with filling grids with images that don't repeat—little "crystals", I suppose. See how quickly you can complete the puzzle, and save your time to compete against yourself. There are four difficulty levels, so you can keep things interesting as you get better and better.

Crystal Sudoku is a Mac application. It's distributed as a Universal Binary, so it's equally at home on either PowerPC or Intel Macs. It requires OS X 10.4 or later.

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If you're responsible for the care and feeding of a website, you know that creating the site is only part of the job. After you're up and running, you need to see who comes to visit, and tweak the verbiage and pictures to make sure that folks are getting to the pages you want them to visit, and hopefully signing-up for those newsletters and buying your products. In order to do this, you need to look at your server's access logs.

Raw logs contain all of the information about who came calling, but not in the most friendly or intuitive format. Website statistics programs can help make sense out of all that data. SmarterStats Free Edition is one such tool, at a price you can't beat.

Who came to visit? Which pages did they see? Where did they come from? If they came via a search engine, which terms did they search on? This kind of data and more is yours with SmarterStats. While the publisher offers "Pro" and "Enterprise" editions of this tool for reasonable prices, this free edition gives you much of the same functionality as the Enterprise Edition—at a greatly reduced price—although you can only monitor one site with the free product.

SmarterStats is a Windows tool. It requires Window 2000 or later, and version 1.1 of the .NET framework.

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We're always looking for a way to get more organized and try to stay on top of all the "stuff" we've got to keep track of. If this sounds like your situation, here's a tool that may help you to finally get organized.

Hott Notes is a slick little application for your Windows system that lets you create virtual "sticky notes" to help you keep track of what you need to keep track of. Your notes can be one of three types of reminders. There's a message note, freeform text to remind you to pick up that carton of milk on the way home. You can create a checklist note, that allows you to enter text into multiple fields, each prepended with a checkbox so you can keep track of what you've accomplished and what remains to be done. And finally, there's the scribble note, a note where you can draw pictures or write your notes freehand—great if you have a stylus to work with.

A note manager allows you to deal with your notes: organize them, delete them, archive them, or perform batch functions of them.

Hott Notes is a Windows application. It requires Win2k/XP/Vista.

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Everything's all about computer keyboards, but does anybody really know how to type? Back in the day, you could take Typing in high school, although as a guy, you might have been looked down as taking a class "for girls". In retrospect, that's probably the most important class I ever took. With the importance of typing, the most significant method of data entry out there, it's amazing how many people still use the tried-and-true methods of hunt-and-peck, or two-finger typing. Certainly not the most efficient way to get things done.

You may be beyond the age where the remedial typing class is an option for you, but you would still like to become at least a bit more proficient at typing. Maybe you'd like to give Stamina Typing Tutor a try.

Stamina Typing Tutor supports multiple languages and layouts, so whether you're trying to wrestle the traditional QWERTY keyboard to the ground, or want to try something more exotic like a Dvorak layout, it's all here for you. There's even an alternative method that they suggest that they claim will lead to a reduction in hand stress. Drills are provided to help you focus on particular skills. It keeps track of how you're doing, so you can watch your progress over time, and see how much faster you're getting.

If you're tired of thinking faster than you can type, Stamina Typing Tutor maybe just they help you're looking for.

Stamina Typing Tutor is a Windows application, and will run on just about any Win32 platform, from Win95 or NT on up to Vista.

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At its base, an address book—whether a paper list, or a software application—is charged with keeping track of all the names and phone numbers we need to make it through the day, both personally and professionally. There are a whole range of tools out there that handle that responsibility nicely.

Open Contacts takes that basic functionality and adds to it. Along with the canned fields and categories offered, it allows you to add new fields, and to define relationships between people. It's easy to grab whole groups of people—work contacts, family, vendors, and more.

An exhaustive search capability makes it easy to search on any, or multiple, fields, so you can find everybody with a birthday in March, or everybody who lives in Springfield.

You can import contacts from your address books in many popular email applications. You can export your contact info in several useful formats (Excel, CSV, HTML), and you can print contact lists and labels.

Open Contacts is self-contained, and with a small footprint, you can put the whole app and your database on a USB thumb drive and take it with you.

Open Contacts is a Windows application. It requires Win98 or later.

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PDF files are a great thing. They allow you to share content across platforms, since everybody understands that file format. You maintain formatting and layout in your documents. They support images, The list goes on and on: PDFs are really a de facto standard for documents on the Web.

What do you do when you're only really interested in the text of that PDF document? There's no easy way to extract just that content, divorced from any formatting, layout, or graphic elements. Sure, you can copy and paste from a document, or maybe you can come up with a better way to spend your day.

PDFTextOnline is a free service that will give you your day back. With no login or account required, you just browse to- and select your PDF file, click the magic button, and PDFTextOnline takes it from there. It extracts the text from your file, and also reveals any form data from the PDF. In addition, it also shows you document properties, revealing the document's author, the tools used, etc.

You can view the resulting text onscreen, or you can choose to download it. Your text-only download is placed in a ZIP archive for you.

PDFTextOnline is a free service. It should be compatible with most modern web browsers.

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If you run multiple systems, you probably long ago ran out of desktop space. With a keyboard and mouse for each machine, your work space probably looks more like a used computer store.

Input Director is a tool that allows you to run multiple systems with just one keyboard and one mouse. You can transition from one machine to the next by hitting a hotkey, or you can simply move your mouse cursor from one monitor to the next.

One slick feature that Input Director offers is a "shared clipboard." This means that you can copy-and-paste from one machine to the next. The clipboard supports both text and images.

Input Director is a Windows app, and it's free for personal use. It requires Windows 2000 or later, and all your machines must be networked.

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There are just too darn many things to do. When was the last time you saw your desktop, or the bezel of your monitor? Between the piles of to-do lists, and all the sticky notes hanging on the walls, it's a wonder we get anything done.

CheckOff is a slick little to-do list that sits on the menu bar of your Mac. You can enter individual items, each with an associated note. For related tasks, you can create groups, helping you to better organize your life. Colored labels make it easy to spot work-related items, or personal stuff.

CheckOff is a Mac application, and can be downloaded as a Universal Binary. It requires OS X 10.5 (Leopard), although there are reports that it may run on Panther or Tiger as well.

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Throwaway email addresses are an important tool in the fight against spam. You know the drill: you want to sign up for a free this or that—online subscription, access to some hidden information, or what have you. You have to supply a valid email address, but you know that the minute you hit the "send" button, you're going to be deluged in spam. You need a throwaway address, where it makes no difference what the spammers send your way.

Mailinator is a free service that gives you a throwaway email address. It has several advantages over similar offerings elsewhere. First, there is no sign up—just tell your contact to send mail to bigboy@mailinator.com or spoiledrotten@mailinator.com, and it will go there, without your having to create the account ahead of time. If you need to check that email—to send back a verification, for instance—you have several options. Go back to the Mailinator web site; subscribe to their RSS feed for that address; put a Mailinator widget on any web page; or access the mailbox directly at http://:<accountname>.mailinator.com.

Remember, of course, that there's no security here, so this is not the service you want to use to pass the launch codes along to your friends, for example.

Mailinator is a free service and should support most modern web browsers.

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