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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.

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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.

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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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Taking screenshots of web pages is a way of life. Maybe you've created a new page or site and need to show it to a client. Maybe you're documenting your work and want to grab a whole page to stick onto a report. Either way, it's not easy to capture a whole page. Use your machine's standard screen print functionality, and you're going to grab the visible portion of the web page at best, but if your page is longer than that, you're pretty much out of luck. Or you can save your screen as a PDF, but now you've taken one continuous screen and stuffed it into a multiple-page document. That's not really what you had in mind either.

WebShot lets you capture the whole page—not just the visible portion—into a single file—no multiple pages here. If your page is 2500 pixels tall, for example, then your screenshot file is going to be 2500 pixels tall. You get the whole page with none of the traditional limitations. You can save into several different image file formats, so you can use your pretty pictures however you want.

WebShot is a Windows app. It runs under Windows 2000 or later. You'll also need the most recent version of Internet Explorer to make things work right.

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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).

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Back when the Internet was young and dinosaurs roamed the earth, Usenet was the place to be. Blogs and Twitter didn't exist yet, but you could carry on threaded conversations through newsgroup posts. File sharing apps like LimeWire weren't around, but you could still share executable files and media through binary newsgroups. Well, guess what? Usenet still exists out there, and folks still use it.

Ozum is an all-in-one newsreader app that you can use to prowl newsgroups. Not only can you read and post messages, but it also allows you to search for and find the binary files you're looking for. Once you find them, you can preview them and download what you want. After all, it doesn't make much sense to grab a whole bunch of pieces of a multi-part file if it turns out that it really isn't what you're looking for.

Ozum is a free Windows application.

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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+).

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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.

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If you're a web designer, or just somebody with a very particular way you want to work, then you probably use several different web browsers. Between IE, Firefox, Opera, and more, it can be a lot of work to keep them straight. And then there's the whole question of the "default" browser—you know, the one that opens up when you click on a link in an email or document. It'd sure be handy to have more than one default browser.

Browser Chooser gives you that power. Once it's installed, it then functions as your default browser. Now when you double-click on that link, instead of opening a real web browser, you get Browser Chooser, and it offers you links for each of your installed browsers. Finally you can use the tool you really want without a bunch of extra twisting and turning.

Browser Chooser is a Windows app. It's designed for Vista and Windows 7.

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