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Art takes inspiration and tools. You need to have the idea—I'm going to paint a picture of a sunset—and the tools to use to make it all happen—brushes, palettes, canvas, paints. Put them all together, add a little talent, and you're on the road to art. When you're working with graphics on your computer, you've got similar requirements.

Your inspiration may be the tech manual that you're writing, and you need to add a screenshot to it; you may be creating background for your next new game; or it could be any number of things. Now you've got to find the tools to use to make your dream come alive. PicPick is a box of graphical tools that may be just what you're looking for.

It's got a built-in screen capture utility that lets you grab whole screens or smaller regions of your display. It even supports dual-monitor systems. It has a full-featured image editor, so you can tweak your screenshots, or create new images as you need them. Tools like a color picker, on-screen rulers and protractors, and more let you manipulate your images like a pro.

PicPick Tools just sits in your System Tray until you need it, so it's not taking up valuable screen real estate. It doesn't require any installation, so it isn't leaving a bunch of extra DLLs strewn across your system, and no changes are made to the Registry.

PicPick tools is a free Windows application.

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Your computer is important to you, right? Whether it's for business or play, you want your system to be set up "just right." You've got the right apps; you've even chosen a desktop wallpaper design that suits your personality: a basket full of puppies, a snow-covered mountain, or maybe even a utilitarian solid black. The point is that in some ways your machine is an extension of your own ego, and what you're trying to accomplish with it.

Why stop here though? Take a look at the icons scattered across your desktop. Whether there are just a couple of them, or you've go 'em piled onto every available pixel, wouldn't it be nice to have some control over their appearance as well? To take a crack at this, give Iconoid a try.

Iconoid is a tool that helps you take control over your desktop icons. You can tweak the text and background colors of your icons and their text to make them easier to spot, or to blend in better with your wallpaper. For that matter, you can hide them all so that you can gaze longingly at your puppies or mountain.

Another great feature will come into play if you design web pages. If you have to change screen resolutions a lot, you know that it totally messes up the layout of your desktop icons. With Iconoid, you can save your layouts, so you don't need to spend the next half hour re-adjusting your desktop after you change resolutions.

Iconoid is available as a free download. The publisher calls this distribution model "sillyware' and asks that you send them "something silly." It runs on Windows systems, and should be compatible with Win98 and later.

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It's almost here: Halloween, the spookiest day of the year! If you and your little ghosts and goblins are trying to get into the mood, you'll want to check out these free Halloween printables. If coloring is your thing, how about some Halloween Printable Coloring Pages and Halloween Free Coloring Sheets? Choose from scary witches, spooky bats, and more. Maybe it's time to write your annual letter to The Great Pumpkin? Nothing could be better than some Halloween Letterhead. Or how about some Halloween Gift Tags? A Jack-o'-Lantern or haunted house may add just the right touch to your spooky gift.

Don't be afraid, though—these are all available for free, so you can download all you want. It's kind of like Trick-or-Treat-ing from your computer.

Did you ever notice that as we get older, the fonts they use in applications and web pages get smaller? As we progress along the inevitable continuum from "naked" eye to reading glasses to bifocals to magnifying glass, it gets to be more of a challenge to see what is being displayed on our monitors. Or maybe you're a graphics person. You're creating (or editing) the perfect image, and you really need to tweak it on a pixel-by-pixel basis.

Either way, you need to be able to pump up the size of the image you're seeing on-screen. But you don't want to just dial the whole image up to 1000%, because then you lose the context of what you're looking at. What you need is the onscreen version of that magnifying glass.

Magical Glass may be the solution you're looking for. Like with your regular magnifying glass, this "virtual" magnifying glass lets you zoom in on just the portion of the screen you're really interested in, but without totally losing the surrounding screen area. Use it to pump up the "fine print" at the bottom of the page, or drill down to the exact pixels you need to adjust in your image. And it doesn't get in your way: Magical Glass just sits there in the System Tray until you call it up with a hotkey.

Magical Glass is a Windows app. It's compatible with systems running Windows 2000 or later. They've also got a down-rev version that works with Win9x, ME, and NT.

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We're always looking for a better tool to make screenshots with. Most operating systems have the built-in ability to capture as an image the entire display of a system, or to grab just the active window. If you're looking for much more than that, you're pretty much on your own.

There are some tools that let you define a region to grab—click and drag crosshairs on your screen—and even let you save the results into different graphical formats, such as BMP, JPG, PDF, and more.

MWSnap can do all these and more. Unlike many tools, you can grab the other "stuff" that you see on your screen that is often left out of screenshots. You can grab a menu, or an individual on-screen control. If you're showing somebody how a program works, or demonstrating an error for a developer, this extra ability can be most helpful.

No complex installation is necessary—just drop the app where ever you want it, and don't worry about messing up your system with a bunch of extra DLLs or Registry entries.

MWSnap is a free download. It's a Windows application and runs on any Win32 platform.

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So what's the real difference between a GUI and a terminal or command prompt interface on your computer? Ease of use? Drag-and-drop file maintenance? Point-and-click convenience? Those are all good. I like the pretty pictures.

We've come to think of our applications and data as the icons that represent them. Whether it's the big blue "W" of Microsoft Word, or the globe-and-critter icon for Firefox, they've changed the way we relate to our computers. But maybe you'd like a little input on this topic. Maybe you have a better idea about how things ought to look.

IcoFX is a free icon editing tool that lets you create and edit icons for your Windows or Mac system. You can create original icons, or extract them from other files; you can even change the icons embedded inside of your Windows executables. Make icons out of images. Further personalize your blog or website with favicons. It supports all different sizes and has over three dozen effects you can apply.

IcoFX is a Windows application. It runs under XP or Vista.

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If you take a lot of digital photos, you know that sometimes you need to tweak them to get them "just right". Whether it's issues with lighting and color, poorly framed subject, or the dreaded red-eye, you know that you need a tool to help you clean up your images. You also know that if you want to buy a copy of Photoshop you may have to refinance your house.

If your graphical editing needs are primarily in dealing with photos like this, then you might want to take a look at LightBox Free.

It's a professional-level image editor that doesn't cost like a professional tool. You can resize your images, crop them (maybe cut your irritating brother-in-law out of the family photo), print them, and get rid of those dreaded red eyes.

LightBox Free is a Windows app, and runs under Windows 2000 or later. If you really like it, they also have a paid version with even more features.

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Back in the old days, nobody cared about what things looked like on computer screens—you had your choice of green text on a black background, or if you were really adventurous, you might have amber on a black background. Nowadays, everything's graphical: desktop applications, web pages, and more. Graphics are everything.

With text, you could describe what you saw on your screen in terms of characters and lines—maybe an area ten characters wide and three lines tall. Now, it's all pixels. Images, icons, on-screen widgets, web pages—everything has a size, and those sizes are important. Will this control fit on the screen? Will this picture fit on the page? There are a zillion things to consider.

Meazure is a cool tool that helps you wrap your head around all these graphic elements. You get on-screen rulers that allow you to measure all of the stuff you see on your display. In addition, you can grab screen captures for any piece of the screen you want. You can even measure to see whether what you've got on your screen will fit into common screen or video sizes.

How much would you expect to spend for all this functionality? You're right: it's free. Meazure is a Windows application. It runs under Windows 98 or later.

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How many image files do you have on your computer? Zillions? With various pieces of clipart, digital photos, and more, you've got a huge pile of GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and more all over your hard drive. They've probably all got just plain old generic file icons, making it a little challenging to figure out which file is which. It'd be nice if you could assign custom icons to your images.

Xentient Thumbnails is a tool that lets you do just that. Instead of every file looking just the same, it helps you to make thumbnail images of your graphics files. Now instead of a generic JPEG icon, the photo of your vacation in Yosemite has a thumbnail image of Half Dome, so you don't have to scratch your head, trying to figure out what in the world HPIM0418.JPG could be a picture of.

A free download, Xentient Thumbnails is a Windows application. It's at home on anything from Windows 98 up through Vista.

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How big a geek are you? While some folks strive for the latest and greatest, others are driven in the quest for the more obscure. (We once new a guy who balanced his checkbook in hex.) If you fall into this latter group, or you just like flashing LEDs, then you might want to take Binary Clock out for a spin.

Binary Clock is a fun little app that tells you what time it is via (simulated) little green flashing lights. Not only that, but it's all in binary. It takes the current time, 11:45:15, for example, and breaks out the binary equivalent of the hours, minutes, and seconds, giving you a result like :1011:101101:1111. With all the flashing lights and 1s and 0s, it's a veritable geek-fest.

While it's fun to amaze your friends, it also gives you a chance to bone-up on your binary numbers. After a bit of practice, you may find that it's as easy as 01-10-11!

Binary Clock is a free download for your Windows system.

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