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Sometimes the latest and greatest bleeding-edge technology is what's needed to get the job done. If you're a trailblazer and boldly going where nobody has gone before, this may be the approach for you. If, however, your goals are a bit more modest, the tried-and-true approach may be more your style.

Flash cards as a learning aid have been around since forever, or at least as long as there have been index cards. It's easy to write a question on the front of a card and the answer on the back. Or if you'd like to modernize the process, maybe you can enlist your computer to give you a hand, along with the folks at Printable Flash Cards. This site has dozens of sets of ready-made printable flash cards covering a wide variety of topics, including geography, science, literature, and more. Or if you don't see the set you need, they've got a free flash card maker you can use to generate your own custom flash cards. Choose from four- or six cards to a page, or you can add additional pages to your flash card set. Print 'em out, use them to study, and next thing you know you'll be a Rhodes Scholar (well, maybe not, but why not aim high?).

Printable Flash Cards is a free service. Any flash cards you download will be in PDF format, so you'll need a copy of Adobe Reader to print them out.

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Sharing files is a necessity. Whether you're collaborating on your latest project, or you've got those killer vacation photos you need to share, you want to be able to get those files from here to there without too much of a headache. Email is okay for small, single files, but once you go beyond the simple stuff, your life can get complex rapidly.

Dropdo is an online service that lets you share your files without the limitations of email, while at the same time avoiding the hassles of big-time file sharing services or, heaven forbid, the need to set up and administer an FTP server or the like. Just point your browser at their site and upload a file or enter the URL to a file that's already online, and you're golden. The site features a built-in file viewer, so you can see your document, text file, image, or what have you immediately after you upload it. And then you can share it with whoever you want, sending the file's new URL via email, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Dropdo is a free service.

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So many of the things that we can do today with a personal computer could only be dreamed of not so many years ago. Word processing, number crunching, communications, and more have really changed the way we think and work. Another of the areas that have been opened up by that computer sitting on your desk—or lap—is that of audio recording. It used to be that making sound recordings that were worth anything required a big studio with industrial-grade recording equipment; now you can do much of that on your computer.

AudioExpert is an online audio editor and sound recorder. With this free service, you can record sounds, edit them (cut, crop, or merge files), convert them between any of several popular formats, and more. Create new ringtones for your phone, record a podcast, tweak the tags on your MP3 files, go nuts. It may not be as interesting as a trip to Abbey Road, but it's much more convenient, as well as a lot cheaper (it's free).

If you want to use AudioExpert, you'll need a web browser, files to be edited, and a microphone if you want to record new material. And thanks to Jason for turning us on to this site.

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How hard is it to create a presence online? You can sign up with Twitter or Facebook and be seen with very little effort. And that's okay, if you're willing to operate within their idea of how the world works. But suppose you've got other ideas? All of a sudden you may be looking at setting up a web server and dealing with a hundred and one headaches involved with the care and feeding of that setup. Or you might try out a service like Coralrift.

With this service, there's nothing to set up and no configuration necessary. Build your website on your local machine—pages, images, links, all that—and then archive it all into a ZIP file. Upload your archive file to Coralrift's servers, and you're on the air. You choose where your site lives—each site is hosted in a subdomain on their main website—and you're good. You now have web presence without having to plumb the depths of Apache or becoming a complete propeller-head sysadmin. Use this service to host a little site, a bigger one, or just as a place to build prototypes before cutting over to a more full-featured web hosting arrangement. If you're just using them to test a site, it all goes away at midnight tomorrow, but if you're a registered user, your site stays up forever, or at least until you take it down.

Coralrift is a free service, and doesn't require anything fancy on your end—just a web browser to upload and view sites, and whatever your favorite text editor and archive tools are to create them.

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Sharing files with other folks can be as easy as attaching them to an email message or as complicated as setting up an FTP server and dealing with its care and feeding. Somewhere in between is the world of file sharing sites. Many of those require signing up for an account, and then sharing a complicated URL with your recipients.

WeTransfer is a file sharing service that doesn't require any setup. There's no registration to worry about, although they do want your email address to send you a confirmation that your file upload has been successful. They will notify your recipient that there's a file waiting for them, and even give them a nice download button to click, so there is no complicated copying and pasting of addresses. You can upload up to 2 GB of data at a time, and your files are available for two weeks after you upload them, allowing even the slowest friend or co-worker ample time to get it together and grab that file.

A free service, all you need to have to use WeTransfer is a Flash-enabled web browser. Thanks to Roy for giving us a heads-up on this service.

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Data is just data until you can't find the piece you're looking for; at that point it becomes a headache. Some things just make more sense when they're organized, and for that you need a database management tool.

Grubba is an online service that helps you to get organized. Choose from one of their templates, or build your own system from scratch. You can define the fields you want and give them the characteristics you need–maybe a long chunk of text here, maybe a shorter number, or even a currency amount there. Your forms can be interactive as well, not just textboxes to enter data, but also dropdown boxes where you can choose from lists, or checkboxes you can tick–basically all the kinds of stuff you could do with Access or FileMaker, but without the headache of installing it on your system. Or paying for it. Organize your finances, administer your organization's mailing list, it's all up to you. You get to work with five different forms, and you can import- and export data between Grubba and other tools like Excel and OpenOffice.

A free online service, Grubba only requires a web browser to use. And if you decide you really like it, they'll be happy to receive a small donation from you, although you're under no obligation to do so.

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How many apps do you have installed on your machine? And how up to date are they? With new versions of popular software being released all the time, it could practically be a full-time job just trying to keep up with all the changes. And even though some of the changes are just cosmetic, or adding some new "gee whiz" features to your favorite program, others are intended to fix nasty security flaws that may be uncovered from time to time. You certainly don't want to miss that upgrade!

Ninite is a service that helps you keep your machine humming along with the latest version of lots of your favorite applications. Their focus is on the big-name free apps where we spend so much of our time, like the Firefox web browser, Skype Internet phone service, 7-zip archiving tool, and more. It's easy to set up your own custom updater: just select the applications you want Ninite to bring current, click the button, and you get a custom installer that will help to install the latest versions of your apps on your system. And it's designed in such a way that if you run that same installer again in a week or a month, it will check your system again and install any updates that have been released since the last time you ran it. That's certainly convenient.

Ninite is a free service. They can work with both Windows and Linux systems.

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Life can be more interesting and more fun when you add the little things. A dash of cinnamon on your oatmeal, or maybe that new pair of shoes—they're not absolutely necessary, but they add a little bit of interest and excitement to what might otherwise be just another day. If you've got a website, maybe you've thought of adding a little digital "bling" to spice it up a bit. How about a fancy new clock?

The folks at Free Flash Clocks offer oodles of interesting little Flash-based clocks. They're easy to use—just look through their galleries of clocks and pick one or more that speak to you. Choose from analog clocks, digital clocks, animal clocks, clocks that count up and down, or any of a zillion others. Once you find the one you like, just click the yellow button to copy and paste the code for the clock into your web page, and you're off to the races. They don't require any programming skill, so there's nothing to be afraid of.

All you need to use Free Flash Clocks is a web page to stick them into.

Download Free Flash Clocks

Everybody needs a calendar. While there's some routine stuff where you really don't need to know which day it is—brush your teeth, feed the cat—there are other things where knowing where you are in the week, month, or year are really important. If it's Monday, you'd better go to work. If it's April 15, you'd better mail that check to the IRS. Without a calendar, we'd be hard pressed to keep track of it all.

There are all kinds of calendars. They range from the one you picked up at the drugstore with the advertising all over it to the little one you stick in your wallet. Some calendars focus on holidays, while others are more interested in natural phenomena. Lunar Calendars fall into this latter class.

Lunar Calendars are provided by the folks at RocketCalendar.com. These guys have lunar calendars—calendars that focus on the phase of the moon on any particular day—that you can view online or download as a PDF file. Both versions feature graphical representations of the phase of the moon for each day in a given month, as well as including the captions "New Moon" and "Full Moon" on the appropriate days. Even with the labels, there's enough room to add your own annotations to the calendar, so you can be sure to pencil in your next snipe hunt or other lunar-related event.

Lunar Calendars are free. You'll need a browser to look at them online, and a copy of Adobe Reader or another app that can work with PDF files to print them out.

Download Lunar Calendars

There seems to be no end of ways for you to get your story out to other folks on the 'Net. You can build a plain old website, put together a blog, or even set up a wiki. If the idea of a wiki appeals to you, you might want to check out the offerings at Wiki-Site.com.

These folks make it easy to get up and going with a wiki, and the one they use is the same one Wikipedia is built on. You can choose to just stick your toe in the water and start with just a single page in what they call a Personal Wiki. Or if you've got more to say, you can set up a Group Wiki, which gives you multiple pages to work with. In either case, everything you're doing is out in the open—you've can't control who edits your entries and everybody can see them. While this means you're probably not going to want to post your super-secret chocolate chip cookie recipe up there, you could still spread the excitement of cookies in a more general way.

There's no cost to use either the Personal or Group wiki, and all you need is a browser and an email address to get started. If you're interested in a more feature-rich setup, they do offer the option of a paid version as well.

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