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There are bad people out there, and they're doing bad things. Sometimes it's something as nefarious as some nasty virus that's just waiting to hit your system. Other times, it's just unresponsive online vendors who want your money, but aren't necessarily too concerned about giving you what you paid for in return. So how do you know who the bad guys are?

Web of Trust (WOT) is an add-on for your web browser. The guys behind this tool spend a lot of time looking around on the web, finding out who can be trusted and who you'd rather stay away from. With WOT installed, you're forewarned about sites before you visit them.

Run a query in your favorite search engine, and when you look at the results, you'll see little icons that report on the trustworthiness and reliability of the sites in your results. Sites with an excellent reputation will probably be your best bet for a successful online experience; sites given a very poor reputation rating may not be where you want to go. You'll want to remember, of course, that your mileage may vary. You may have no problem with a site that has a low rating, or you may have a terrible time with a site that's rated at the tippy-top. Just remember that these ratings can serve as a jumping off point, so you'll increase the likelihood of coming out a winner.

WOT is available for both Firefox (version 1.5 or later) on all platforms, as well as Internet Explorer (version 6 or later on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista).

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If you need to move files from here to there, there are several ways to do that. Setting up an FTP server may be efficient, but it's certainly not the easiest way to get things going. Attaching files to an email message gets the job done, but once your attachments reach a size of around 1MB, it starts to get questionable about whether it's really going to get delivered to where you want it to go. There are several online solutions available as well. Add to that list GoAruna.

GoAruna touts itself as being the easiest way to share large files. You can use it directly from your web browser like many other services: enter the email address of your intended recipient, choose a file from your local machine, click the button, and it'll be uploaded to their servers and your target will get a unique URL that lets them download the file.

This service goes a step beyond that, in that it also allows your to upload files to be stored on their servers. Now instead of each file transfer being just a one-off transaction, you can put your files up there and share a password that lets them download directly. There's a Java-powered desktop app you can use to just drag-and-drop files to the server, as well as widgets and plugins for your Firefox web browser, your iGoogle homepage, and more. They claim to give you the ability to encrypt your files before you upload them, but frankly their site and app are pretty light on information, so we couldn't figure out just how to do that. Hopefully their documentation will improve over time.

GoAruna is a free service. The desktop app requires that your system have a recent Java installation. The browser interface works with most recent Web browsers.

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Where would we be without email? While we could probably go for quite a while without a telephone, we probably wouldn't last more than a couple of hours without email. While email itself is pretty simple stuff, getting it to work right can be more of a challenge.

There are lots of email clients out there that do lots of things, but as you know, when you add layers of functionality to any application, you're adding layers of complexity to it as well. By the time you format your message with all the pretty fonts and pictures, you can end up with a big message to send. This also means that the tool itself is pretty big and complicated. Claws is not such a tool.

What it is is a no-nonsense email client. You can't send HTML-formatted messages; you can't use it as a full-featured PIM. What you can do is use it for your POP or IMAP mail accounts—as many as you want to throw at it—as well as accessing your local mbox file. You can even create send-only accounts that let you access an SMTP server to push mail out into the world without receiving anything back. Plugins are also available to add more functionality to Claws Mail.

Claws Mail is a free app. It's available for a bunch of different Linux flavors, as well as Windows and Macintosh users.

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Email is probably the biggest use of the Internet. Just think about the number of messages you send—or the amount of SPAM you receive—in a given day, and you'll realize what a big deal it is. And it's used for more than just communicating with Nigerian princes. We've all sent ourselves an email to remind us of a "to do" item that we need to take care of. And then there's file transfer. It's easy to email Mom a photo from your last vacation, or to send a copy of the Johnson Project report to a co-worker.

While it's easy to use email for file transfer purposes, maybe it isn't the most efficient way to handle this task. After all, you've got to create the email, make a little introductory small talk, tell your recipient that you're sending them something, attach the file, etc., etc. When you send it, your email client often will save a local copy of the message, plus a copy of that attachment. Now not only is it taking extra time, but it's eating up storage space as well.

Filemailer is a dedicated use-email-to-transfer-files tool. All you have to do is enter the info for your recipient and then just drag the file you want to send over their name and click the Send button. No muss, no fuss—your file is just sent, with no copy generated in your Sent box or any of that foolishness. It's a pretty simple, no-nonesense way to deal with this issue.

Filemailer is a Mac application. You'll need to be running OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later to use it.

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There's a lot of cool web server-based software out there. Unfortunately, it takes a web server to run it. You may not want to spend the time and effort to set up a server, but it'd be nice to use that new tool. What you need is a true zero-configuration server setup. You might want to check out Server2Go.

Built as a full-featured web server, Server2Go can be run from read-only media. That means rather than having to go through all the hassle of installation and configuration, all you need to do is pop-in a CD-ROM or USB drive, and you've got an instant server. And this isn't some cut-down version either. Based on Apache, it supports PHP, MySQL, Perl, and more. You're probably not going to want to build your whole website on this platform, although if you did you'd certainly not have to worry about somebody hacking in and messing with your configuration.

Server2Go is for Windows systems, and runs under just about anything from Win98 through Vista. They've also got a Mac version under development (x86 only—no PowerPC).

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No matter how much the purveyors of shrink-wrapped software would have you believe it, there really is no reason to have to spend a small—or not so small—fortune on applications to run on your computer. That's not to say that the fine folks at Microsoft and all the other big name development shops don't put out some pretty cool tools, but an awful lot of what you want to do can be done with apps that don't cost you a dime.

Not so much an application, MacLibre is sort of a "greatest hits" collection of free software for your Macintosh. Now instead of running all over the place grabbing individual apps, you can download the whole pile all at once.

MacLibre includes productivity tools like NeoOffice (a Mac-ized version of OpenOffice), Internet tools and browsers, sound and graphics editors (Audacity and GIMP), and a bunch of utility apps as well. You could find yourself with a pretty well equipped system for the cost of only a few minutes worth of downloading.

MacLibre is distributed as a Universal Binary. That means that it'll run on both PowerPC and Intel Macs; you should be able to use it on systems that are running Panther (OS X 10.3) or later.

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There are lots of ways to remind yourself of important appointments and "to do" items. You can use expensive leather-bound planners; you can set up elaborate systems with Outlook; or maybe even tie a string around your finger. Or you can use your web browser.

ReminderFox is an add-on for the Firefox browser. Like most other extensions for your favorite web browser, it's easy to install this tool. Once you're set up, you'll see a little "bow" added to Firefox's status bar (maybe it's a string to tie around your finger?). Move your mouse over it, and you'll get a tooltip-style listing of reminders and to do items you've got scheduled. Click on it, and you can add or edit new items. It supports recurring or single-time events, and lets you set alarms to remind you of what you need to be doing. You can add extensive notes to your entries, so you don't have to keep the "when" in ReminderFox, while the "what" lives somewhere else.

ReminderFox works with virtually any version of Firefox, so it's equally at home on Linux, Mac, or Windows systems. It's also compatible with many other Mozilla-based apps like Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and Sunbird.

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Are your kids eager to get online? Are you scared to death of what they may find there? It's time to take a look at a kid-friendly browser. KIDO'Z may be what you have in mind.

It's got a simple user interface. In fact, you don't even have to be able to read to use it. That can help avoid frustration with your younger geeks-in-training. It doesn't support scripting and lets you access only approved sites, which helps you to better control just what your little ones are exposed to.

Even with these limitations, they'll be able to access pre-screened games, videos, and other age- and content-appropriate content, all with a single click, with new titles being added all the time.

KIDO'Z runs under Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It requires the Adobe Air application platform.

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If you are responsible for a website with more than just a couple of pages, and more than one author, then you know what a pain administering that site can be. Trying to keep everything in sync can be a never-ending battle, and more often than not, one that you can't possibly win. This is why you may need a content management system.

A CMS helps keep track of who's who and what's what on your site, so you can create the content without having to keep track of what's happening with it afterwards. Textpattern is a tool that you may want to take a look at to help you with this.

You simply type new content into the edit window, without having to worry about the proper markup syntax. When you're ready to publish, Textpattern does the heavy lifting, formatting your text in valid XHTML. You and your contributors can focus on content, rather than the minutia of formatting. It supports stylesheets and makes it easy to adjust the look and behavior of your pages.

Textpattern works best when installed on an Apache web server. It requires PHP ver. 4.3 or later, and MySQL 3.23+.

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So you just got back from your vacation, or that big wedding, or some other event that left you with a digital camera full of new photos. You can't wait to share them with everyone, but now the real work begins. Do you send them as attachments and totally overwhelm everybody's email programs? Or do you go in and start editing, creating lower-resolution versions of all those images. Neither option is terribly appealing.

How about just uploading them to Memeo Share? It's an online service that lets you post up to 1GB of photos totally free. Getting started is easy—all you need is an email address and a password. Install the software on your machine, create a "sharing circle" to share your pictures, and you're good to go. You can upload pictures and videos, so for your friends, it'll almost be like they were there with you, but without the mosquito bites or having to listen to Uncle Ralph's stories.

Memeo Share is a free online service. Uploading content requires that you install a client app on your Windows or Mac computer.

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