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It's just a fact of life that if you spend enough time working with a computer, you're going to need to do a screen capture. Whether something's gone sideways with your system and you're looking for help from Tech Support, or you want to document your work with a picture of what it looks like onscreen, that screenshot is going to be a big help to you.

On your Mac, it's easy to grab a screenshot, but on your Windows box, it's always a bit of a kludge. It's easy to save the image to your clipboard, but then you have to open a graphics program to paste the image into a file, and then save it to your desktop. Kind of a mess. Dedicated tools can make the whole process much more efficient.

ScreenHunter is a free tool that lets you capture what you see on your monitor. Grab the whole screen, the active window, or just a rectangular selection. Save it directly into an image file, cutting-out all the foolishness of opening an additional application. And it stays out of your way, sitting as an icon in your System Tray. Or to make things really easy, you can have it start up every time your boot Windows.

ScreenHunter is a free Windows application. It should run under Win 98/NT and later.

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Need to draw a simple flowchart? How about a diagram of your network setup? Who answers to whom in your organization? An org chart spells it all out.

You can create these diagrams on the back of an envelope or the front of a legal pad. Of course when you need to make a few adjustments to it–add a new server, hire a new programmer–your chart is outdated and you need to go back and start from scratch to rebuild it. Or you can re-open and re-edit the diagram you created with DiagramDesigner.

DiagramDesigner is a free tool you can use to create simple diagrams. Along with palettes of the most-commonly-used drawing objects, it includes a spellcheck module. You can plot mathematical equations as well. Import images in any number of formats, and export your handiwork in just as many formats, making it easy to include diagrams in your web site or word processing document.

DiagramDesigner is a free download. It's an open-source Windows app and runs under Windows 98 and later.

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As remarkable as digital photography is, it's far from perfect. Sure, you can take a photo, look at it, and re-take it if you want, but even after multiple tries you aren't necessarily going to have the perfect shot. The nice thing there is that with digital photos, you can edit them on your computer. That's a lot easier than editing old-fashioned film-in-a-camera photos, to be sure.

PhotoViz is a tool you can use to tweak your digital photos. There are a bunch of options you can choose to automatically adjust colors, or manually crop, rotate, or apply filters to your images. It can also convert your images and optimize file sizes and formats to post your handiwork on the web. And for the truly adventurous, it also incorporates technology that lets you embed text within your images.

PhotoViz is a Windows app. It runs under Win 98 or later.

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There are lots of drawing programs out there. If your graphical needs run to something for the kids to play with, or the occasional sketch you need to run to the hardware store with, then your operating system's default image editor may be just fine. If you plan to appeal to a wider—and perhaps more professional—audience, you may want to upgrade from this. If your illustrations require more precision, you might use a tool like Visio to draw illustrations of process flow or the next revision of the corporate organization chart. You might also want to go take out a loan to afford it.

Dia is a tool which, like Visio, is used to draw structured diagrams. Network layouts, flowcharts, etc., are right up its alley. It's got all the standard shapes you might need, and they're fully customizable in terms of color, size, aspect ratio, and all. Draw connecting lines between shapes and anchor them, so that as you drag shapes around the workspace, your connections go with them. Add text to the workspace to help explain what's going on, you start to believe that is picture really is worth at least a thousand words.

Dia is a free download. It's available for Ubuntu and openSUSE Linux, as well as Windows (Win2k or later).

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AutoCAD is an awesome product. The stuff you can do with it is unreal. The price is out of this world. It would be nice if you could do all that stuff without all those dollars. Well, as luck would have it, you can almost get there: most of the features with none of the cost.

DoubleCAD XT is a free application that functionally is very close to AutoCAD LT. Not only can you open and view .DWG files, but you can edit them as well. It comes with a full complement of drawing tools: line, arc, and circle, multiline, and bezier curves and more. Yet at the same time, it has a much smaller footprint than the high priced spread.

So what's their angle? Well, the publisher wants you to fall in love with it and ultimately upgrade to the paid "Pro" version, of course. But you may find that this version does everything you want. It's up to you.

DoubleCAD XT is a free Windows application. It runs under Win XP or Vista.

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Kids and computers go together like peas and carrots. Whether it's because they're all closet geeks, or they just like getting in Mom and Dad's way, they're drawn to our machines. For them, typing a letter or writing a few lines of code holds no interest at all—mostly they like to draw pictures. Now I suppose you could turn them loose with Photoshop and let them figure out layers and masks and all that good stuff (when they've got that all figured out, they can explain them to you), but in all likelihood, that's not going to be what interests them. If you could show them something designed a little more for them, they just might be happy and let you get back to writing that report you need for tomorrow's meeting.

Drawing For Children is an app that your little ones can go nuts with. Choose a paint brush and do some free-form drawing. Add a couple of pre-fab shapes, maybe some text or a piece of clipart, and your little Picasso is good to go. Once they're up to speed, maybe they can give Photoshop another try.

Drawing For Children is a free Windows application. It'll run on anything from Win95 up through Vista.

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Origami has always been intriguing to me. I could never make anything more complicated than the tried-and-true "cootie catcher" from the Third Grade, but that didn't stop me from admiring the work of others. I've never quite figured out what the problem is, since I've always enjoyed the "what will this shape look like when it is folded together?" tests. Maybe it's a lack of clear instructions on how to get from start to finish. Well now, here's a site with clear instructions.

HowPack features patterns for making various containers. Using their patterns, some heavy paper- or card stock, scissors, and maybe a bit of glue or tape, you can create all sorts of different containers. They run the gamut from a simple open-ended sleeve—think of a box with four sides but no top or bottom—up through milk cartons (pointed top), pyramids, little boxes, and more. Interestingly enough, the instructions are basically all nonverbal. The patterns and outlines for the various containers all show where to cut and where to fold to execute these containers.

HowPack patterns are all JPEG images, so all you'll need to grab them and start building your own containers is a web browser and a pair of scissors.

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It's a big, wide, wonderful world out there. How big? Big enough to fill a big expensive atlas with maps and maps. But you don't need to spend all that cash—not if you visit Printable Maps.

This site has a huge collection of maps—something like 150—for you to download. They've got maps of continents, and countries; regions and states. There are maps that are all labeled for you, and others that are left blank for you to label yourself. Get out the vacation brochures and plan your next trip. Teachers can use them in their classrooms. Students can use them for study and reports. And best of all, they're all free. Grab a map, grab two, or maybe download them all. Now you're giving Rand McNally a run for their money.

Printable Maps are free to download and use. They're all available in PDF format, so you'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files and print them out.

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Hey everybody, it's more digital photos! Maybe you can hear the yawning from across the room. It would be nice to do something a little different to add some interest to your digital handiwork.

Here's an interesting way to jazz up some of your digital photos. Foto-Mosaik-Edda is a free application that lets you build mosaics of your images. Using your own pictures, as well as photos you've grabbed from Flickr and other locations, this tool digs through looking for images where the color, brightness, etc., can be used for rendering your picture as a mosaic. Depending on the particulars of your image, and configuration choices you make, you may employ upwards of 2000 individual images to render your full-sized mosaic.

You can choose portrait or landscape for your finished product, as well as square. Decide on your resolution and paper size, and you can generate up to a poster-sized mosaic image.

Foto-Mosaik-Edda is a free Windows application.

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Back in the day, Monopoly was my favorite board game. While it was always gratifying to get to choose the Scotty dog as a playing piece, and I always loved charging rent for Boardwalk (not so excited about paying it when I didn't own the property, however), probably the most exciting part was getting that pile of money to start with. All you had to do was to sit down at the table and you got a free $1500, by far the easiest money anybody ever made. Of course, you couldn't do much with that money, because it wasn't real, other than to the other players in the game. Nevertheless, play money can be oddly satisfying in its own way.

Printable Play Money lets you print all the money you could ever possibly need. Like the Monopoly money, you can't really spend it anywhere, but then maybe that's just a way to encourage saving, right? Use your play money to help teach kids how to work with money—count it, make change, that sort of thing. Or print a bunch of it and roll around on the floor in it, pretending you're Scrooge McDuck. Use it to light your cigars, proving to the world that you've literally got money to burn. (Don't really do that—fire's not safe, and goodness knows what type of nasty chemicals are in your printer's ink.)

Printable Play Money is free to download and print. You'll need a copy of the free Adobe Reader application to print out your fortune.

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