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A simple password is an ineffective password. A single password that you use for multiple purposes is a risky password. By the time you cover all the bases—complex, mixed upper- and lower case, alphanumeric and punctuation marks, no dictionary words—you've got a list of great passwords, but alas now you can't remember any of them. You need a "password locker" tool to keep track of them all. That's fine, as long as you always sit at the same desk with the same machine. What if you're out and about and need one of your passwords? Now you're in trouble. Enter Passpack.

Passpack is an online password manager tool. You can enter up to 100 entries for free, and they don't have to be just passwords. Save emergency info, travel info, confirmation numbers, all that sort of thing. The one thing they do ask is that you not store financial information here. Should everything go south, it's one thing if somebody can log into your blog; it's a totally different matter if they should log into your bank account and clean you out.

For most purposes, Passpack should give you plenty of security for your data. You always connect via secure HTTPS connections, and your data is super-encrypted as it sits on their servers. They've even got "disposable log-ins" for use on public computers. Pretty cool.

Passpack is a free service, and should be compatible with most modern web browsers.

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Who couldn't stand to lose some weight and get some more exercise? Yeah, I saw all your hands go up. It's kind of a pain in the neck to get going, and keeping track of your progress isn't always easy. Unfortunately, though, without some kind of organized feedback, it may not be so easy to stick with a program.

FitDay may be a help to you. It's a free online service that lets you track your progress, and helps you keep on top of things. It is a journal to record what you eat. how much you exercise, how your weight is (hopefully) going down. You can keep track of the calories and other nutritional information on what you're consuming, and see whether you're on track to meet your personal goals.

In addition to the main FitDay app, there are other helpful tools on the site. Need to know how many calories you burn walking at 2.5 mph on flat level ground? They'll tell you, based on your weight, height, age, and gender. There's plenty of other calculators like that as well.

FitDay is a free online service. If you're interested, they do have a paid version available for Windows systems for about $40.

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UberNote is an all-in-one web-based notes application. Since it's on the web, there's no installation necessary, and it is available from anywhere that you have an active Internet connection and a web browser.

It's easy to create task lists, contact lists, bookmarks, or freeform text entries, like shopping lists. Enter a note at work, act on it at home. As a real time saver, you can even update notes via email. This means that you could, for instance, add to that shopping list or event plan by shooting it an email from your mobile phone. Now that's convenient. You can create an unlimited number of notes, so you're never going to run out of space.

UberNote is a free online application. It should be compatible with any system running IE version 6 or better, or Firefox ver 2 or version 3 of Safari.

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How do you get that job you really want? Well, it helps to be qualified—academic background, training, experience in the field—they all go into it. Interviewing well helps too. After all, you can't sell yourself and your qualifications if you don't show them what you've got. But how do you get that interview? Do your homework, do your networking, keep your ear to the ground. And once you're zeroing-in on where you want to interview, you need to let the hiring authorities know you're looking for them. Here's where a good resume comes in.

A resume, no matter how good, will never get you a job. What it will do, however, is get you an interview. Once you're in the door and talking with them face-to-face, you can impress them with your grasp of the important issues that face their company, and let them know how you are uniquely qualified to help them solve their problems.

Instant Resume Templates has dozens of resume templates for you to download, customize, and send off to potential employers. They're all available as DOC files, so you can customize them with Microsoft Word or any other tool that can edit DOC files. With resumes designed for professional, business, or academic settings, there's sure to be one that will help you to land that job. Whether it's basic resumes, chronological resumes, or even informal resumes, all you need to do is to download one of the templates, fill it in with your information and qualifications, and send it off to your next employer. It's not time to open the Champagne just yet, but who knows…

Instant Resume Templates is a free service. You can grab the templates with any web browser, and edit them with a Microsoft Word-compatible word processing program.

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Planet eBook is a great way to grab electronic versions of many works of classic literature. They've got dozens of great works of literature that you can download for free. These volumes are items that the copyright has lapsed on (George Orwell's 1984), or works that are in the public domain (Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol). they run the gamut from Grimms Fairy Tales and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche.

All of these eBooks are free to download and use in whatever way you see fit, as long as you don't make any changes to then and you don't charge anybody for using them. Read them yourselves, share them with friends, burn them to CD, print them and distribute them to your English Lit class, just go nuts with these selections. There is no sign-up required to download any of the titles, and if you've got a suggestion for additional books to publish, they're more than eager to hear from you. They've got a mailing list, so you can be notified when new volumes are added to their library.

Planet eBook is a free service. All titles are downloaded as PDF files, so you need Adobe Reader or any other tool that can open and read PDF files.

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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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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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