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Generally we don't get too excited about screensavers: more swirly lines, vast star fields, baskets of adorable kittens, that sort of thing. Here's one that's different from anything we've run across before.

Word Clock is exactly what it says it is. When your screensaver fires up, your display is filled with a clock, of sorts. Rather than an imitation of an analog clock face, or yet another digital clock, you get a clock that is actually a complete sentence. All of the text necessary to spell out any day and time is displayed on the screen; the text appropriate to give you the current time is highlighted, and changes second-by-second.

Highly customizable, you can choose colors, fonts, and layout parameters for your display. It's even available in over a dozen languages, 'cause you never know when you might need a Hungarian clock.

There's a PC version of Word Clock in the works, but currently it's only available for Mac. It's a Universal Binary, so it requires OS X version 10.3 or later.

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When you're trying to visualize pieces of a whole, nothing brings it all together like a good old pie chart. Whether it's kids in a classroom, or dollars in your portfolio, a pie chart helps you to visualize how how big a share a segment is of a whole thing. Boys in a class? Dollars in stocks? Put it in a pie chart and you'll see what's happening.

Making a pie chart used to require that you run Excel or some other spreadsheet program. That may be fine if you already own the tool, and you don't mind the work involved in setting your data up, but for simple, one-off charts, it's kind of involved.

Instant Pie Charts makes it easy to design and complete just the pie chart you need. Choose from 2- or 3-dimensional charts and pick a size. You can then enter as many, or as few, segments as you need to tell your story. Choose your colors, add your titles, and you're good to go. You can use your custom pie chart in Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, or really anywhere that you can paste an image. Want to include it in a web page? Copy the URL for the completed chart and insert it into an image tag on your site, and now the whole world can see what you've done.

Instant Pie Charts is a free online service. You access it in your web browser, so it's compatible with just about every platform and operating system out there.

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When it comes to typing, are you a "hunt-and-peck" kind of guy (or gal), or do you enter text with the efficiency of a well-oiled machine? Either way, keyboarding is an essential skill, and one at which you probably can improve—after all, Mavis Beacon has made quite a name for herself. But how about speeding up your typing without adding to her retirement fund? (Don't worry, she's not a real person.)

TypingWeb has a free online typing tutor that you can use to improve your skills, and speed up your typing. You can start off with a quick typing test to see just how your current skill level stacks up, and then begin on a series of lessons to speed you up and save you time and effort in keyboarding. Building on your test results, lessons are customized to focus on your weaker areas, helping to build your speed and confidence over time.

There are also lessons for Dvorak keyboards and 10-Key data entry; for non-US users, there is support for different keyboard layouts as well.

TypingWeb is a free online service. It should be compatible with most systems using a modern web browser.

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RSS feeds are a great way to keep up with your favorite websites and blogs. Webmasters generate a feed that you can subscribe to, and you'll get the latest updates and changes from the site. Assuming, of course, that the site you're interested in generates a feed. If not, you're out of luck—or at least used to be.

Page2RSS is a service that watches pages for you, and when it sees a change, it lets you know. You don't have to register or anything; to create your own "feed", you just type the URL you want to monitor into the box and hit the button. It returns a link that you can then paste into your feed reader, and now whenever there are changes to the subject page, you'll be the first to know about it. Or you can make it even easier by dragging the "Add to Page2RSS" link to your browser's toolbar; now you can add feeds for any page you come across while you're surfing.

Page2RSS is a free service that should be compatible with all systems running a modern Web browser.

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Whether you call it a flash drive, a thumb drive, or some other name, those little removable USB drives are handy to have around. With one of those little portable wonders, you can carry data, or even programs with you where ever you go. Unlike a CD-ROM, you can easily stick one in your pocket; in addition, you can both read and write with them. That means you can take your email program or a spreadsheet with you, update it on a different machine, and then save those changes.

Of course, if you're making changes, you may need to download those back onto your main computer as well. You'll want to be sure to do that as soon as you plug the USB drive back in, lest you make changes in your main computer, and now have two different versions of your mailbox, document, or what have you. USB Autorunner is a tool that may help make that easier.

You can create a configuration that will automatically sync your remote- and local versions of files, for example. Plug the drive in, and it will start the synchronization process, or you can launch a ToDo list, or anything else. No more having to dig through things to remember to keep your system updated with changes you made while you were out.

USB Autorunner is a Windows app and will run on any Win32 platform, from Win95 through Vista.

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Proxy servers are a pretty slick way to connect to the Web. Whether it's because you are trying to maintain some semblance of anonymity by shielding your IP address from your destination, or just because you're relying on caching on the server, lots of people use them. If you use multiple proxies—maybe one at work and another at home—it can be a pain in the neck to keep tweaking your system to activate one or the other of them, depending on where you are.

SwitchProxy is a tool that makes it easier to switch the proxy server you're using at any given time. A browser plugin, it's designed to work with the Mozilla-based family of web browsers and tools, including Firefox, Mozilla, and Thunderbird. (It's a couple years old, so you may want to check to see how it works with SeaMonkey, Camino, or other more recent Mozilla-based browsers.) You can set up your list of servers and access them to select or change via Toolbar, Context Menu (right click menu), or as a Toolbar Element. You can choose "regular" proxies, or select from a list of anonymous servers to use, even setting it to change servers automatically from time to time to really mix things up.

SwitchProxy is compatible with all systems running Firefox and supported Mozilla-based browsers.

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Koma-Mail is a compact email client, small enough to run from a removable drive. It doesn't require an installer, so you can put it on a USB device and not have to worry about sacrificing disk capacity.

It works with both POP and IMAP email systems, and includes a built-in RSS reader. You can read both text- and HTML-formatted messages, and it includes an HTML editor so that you can send formatted emails as well. Sending and receiving of attachments is supported, automatically zipping them to save space. It supports multiple user accounts, and each user can have multiple mail accounts as well.

For safety's sake, Koma-Mail includes two types of spam filters, and it won't run scripts or ActiveX components in your emails.

Koma-Mail is a free download. It's a Windows application and requires Windows 98 or later.

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xPad is a text editor and "stickies" tool for your Mac. You can edit multiple documents in its window, and a list of your documents is available to you in a drawer that slides out. Clicking on a document opens it instantly, and all of your work is automatically saved, so you don't have to worry about losing your work.

Sort your documents by name, date, or category, or even color code your documents to more easily organize them. You can work in text or Rich Text mode, so you can use no formatting for code snippets, or all the bells and whistles for documents you'll use elsewhere.

For added convenience, it's easy to export your documents to your iPod, so you can take them along with you while you're out and about.

xPad is a Mac application. It runs under OS X version 10.3 or later, with extra features available under Tiger (10.4).

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Some folks are just never on time. No matter how hard they try, they just can't pull it off. Now whether this is a sign of some deep-seated pathology, or just a lack of good planning isn't for discussion here, but there are some tricks that the chronically late have resorted to to try to get place on time.

One of the favorites is that of setting the clock ahead. Whether it's just a few minutes, or maybe a hour or more, the theory has it that once you set the clock ahead, you will forget that you did. Now when you are running ten minutes late on the clock, you may well be right on time in the real world.

The Procrastinator's Clock takes an interesting twist on this principle. Instead of running a set ten minutes ahead or so, it actually varies in how fast it runs. It's guaranteed to run up to 15 minutes fast, but that value isn't a constant. With a clock like this, you know that at any given moment, it may be a quarter hour ahead, or it may be dead on accurate—and you'll never know which. If you weren't neurotic enough about getting there on time, now you can add the further uncertainty of not really knowing what time it is. Heck, it may be easier to just be on time.

The author suggests that this tool is offered in the spirit of Chindogu, "…the Japanese art of creating almost useless objects." If you're not on time, or maybe if you are, you'll want to give this a spin.

Procrastinator's Clock is an online service. It should be compatible with most systems running a modern Web browser.

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It's the nightmare scenario: your laptop is missing. Whether you just misplaced it, or somebody decided that they needed it more that you did, your world has just come crashing down around you. If you don't have strong passwords on everything, you may have your data stolen. Even if everything's buttoned-up tight, there still are things on that machine that don't exist on your desktop box. Oh, yeah, there's the whole hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of replacement necessary to get you up and running again.

LocatePC may be able to give you a hand here. A free application, its purpose in life is to let your know where your little darling is. When the "bad guy" fires up your computer, it will send you an email giving you enough information that you just may be able to figure out where your machine is. It will report its current IP address and other information that may allow you or the authorities to contact the ISP who controls that address, and may help you to figure out who has your machine.

The publisher doesn't make any claims or guarantees that you will be able to recover your machine with this information, but it seems like it's a pretty painless way to help make that recovery more likely.

LocatePC is a Windows application. You must be running Windows 98 or later, and of course your must have an email account to receive any notifications that it sends out.

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