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How much of your hard drive space is taken up with duplicate files? Sure, they were all important when you created them, but now you've got three identical copies of that report you created, and you don't even know where they all are. Is that really the kind of clutter you need?

There are several tools out there that will help you to discover duplicates on your system, but Duplicate Files Searcher goes one better. Not only does it work on your local hard drive, but you can also use it to check for duplicates on removable media like CDs, DVDs, and even USB drives. In addition, you can also search mounted network drives, which can help you find stuff you've left on your network share as well.

Duplicate Files Searcher does a byte-by-byte compare of your files, so you know that you're identifying actual duplicates, and not just documents with the same name and different content. You don't want to clobber all your incremental backups, after all.

Duplicate Files Searcher is a Java app, so it'll run on just about anything.

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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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How much stuff do you collect? No, not the dust bunnies under the couch—we're talking real collections here. Stamps. Coins. Baseball cards. How about CDs? Movies? I'll bet you can come up with a sizable list…or lists, if you have to manage a separate list of each collection.

Data Crow lets you manage everything through one tool. Designed to help you manage your stuff, it lets you enter a closet full of goodies. To help make things easier on you, it's smart about the data you're entering. Keeping track of a list of books? It can use Amazon to help flesh-out that list—give it the title, and you'll get back the publication date, author, cover art, all that good stuff. You'll get similar help with music and movies, as well as software. Data Crow will also look a the meta data that your music files and image files carry with them, so you won't have to re-enter all that. Tweak the UI so that you can enter things the way that makes sense to you.

Features include auto-numbering, automated backup, and reporting. A quick and easy loan management system helps you remember why you can't find your favorite Starland Vocal Band album: you loaned it to your brother-in-law.

Data Crow is a Java app, so it should run on most any machine that has a current Java runtime. For Windows users, there is a regular installer.

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How do you spend your time? By the end of the day, we've been so many places and done so many things, it's hard to reconstruct exactly what happened. And what about the little tasks that don't take any time themselves, but add up to several hours by the end of the day or week?

Sure, you can keep track of what tools you've used and which applications you've run, but pretty quickly it becomes clear that the overhead involved in breaking your time down can easily grow into a big task itself, which doesn't really benefit anybody.

With RescueTime, you install a "dohickey" on your system (their words, not ours). Data is store remotely, so you won't take up all of your hard drive space keeping track of how you use your hard drive space. Tell it which applications you want to keep track of, which websites you're interested in, or even which categories of work you want to track. It then keeps track of how much time you spend with a particular application active on your desktop, or how long you spend on those websites. You can track where you've been, or how how much time you've spent surfing the web. Want to spend less time on email? Set a goal—maybe an hour a day—and let RescueTime tell you whether you've achieved that goal.

RescueTime is still in Beta, so there may be a few rough edges. The up-side is that as an early adopter, your feedback can help make this an even better tool.

RescueTime is available for Windows, Mac, and even Linux, and requires an active Internet connection.

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Work is a noble thing. It helps give meaning to our lives. It keeps us occupied and engaged. Oh, yeah, it pays the bills, too.

No matter what other benefits may accrue to us through work, that paycheck is a strong motivator, and a reward for a job well done. Some folks work on salary, or are paid by the project, so everybody agrees ahead of time what will be in the pay envelope. With hourly folks, that's not true.

Whether you work on an hourly basis, or simply want to track your time as it's split between multiple projects, it's important to keep track of how many hours you work, and when those hours are. Whether you track your hours with an electromechanical time clock, a pad of paper on your desk, or some other form, at some point those lists of hours have to be summarized, and the hours turned into dollars.

PrintableTimesheets.net offers more than 40 employee time sheet templates that you can download and print. Categories include weekly, bi-weekly, semimonthly, and timesheets with overtime calculation. These PDF files allow you to standardize your data collection, and make it easy for the payroll folks to do their job. Everybody likes it when payroll goes easier.

Customizable versions, which perform the actual calculations, are also available for a nominal charge. These are compatible with Excel, Google Docs, and most other spreadsheet apps.

PrintableTimesheets are compatible with most systems that support PDF files and spreadsheets.

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There's always a need for more computer programmers out there, but unfortunately not everybody's thrilled at the prospect of keeping track of semicolons and curly-braces. With this in mind, the folks at Carnegie Mellon University created Alice.

Alice is a development environment that allows for error-proof programming. Using a drag-and-drop interface, users write code by dragging onscreen tiles that fit together into programs. As the result of fitting these pieces together, students actually create 3D animations. While interesting in their own right, these animations allow immediate feedback to the user, showing how re-ordering a series of tiles (instructions) impacts the behavior of the resulting program.

While users think they're creating animations and games, they are also seeing how languages like Java and C++ work, since the tiles correspond to statements in those types of high level programming languages. They claim that upwards of 10% of all computer science programs in American colleges use Alice in their curriculum.

Alice is a free download, and is available for Windows (Win2k or later), Mac (OS X 10.3+), and Linux.

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Collaboration can be a real challenge, especially if your team is scattered around the office or the world. Keeping in touch with everybody can be a challenge, and running a handful of apps just to stay in contact can quickly exhaust your screen space, to say nothing of your system resources.

Spicebird is a collaboration tool that helps people work smarter together. It integrates all the tools necessary to make sure that everybody's on the same page: calendar, tasks, contacts, email, and chat are all represented. Built on top of Mozilla's Thunderbird (email), Sunbird (calendar), and SamePlace (chat) platforms, you have access to all these tools in a single application.

Individual tools are accessed via applets that sit on the desktop. You can choose which applets to activate, and customize their content, adding, for example, your favorite news feeds to the RSS applet.

Each of the individual tools boasts the standard functionality you would expect: the calendar allows you daily, weekly, or monthly views, for example. The email tool will examine incoming messages and if it spots time information, it will ask you whether you want to schedule an event that corresponds with that time. The email and chat tools let you know in real time whether your contacts are online, making it easier to ping them right now if you need to communicate with them.

Spicebird is a free download, and is available for Windows and Linux.

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How can you possibly keep track of all the "stuff" you've got to do? There are lots of organizers and calendaring tools out there, to be sure. Even then, it's not always easy to stay on top of things. Sure, if you're at your computer, an Outlook-generated reminder is fine, but what if you're using a different machine? An emailed reminder may suffice. Need more flexibility than that?

Remember The Milk is a free online service that allows you to easily create reminders, but it comes with more. Along with pop-up and emailed reminders, you can have it send reminders to your favorite IM client. Or even send SMS text messages to your phone. Now you'll be on top of your schedule no mater where you are or what you're doing.

Along with the basic functionality, Remember The Milk supports a bunch of plug-ins. Use the iGoogle Gadget to manage your life from your homepage, use the mobile version on your iPhone, or even do it all offline with the Google Gears browser plug-in.

Remember The Milk is an online service. You should be able to use it with most any modern web browser.

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Are you responsible for the care and feeding of a large website or an online application? Given the speed with which everything on the Web changes, it can be a constant headache to plan, implement, and then test changes and updates to your site. We've found a tool that may help you to at least get through the testing phase easier.

Watir (pronounced like water) is a Ruby library that helps to build test suites for your online applications. Watir (Web App Testing in Ruby) is designed to interact with browsers the same ways that human users do: click on buttons, fill-in forms, follow links, and all the other types of interactions that you need to use to really test the stability and performance of your complex online apps.

Not a keystroke recorder, Watir allows you to really get in there and test the logic and results from working through your complex site or complicated online app. You're programming in Ruby here, so it's going to be helpful if you have experience in the language, or at least a couple of good references to work with.

Watir is available for Windows and Internet Explorer. There are also ports for Firefox (on Windows, Mac, Linux) and Safari running under OS X.

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Sometimes thinking is just too hard. When you look at any task or project, there can be so darn many considerations to keep track of: little pieces, big picture, dates and deadlines. It's a wonder you can ever get anything done.

Mind mapping is a technique where you dump all that "stuff" in your head onto a piece of paper. By grouping related thoughts and concepts, drawing arrows and boxes to show relationships and timing, eventually you can bring some sort of order to all those bits and pieces.

WiseMaps allows you to do all this paperwork on your computer. Not only does that make it easier to arrange and rearrange your thoughts as you clarify what's going on, but you can also share your mind map with others. WiseMaps uses SVG and VML to allow you to embed your mind map in web pages, either for your own review, or so that you can show others what you are really talking about.

WiseMaps is a free online service. It requires that users be using IE 6 (Windows), Firefox 1.5 (Win, Mac, Linux), or Safari ver. 3 (Windows, Mac).

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