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For much of the modern world, all that stands between you and utter disaster is a password. Lots of online accounts depend on an email address as a user name, so if somebody's after your stuff, they're halfway there just by virtue of knowing that address. That means that choosing a good password is even more important.

The best password is the password that has the least meaning in the real world. Your pet's name, dictionary words, the word "password"? Not such good choices. Passwords that include both upper- and lower-case alphabetic characters, numbers, and even punctuation marks are better. And you get bonus points for making them extra long as well. So how do you know if your password is a good one?

Check out The Password Meter. This free online service takes a look at your password and lets you know how it measures up. Sure, there are no "password police" out there to really say that you've made good choices or bad, but these guys will point out places where you could improve things (no repeated characters) and where you've made good choices (including at least three of the four character types listed above). One drawback to this tool is that it caps you at a max of 16 characters for passwords that it tests. The security of your passwords will increase dramatically as the number of characters increases.

If you're a little squeamish about checking real passwords on a non-secure site like this, you can download the tool and run it on your local system. The heavy lifting and analysis is done by a chunk of JavaScript, so it's not really talking to the server.

The Password Meter is a free service. If you've got a browser and care about security, you should be good to go.

Download The Password Meter

When you write in Word, OpenOffice Writer, or any other high-powered word processor, you've got built-in spell checking, grammar checking, and more. But any more, lots of your writing doesn't take place in one of these desktop apps. Writing blog posts, creating Tweets in Twitter, and lots of other places have you composing directly in your web browser, where these types of tools aren't necessarily available to you.

You can add the ability to check spelling, grammar, and usage with After The Deadline. This tool is available as an Add-on for Firefox. Click in a text field on your online form, hit the After The Deadline hotkey, and it'll take a look a things and let you know what it thinks might need attention, highlighting spelling errors in red, problems with grammar in green, and even style suggestions in blue.

And if you don't happen to have Firefox, they've made the core functionality of this tool available as a bookmarklet that you can use with Safari and Internet Explorer.

After The Deadline is free for personal use. All you'll need to use it is a recent copy of Firefox and a dedication to making (and fixing) spelling errors.

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Back in the day there were web browsers. You used them to visit sites and, umm, browse the web. Then came Firefox. Sure, you can still use it to look at web pages, but with the advent of Add-ons, now you can do all kinds of extra stuff, from analyzing the structure of web pages to setting-up to-do lists, and more.

FireFTP is a full-blown FTP client that comes as a Firefox Add-on. Once you go through the install process, you've got a fully functioning FTP tool to use for file transfers to- and from your system. It supports both plain vanilla FTP transfers, as well as encrypted SFTP uploads and downloads. Even though the browser and Add-on are platform independent, you will need to go through some extra machinations to get SFTP to work on your Mac or Linux system. It's got enough options to let you customize its behavior in ways that make the most sense to how you work, including saving login info, default directories, and such.

FireFTP is a free download. Since it's a Firefox Add-on, you'll need the Firefox web browser (version 3 or later) to use it.

Download FireFTP

There's no doubt that Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the wave of the future for web page layout and formatting. Gone are the days when everything was a table and <FONT> tags ruled the day. Stylesheets give you much greater flexibility and accuracy in your text formatting and page layout. Unfortunately it's not always easy to figure out just which commands to use to get the job done.

Simple CSS tries to help make the whole stylesheet thing easier. A desktop app, you can use a series of dropdown lists to build your style rules. It's almost always easier to pick stuff from a list that to pull them up from memory, and this seems to be no exception. Text formatting, page layout, borders, and more are available to you. Use it to create new stylesheets, or import existing ones and use it to tweak them and get them just right.

Available in both Windows and Mac versions, Simple CSS is a free download. The Windows version runs under Win98 and later; for Mac it's a Universal Binary and runs under OS X and should do fine with Tiger (10.4).

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As you browse the web, you're (hopefully) going to run across things that interest you. Some stuff, like news stories, are read-once encounters; you look at it, read and understand, and go on your way. Other stuff you may want to revisit. If you're looking at a page that's really important to you, then you'll want to bookmark it. Use your browser, or tag it for del.icio.us, and you'll always be able to come back to it. And then there's the stuff in between.

Quiet Read lets you bookmark pages on a more temporary basis. When you've seen content you want to come back to, but you don't need to remember it forever, all you need to do is drag it to the menubar. The Quiet Read icon sits there unobtrusively waiting for you to drag and drop the link. When you've got time to revisit the site, just click the icon, and you'll get a list of the pages you've saved. Double-click the link, and you're back. It's easy to delete links as well, so you don't have to worry about having dozens—or hundreds—of "it seemed important at the time" entries, like with your regular bookmarks.

Quiet Read is a free download for your Mac. You'll need to be running OS X and update to Snow Leopard (10.6) to use it.

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Lots of systems now ship with a webcam as standard equipment. It's pretty handy to be able to video conference from the convenience of your desktop. For that matter, there are lots of uses for that technology. Unfortunately, if you're using more than one of them at a time, you may be out of luck as far as your camera is concerned.

ManyCam lets you use your webcam with multiple applications at the same time. Whether you're chatting or streaming live, your single camera handles it all. In addition, ManyCam includes several fun features you can use, including adding text, including local date and time, to your video feed, and background effects. It's almost like having your own green screen backgrounds, but without all that tedious painting.

ManyCam is a free download. It's available for Windows (requires Win2k or later) and Mac (OS X 10.5+, Intel machines only).

Download ManyCam

If you run a blog or have a website, you know all about FTP—File Transfer Protocol. These three simple letters can mean several different things: the language that computers use when talking to one another about moving files around; the tool you use to do that moving; and even as a verb, in describing what you're doing, as in "I'm going to FTP those files up to the server." The use of FTP is almost as complicated as talking about it.

If you FTP from the command prompt, then you're probably already confused. Between all the PUTs and the GETs, it's a wonder anything gets done. A graphical FTP tool can be a real time saver, as well as doing wonders for your sanity.

Classic FTP is a pretty straightforward GUI FTP client. It features drag-and-drop uploads and downloads between your local machine and the server. Add default local and remote directories, and you'll save even more time, since you don't have to manually reposition yourself every time you connect.

Classic FTP is a free download. It's available for Windows (Win 2000 and later), PocketPC, and Macs running OS X (10.2+).

Download Classic FTP

If you're prowling the web looking for images, audio files, or other tasty downloadable stuff, you know that finding a page you're interested in can be a mixed blessing. Sure, there's all those files you were looking for, but it also means that you have to download them, probably one at a time. That's going to take you all afternoon.

DownThemAll is an add-on for Firefox that lets you grab all the links or all the images on a web page. Just fire it up and you get a list of links on your page. Select the links you're interested in—maybe thumbnail images, maybe MP3 files—and download those items pronto! As a smart downloader, it lets you build filters to grab just the files you're looking for. It's easy to rename them as they're downloaded as well, so you can make sense out of that pile of files you just grabbed. It can even auto-increment numbered files so that you won't have to worry about downloading file "x" only to have it overwritten by file "y". And it splits files into multiple chunks as they're downloaded, so the process all goes much faster; in addition, you can interrupt and resume your downloads with no problem.

DownThemAll is a free Firefox extension. It should run on version 3 or later of Firefox.

Download DownThemAll

There are two types of people in the world: those who break the world down into two types of people and those who don't. Okay, old joke, right? But seriously, there are a lots of ways in which people can be broken down into two different groups based on their attitudes or behaviors. Take news feeds, for example. For some folks, it's all fun and games: keeping track of the comings and goings of friends, new music and video releases, and other general recreational stuff. For others, it's strictly business: vendors to watch, competitors to track, that soft of thing. This latter group usually has a whole bunch of stuff to try to keep track of; they need a tool that's as serious about it all as they are.

BlogBridge is an industrial-strength blog and newsfeeds aggregator. It supports all popular feed formats, and lets you keep track of what you've read and what's still waiting for you. With installs on multiple machines, you can keep your life synchronized between work, home, and even on the road. It's got heavy-duty search tools that let you find what you need fast, too.

BlogBridge is a free download. It's a Java app, so it'll run on systems that have the appropriate runtime installed, including many flavors of Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

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Everybody agrees that when it comes to passwords, bigger is better. After all, one of the best ways to frustrate a brute-force attack is to increase geometrically the number of combinations of characters that are necessary. Add to this all the other safeguards that are included in any robust password protection scheme—upper- and lower case alphabetic characters, numbers, and a few punctuation marks, no dictionary words, etc.—and you've gone a long way toward keeping your accounts secure. The flip side of that, of course, is the impossibility of remembering dozens of unique 40-character passwords for all of your financial- and other accounts.

LastPass is an online password manager. All you need to remember is your password to get into LastPass, and everything else can be as complicated—and safe—as you want. Along with passwords, it also remembers all that other fill-in-the-blank stuff you need to speed-up the process of entering your information into web forms: name, address, credit card numbers, the whole thing.

It's available as a desktop app for Windows, or as a plugin for your Windows, Mac, or Linux web browser.

Download LastPass