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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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If you're like me, you can't sit down to think without a legal pad in front of you. Somehow it's always easier for me to grasp a situation when I can draw a picture of it. You get your keywords out there, maybe add a few arrows to indicate relationships between nodes, that sort of thing. The hard part of this paper-based thinking, though, is that it's not so easy to change and refine your thoughts without extensive use of a pencil eraser (with the attendant holes rubbed in the paper), or of having to go through several iterations of your plan, starting from scratch each time.

View Your Mind may be the tool to use for these types of situations. Not just a drawing tool, it actually helps you to organize your thoughts and reorder them as you work through the process. Along with being able to order and arrange nodes, the note editor allows you to annotate them, so your main drawing doesn't get cluttered with the details.

View Your Mind is available for free; grab it for OS X as an image (.dmg) or Linux as an .rpm package.

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Want a free computer? Don't we all. We can't promise you that, but here's the next best thing: Userful (Free 2-User Edition).

If you've got two monitors on your machine (or can add a second one via a dual-head video card), you can treat your one box like it's two. Install Userful (Free 2-User Edition), add a USB keyboard and mouse, and it's like you've got two separate systems. Still busy on the computer, but the kids need it for homework (or online chatting)? Now you both work at the same time.

Userful (Free 2-User Edition) is a Linux app and runs on many distros that use the 2.6 kernel (check the website for the official list), and requires a Pentium III-class x86 machine running at 450MHz or better. Download the LiveCD version and give it a try on your Windows system as well.

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It's not a complicated task: arrange this list in alphabetical order. It's repetitive, it's clearly defined, it should be easy to do. Computers like to do these types of things, and there are plenty of tools that allow you to do so. Unfortunately, the time you most need this functionality may be the time when it's not available to you. Sure, you can use Word or some other high-powered tool to sort a list or lines of text, but two of the places that you may spend a good deal of your life—Notepad for Windows users, and TextEdit on your Mac—don't have any provision for this type of organizing.

The Alphabetizer is a free online service that alphabetizes your list. Enter your data, either one item per line, or choose a delimiter if you've got a list of terms with commas between them. You can choose whether or not to ignore case, so that "a" and "A" will both float to the top. If you want to, you can force your results to all lower case, or you can capitalize the initial letter. Strip HTML markup from your text so that you're not sorting a bunch of tags. Reverse the order to sort from "z" to "a". You can even number or letter your results.

The Alphabetizer is a free online service. It should be compatible with most modern web browsers, so it'll run on just about any platform.

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The Portable Document Format (pdf) is the cross-platform standard for document distribution. Allowing the combining of formatted text and images, it's the perfect package to get the word out to whoever you need to communicate with. Unfortunately, the official tool to manipulate files in this proprietary format, Adobe Acrobat, isn't cheap. It would be nice to be able to tweak your pdf files without emptying your wallet.

Pdftk is a Swiss army knife for manipulating pdf files, and best of all, it's free. It's a command line utility, so it's not the prettiest thing in the world, but if you're comfortable opening a terminal window/DOS box, you can accomplish a lot with only a couple of keystrokes. You can, for example, merge multiple documents into one file, break a single pdf document into multiple documents, rotate a page, or even add a password.

Pdftk is available with installers for Windows, OS X, Linux, and other UNIX and UNIX-like systems.

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Glide is pretty close to an entire operating system's worth of applications and tools, available online. With nothing to download or install, just about anybody with a modern web browser can take advantage of its capabilities.

Along with email, instant messaging, and a calendar app, Glide also has tools for website creation, a presentation tool (like PowerPoint), a text editor, photo editor tool, and a bunch more. There are applications that support sharing media, whether it be photos, music, videos, or documents. There is also a spreadsheet app that runs in conjunction with the Glide Sync tool.

You can also use Glide's Sync tool synchronize files living on multiple machines. This tool must be downloaded and installed and requires Windows 2000 or later, or Mac OS X 10.4+, or Linux (kernel 2.6).

With Glide Mobile, you can harness the power of Glide through your web-enabled phone or PDA. The publishers recommend it as the perfect accompaniment for the iPhone.

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Thinking Rock is a planning tool that follows the "GTD" (getting things done) methodology. Basically, the thought is that if you get all the bits and pieces down somewhere in black and white, you don't have to waste your mental bandwidth keeping track of what you have left to do. Let the tool keep track of the "stuff", and you can actually work.

By organizing your thoughts into actions, projects, information, and future possibilities, Thinking Rock makes it easier for you to review and execute the tasks you need to perform, or to delegate those tasks to other people.

Thinking Rock is small enough that you can install it on a USB thumb drive and take it with you. Since it's a Java app, it can run on both Windows and Mac systems, making it even easier to bring it along.

Thinking Rock is a Java app and will run on just about anything that supports the JRE version 1.5.0 or later, including Linux (Fedora 4 or equivalent), Mac OS X 10.4+, or Windows XP or Vista.

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Computers have added a whole new dimension to teaching. The abilities to drill for mastery of content, provide instant feedback, and work interactively between students are just a few of the opportunities available with computers. There is a potential downside as well.

Assuming that "no good deed will go unpunished", having students working on computers adds a whole layer of administrative attention that must be brought to bear. You don't need much tech support with a paper and pencil, but computer systems aren't so easy.

iTALC, the tool that provides Intelligent Teaching and Learning with Computers, can help make this part easier. Its ability to control machines remotely means that teacher can "look over the shoulders" of students, to examine their work and help coach their efforts. iTALC can also flip that around, putting the teacher's screen in front of each student at their remote workstations, making it an ideal platform for demonstrations. This functionality is not limited to a shared subnet, so remote systems can be included as well, great for students who are at home rather than school.

It can also lock workstations, so that students are paying attention to instruction, rather than being distracted by their systems. And at the end of the day, teachers can power-off an entire lab full of computers, saving lots of time.

iTALC is a free download, and runs under both Linux and Windows (Win2k or better).

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