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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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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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GE's slogan "Imagination At Work" gives a name to their little online tool ImaginationCubed. You can let your imagination run wild on their virtual whiteboard. Included are tools to draw, stamp, add text, and more. Change background and foreground colors and line width to make your little sketches your own. Clear and Undo functions make it easy to fine-tune your doodles. There's even a built-in recorder that allows you to replay the drawing that you just performed, so that you can watch your picture be re-created. You can save your handiwork for future reference, or email it to somebody else to share your inspiration.

ImaginationCubed is a free online application. It should run on most systems with a modern web browser. It requires that you have Flash installed on your machine, and you'll have better results with a broadband Internet connection.

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It's not all about the money, but money is certainly a big concern for us all. Budgeting, bill paying, cash flow, there's a lot to keep track of. You can sit at a high desk with a green eyeshade and a quill pen, or you can use automation to help make it all more manageable.

There are a bunch of programs out there to help you stay on top of your financial issues. Mint is a tool that may fit the bill for you in this regard.

Mint is a free online service that interacts with many banks, credit card companies, and investment accounts. It can automatically go out and grab the latest information for each of your accounts, so that you can look at your entire financial situation all at once, rather than having to spend half an hour logging on to a dozen different web sites to get your latest information. It's clever enough to categorize your spending, so that you'll know where you money is going without having to create a budget and spending hours trying to see how it all fits together. If you decide you do want to start budgeting, Mint will tell you what you've spent historically in different areas. It can notify you when you go over budget, or when other significant events happen, like low balances in your bank accounts, getting close to credit card limits, or even large transactions, like salary or tax refund deposits.

Mint should be compatible with most modern web browsers, so almost everybody should be able to use it.

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Stuff happens. Generally it happens over time. Sometimes understanding a topic requires that you see just how things have changed over time—they've gotten better, they've gotten worse, they've gotten bigger, and so forth. A biography, a history book, even a class schedule are timelines of a sort.

Dipity is like Wikipedia for timelines. It bills itself as "…the easiest way to make and share interactive timelines about the people and things you care about." If you've got something you're interested in, and it happened over time, you can build and share a timeline of it. The rise and fall of Mesoamerican culture, the history of UFO sightings, Monty Python episodes—they're all fair game.

Timelines can have creators, editors, and fans, so you can create a timeline, collaborate with others in fleshing it out, and then share it with the world. Along with text, you can also incorporate images, links to other Web locations, Google maps, YouTube videos, and more. In addition, you can embed timelines in your web pages, so that your Mesoamerican ethnography site will include the timeline along with all the pictures of pyramids.

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

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Stikkit is an online tool that helps you organize all the disparate bits and pieces that make up your life. It's like having a pile of little sticky notes, only better. You can create a stikkit for anything you're interested in keeping track of, like people, events, and ideas. It's clever enough to figure out whether you're typing in a note, a calendar item, or contact information, and categorizes your stikkit accordingly.

You can log in and add or edit your stikkits, but the real savings is when you add a bookmark to your browser. Now whenever you need to take a note or look a something you've already written, it's just a quick click away. It's really helpful if you're taking notes while you browse the web—open a new stikkit and it's automatically populated with the title and URL of your current page.

You can share your stikkits with others, so that you can collaborate and all be on the same page. You can add to your notes via email as well. Each stikkit comes with a discrete email address. Send your note an email and the body of your message becomes a part of the stikkit.

Stikkit is a free online service. It should be compatible with most modern Web browsers.

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Way back when, computer displays had two colors: black and green. Squinting at the screen of your Osborne or Kaypro, you had to do your best to make out those glowing green pixels on that teeny-tiny screen. Thank goodness those days are over, although we still bear the scars of that experience with the glasses or contact lenses we don every day.

Writer is an interesting online tool that recaptures the flavor of that experience, but without the pain. Writer advertises itself as "the Internet Typewriter", and that pretty much says it all. Go to the site and you're presented with a bare bones screen, and given a chance to start typing. Now since you're using your fancy new widescreen display, you're not going to go blind, and the characters are in a Courier-like font, making it easier to see what you're typing.

Once you've gotten your thoughts out, you can save them, send them (blog, email, whatever), download them as a TXT file, PDF them, or print them. Preferences allow you to change the font, line spacing, and even the color of the characters—choose Amber to re-capture the Hercules look, which beat the pants off of a CGA display back in the day.

Writer is a free online service. It should be compatible with most systems running a modern Web browser.

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The world's a complicated place. Things happening, people moving around, all that. It would be nice if Mom were always there to keep an eye on us and help tell us what to do, but she's not always available. Sometimes the next best thing can be a good sign. This house is for rent. You can't park there. There's wet paint on that bench. All the helpfulness of Mom, but without the funny hair style.

Printable Signs features over 75 signs that you can download and print for free. Formatted as PDF files, all you need is a copy of Adobe Reader or any other tool that can read those files, and you're in business. Put a "keep out" sign on the refrigerator; put a "biohazard" sign on your kid's room; hang a "beware of cat" sign on the fence. Knock yourself out—the sky's the limit here.

You can also grab editable versions of the signs for only $1.99 each. Available as Microsoft Word-compatible DOC files, you can post your business hours or fill-in a yard sale sign with all the particulars on the great bargains you're offering this weekend.

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ConvertIcon does one thing, but it does it pretty well. It takes a PNG image and converts it to an ICO-formatted icon. Or it takes an ICO-formatted icon and converts it into a PNG image. Maybe that's two things.

To use it, just point at the URL of an online image, or browse to the location of an image on your local machine, press the button, and sit back. You get your result right away, and since you don't have to download any software, there's no drain on your system and no concern about system compatibility.

ConvertIcon is a free online service. It should be compatible with most any system running a modern web browser.

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