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Did you ever wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and wonder "where do you suppose I could get a pad of six-column columnar ledger paper at this time of the night?" Okay, neither have I, but certainly there have been times when I did need some specialized paper, whether accounting paper like this, or graph paper for laying-out the new garden, or even a couple sheets of notebook paper for the kids to finish their homework. It's not always easy to run to the corner office supply store, and there's no guarantee they'll have what you're looking for anyway.

PrintablePaper.net boasts hundreds of different sizes, shapes, and configurations of paper for you to download and print for free. They've got graph paper (with both lines and dots), lined paper, music paper, accounting paper, and penmanship paper—that wide-ruled paper that you used when you were learning how to write. These papers are available in letter-sized, legal-sized, ledger-sized (11 x 17 inches), and even A4-sized for non-US users.

Free Printable Paper is, as the name suggests, free to download and print. You need Adobe Reader, or another application that can open PDF files.

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Need to do serious work, but you're trapped behind a firewall? In some corporate and other environments, security constraints necessitate locking down all inbound- and outbound traffic except for ports 80 and 443, the standard ports for HTTP and HTTPS traffic. If you need to use services like FTP, Telnet, or SSH to talk to a remote server, you're out of luck. What to do?

Web Console is one solution for this problem. Using only these allowed ports, you can now execute shell commands on your server, edit files using vi or Emacs, and all the other stuff you'd do if only you could access your server.

Installing Web Console on your server is pretty straightforward. It works on both dedicated servers and shared boxes. It's written in Perl, so your server is sure to support it. Once you're up and running, the web interface uses AJAX technology, so you are really interacting in real time.

Web Console will run on any web server that includes Perl.

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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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You're reading along in a document or web page and come across some numbers. You want to do a quickie calculation, but now you're stuck—do you start-up the ten-key sitting on your desk—you do still have a desktop calculator, right—or do you fire-up Excel? Neither of those is a particularly satisfying option. Wouldn't it be nice to have an on-screen calculator that would let you do that quick calculation without making a major production of it?

Calq is just such a tool. You can start Calq up when you need it, or add it to your start up items and call it up with a hotkey combination. Either way, you get a calculator that overlays the windows on your screen and lets you do calculations through the keyboard. It's so unobtrusive that once you're done using it, it even puts itself away—after several seconds of inactivity, it hides itself, just waiting for you to call it up again.

Calq is available for both Mac and Windows. The Macintosh version requires OS X version 10.4 or later. The Windows version wants XP or Vista.

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RapidoWrite is a cross-application text replacement tool. If you're constantly typing the same text into letters, forms, and so on, why not automate the process? Now instead of typing your whole address, just type "addr" or any other string of characters, and it will expand out to the text you've assigned to it. Use it for signatures, addresses, or even whole documents—it's up to you. It's easier and quicker for accessing regularly visited web pages than digging through lists of bookmarks.

To use the power of RapidoWrite, you just type your abbreviation and hit [Return], and that's it. It will automatically replace the abbreviation with your selected text, and you're on your way. It works with any application, so you don't have to use one tool with your word processor and another one with your web browser.

RapidoWrite is a tool for Macintosh users. It requires OS X version 10.4 or later. It will run on both PowerPC and Intel machines.

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Outlook does everything. It's email, it's collaboration, it's scheduling; heck, it's even a development platform. The bad part? It does all that stuff.

I've got a bunch of stuff I need to do. What I don't need is a tool that takes more attention than the tasks I'm trying to get done. Like going after a pesky fly with a thermonuclear device, sometimes Outlook and its ilk are just too much for the job at hand. All I want to do is to make a list of what I've got to do, remind me to do it, and let me cross it off the list when I'm done. Nothing more.

Doomi may be just the ticket here. It's just a simple "to-do" list manager. Not a lot of bells and whistles, you can create and edit tasks, set reminders, and archive the stuff that you've done. No learning curve. No layers of stuff to have to dig through. It's a tool that lets you get your work done while it stays out of the way. 'Nuff said.

Doomi runs on both Mac and Windows machines. It uses the Adobe AIR platform, which requires either OS X 10.4 or later, or Windows 2000 or better.

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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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Your computer should behave the way you want it to. You're going to be most efficient when things make sense and fit with the way you work, so why shouldn't you have it your way, as the burger place says.

FinderPop integrates with Finder to let you stand your Mac on its ear. You can easily add items to context menus, so that you can get where you need to go with minimal effort. Command-click the menu bar and you'll get a process menu that lets you see what your machine is up to, listing both user apps and even background processes. Want to quickly see what volumes you currently have mounted? Shift-click on the menu bar and you'll see which drives you're attached to. Life is a lot easier when you're calling the shots.

FinderPop is a Mac app and requires OS X 10.4 or later. It's distributed as a Universal Binary, so it's good for your PowerPC or Intel machine.

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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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