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For much of the modern world, all that stands between you and utter disaster is a password. Lots of online accounts depend on an email address as a user name, so if somebody's after your stuff, they're halfway there just by virtue of knowing that address. That means that choosing a good password is even more important.

The best password is the password that has the least meaning in the real world. Your pet's name, dictionary words, the word "password"? Not such good choices. Passwords that include both upper- and lower-case alphabetic characters, numbers, and even punctuation marks are better. And you get bonus points for making them extra long as well. So how do you know if your password is a good one?

Check out The Password Meter. This free online service takes a look at your password and lets you know how it measures up. Sure, there are no "password police" out there to really say that you've made good choices or bad, but these guys will point out places where you could improve things (no repeated characters) and where you've made good choices (including at least three of the four character types listed above). One drawback to this tool is that it caps you at a max of 16 characters for passwords that it tests. The security of your passwords will increase dramatically as the number of characters increases.

If you're a little squeamish about checking real passwords on a non-secure site like this, you can download the tool and run it on your local system. The heavy lifting and analysis is done by a chunk of JavaScript, so it's not really talking to the server.

The Password Meter is a free service. If you've got a browser and care about security, you should be good to go.

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Your mom always taught you it's nice to share. We recently looked at Cl1p, a service that lets you share clipboard-type information across the 'Net. Here's a similar type of setup that lets you share files instead.

Drop.io is a simple file drop. You create an arbitrary directory name on their site and upload files directly into it. Share the resulting URL with anybody else and they can grab any of those files. You don't have to go through all kind of complicated steps to set things up; heck, you don' t even have to register to take advantage of their service. They're not particular about what you upload, so you can use it to share text files, documents, images, audio, or just about anything else.

Drop.io is a free service. All you need to take advantage of it is a browser with Flash installed and a file you want to share.

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Whether you work as an employee, or you're under contract for somebody else, you need to keep track of what you do. Whether it's the hours you put in on a given day, expenses you've incurred, or miles you've driven, it all needs to be tracked. After all, if you're an employee you want to be reimbursed; if you're a contractor, you need to bill for your activities.

1DayLater is a service to help you keep track of time, expenses, and distance. It's easy to create a new project or client and to start filling in the values. Entries are automatically time-stamped, so you're always up-to-date. While you can post-date entries as you make them, you can't go back and edit times after-the-fact, so you need to make sure you get it right the first time. It uses color coding to help you keep track of things, and it features a search function that lets you focus in on the particular items you want.

It looks like this tool is in its early stages, since there are several pieces of functionality that are hinted at but not yet implemented, like invoices and mileage claims.

1DayLater is a free online service. You'll just need a modern browser with Flash installed to take advantage of it.

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We recently looked at a "Lorem ipsum" generator that lets you create dummy text to use while mocking up a new or redesigned website. It may help you to visualize text on your pages before you've invested the blood, sweat, and tears to actually write content. But what about images? Certainly those don't spring forth fully-armed from the forehead of Zeus either. So what can you use as placeholders while you're getting your graphical act together?

The Dynamic Dummy Image Generator is an online service that lets you create mock-up images to get the spacing right on your pages. Generating images is as simple as adding width- and height- attributes to their site's URL. The resulting image, a gray box with its dimensions clearly spelled-out in it, can be hot-linked from the publisher's site, or you can save the generated GIF file to your server and grab it locally. If you're feeling really adventurous, you can grab the underlying PHP code and host this tool on your own server.

A free service, Dynamic Dummy Image Generator should be compatible with just about any make and model of web browser.

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Using a web site is a pretty cool way to tell your story. Put up a couple of pages about your Widget business, and the world will beat a path to your (virtual) door. Recite a brief history of Widgets, demonstrate your state-of-the-art Widget manufacturing process, let everybody know why you are The Widget King.

While web pages give you an easy way to get in your customer's' face, you can't always control what those pages look like. Everybody's browser interprets the HTML code behind your pages just a little differently. A page on Firefox doesn't always look like that same page viewed with Internet Explorer or Safari. That means that your catalog may look a bit off when people look at it. If you want consistency in visual presentation, you need to PDF that product information.

Youblisher takes your PDFs—product lists, multi-page brochures, and such—and fiddles with them to make them behave more like printed catalogs. Then you can use your mouse to flip pages just like a real catalog. Upload your document and these folks convert your PDF into a Flash movie that they host, that supports this flip-through-it behavior. Your users have quick access to your document, and they don't have to download a PDF and fire up Adobe Reader to look at it.

Youblisher is a free online service. All you need to use it is a PDF to upload and a Flash-enabled browser to look at the results.

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If you sell stuff or services to people, then you need to keep track of those people. Sure, some stuff is sold just one-off and you'll never hear from those customers again. But if you really want to make money, you want to be able to sell to your customers again and again. Collecting and tracking information about how to contact them, what their needs are, and how you've been taking care of them is vital. In the simplest case you can do this with a spreadsheet or even an address book application, but if you really want to get serious about it, you need to look at a dedicated customer relationship management (CRM) tool.

There are some very good—and very expensive— CRM apps out there. If you've got a ton of money and nothing better to do with it, you might just want to help yourself. But if you want to save a buck (or several of them), take a look at Javelin.

Javelin is a free online tool. Sure, it can help you track your customers, but it also has the flexibility to let you keep an eye on prospects (turning them into customers), vendors, and more. Add your own custom tags to organize things in ways that you work. Share contact information with co-workers, so everybody's on the same page. Track email and attachments, and you've got a full picture of your interaction with your clients. And since it's all online, that means you can access your information from anywhere. They also take care of backing things up, so you'll never have to say "oops" after your server crashes, and of courseyou'll never have to do a system upgrade, since you didn't install anything.

While they do offer a paid version, the Free Edition allows for two users and up to 250 contacts. While that might not be enough for a bigger company, if you're running lean-and-mean, that may be just the right number.

You don't need anything fancy to use Javelin. Once you sign up, you just use your regular web browser to access this free tool.

Download Javelin

If you're working in an organization that's bigger than what you can fit in your bedroom closet, you've got folks who need to work together. While everybody may have their individual responsibilities, they've got to at least talk to each other to coordinate those activities. And if you're working on a project, then there's a lot collaboration going on. There are plenty of tools that can help you with this, but here's one that takes a slightly different tack than the others.

Thinklinkr is an online collaborative outliner. Instead of sharing documents or supporting elaborate video chats, this tool just lets you work together on outlines. While this methodology doesn't work for everybody, for some folks the ability to organize information hierarchically is the way to really get things done. With Thinklinkr, you can share outlines and get everybody's input in real time. It tracks revisions, so you can go back and revisit earlier versions and decisions. If you're working on multiple projects, you can create multiple outlines.

Thinklinkr is a free service. All you need to do to take advantage of it is to have a web browser and in Internet connection.

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It's no news that there are about a zillion web pages out there. Some are interesting, some not so much. Sometimes just looking at a page is all you're interested in: now you know the current temperature, closing stock prices, that kind of thing. Other times you may want to go back to check on things as they change and evolve: updates to a news site, new software releases, etc. Then there are the sites that contain interesting goodies that you want to hang on to. Sure, you can set a bookmark and go back and visit them again, but sometimes you want to grab a page to keep on your machine; maybe you're going to be spending a lot of time looking at it, or maybe you're going to be offline for a while and want to bring that page with you.

PdfMyUrl is a helpful online service that lets you save any web page as a PDF file. All you do is type or paste the URL for the page you want to save into its text field and press the magic button, and it will automatically PDF the whole page for you, including images and hyperlinks. While most browsers let you save a web page as something with a name like "web page complete," typically the "complete" means a separate folder chock full of images, scripts, and various other individual files. If you save it all as a PDF, then you've got one file rather than a pile of individual ones to have to deal with. The PDFs created by PdfMyUrl include live links as well, so you can still navigate with through those links the next time you're online, if you want.

A free service, PdfMyUrl shouldn't require anything other than a web browser and an Internet connection—as well as a suitably interesting web site to save—in order to do the deed.

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Some people have a great sense of design and color. Show them a paint chip or a fabric swatch and almost instantly they can design a room, an outfit, or just about anything else from it. I am in awe of those people. Where they see cranberry, magenta, rose, crimson, scarlet, or puce, I see red. I need Color Schemer Online.

With this online tool, all you need to do is enter a single color, and it will give you back over a dozen others that will go well with it. You can enter your color with individual RGB values, or you can type or paste a hex value, much like you might use on a web page. Once you get your colors, you can then further tweak it by lightening or darkening your original color and the suggested color scheme colors as well. Click on any of the suggested hues and you'll get back another list of colors that would go well with that. Use one of these palettes in your next project and people won't even remember that your personal favorite color is plaid.

Color Schemer Online is a free service. All you need is a web browser and a desire to see something other than red.

Download Color Schemer Online

Seems like there's always something to calculate. Whether it's just adding a couple of numbers, figuring the tax and shipping on your next Amazon order, or computing what the interest is going to cost you on a new car purchase, there are numbers to be crunched. For some of them, a simple pocket calculator would suffice; for others you might want to reach for a full-blown spreadsheet application. Or you might take a look at an online option.

InstaCalc is a free online calculator. You can use it to do some quickie addition, or you can get all complicated and use it to compute mortgage amortization, future value, and other complex calculations. For the simple stuff, all you need to do is type in the numbers and operators, and it figures the answer in real time. If you need to get more complex, you can define variables and reference other parts of your calculations. It supports all sorts of complex operations, including trig functions, logarithms, and more. It's even got built in conversion functions: how many teaspoons are there in a gallon? (768), or what is 2010 in octal? (0o3732).

InstaCalc is a free service. You should be able to use it with any browser that supports JavaScript.

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