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No matter what you do in life, everything always goes easier if you've got the right tools. If you're a carpenter, you need a hammer and a saw. An auto mechanic? You need your wrenches and screwdrivers. Sure, you could drive a nail with a rock or use a pair of pliers to loosen a bolt, but that makes your life harder than it needs to be. The same can be said for those who write computer code for a living.

While you could use a plain-vanilla text editor like Notepad, TextEdit, or emacs, in some ways that's like driving a nail with a rock—it gets the job done, but you may bang your fingers up in the process. A programmers text editor like jEdit has many of the features you'll need on your next project.

In addition to letting you enter plain-old text, it supports doing the things that programmers need to do: syntax highlighting (over 130 file types), unlimited clipboards, folding (to hide and reveal chunks of code), search and replace for literals and regular expressions, and more.

jEdit is written in Java, so it should run on just about any system that supports that technology, including Windows, Mac, and various flavors of *NIX. It's available for free under the GPL.

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Whether you're taking a beating in the current financial situation, or you're on top of things and positioned to lead us all back out of recession, everybody can agree on one thing: you won't know how you're doing if you don't keep an eye on things. If you've got a portfolio of more than one or two investments, you probably already get some help from a high-powered tool like Quicken or Microsoft Money, but sometimes you just want to take a quick look at what's going on today, without having to wade through layers and layers of complicated stuff.

Portfolio Viewer is a tool that lets you keep an eye on your investments. It can handle multiple portfolios. Track your positions, with automatic updates of share prices, so you'll always know the value of your investments. Use charts and reports to help you tweak your asset allocations. And since all your data is stored locally, you're not going to have problems with your information being compromised, as well as the fact that you can take advantage of much of this tool's functionality while you're offline.

Portfolio Viewer is built on the Adobe Air framework. It should run on any system that supports that technology.

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Have you ever made cookies? Not the drop kind—the kind that you use a cookie cutter to make. No matter how closely you space them to each other, there's always a lot of waste in between. With cookies, you can just smush the dough all together and roll it out again. Now imagine instead of cookies, you're cutting shapes out of cloth, wood, Plexiglas, or some other material that doesn't lend itself to "smushing" to re-use the waste. Is there some way you can better use your material to minimize the leftovers?

Cut List is one possible solution here. Tell it the size board you're working with and the sizes of the pieces you need to cut it into, and it'll figure out the most efficient way to lay out your pattern on the available stock. Since it deals with rectangular regions, you're not going to be able to use it to make your cookie cutting escapades go any more smoothly, but that's probably okay.

Cut List is a free Windows application.

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If you've got a bunch of "stuff" to move around, whether it's to share with somebody else, move to another machine, or just squirrel away in an archive, there are several possible solutions. Stick them all in a ZIP file; roll 'em into a tarball, or go ahead and save them off as a disk image. This latter option is especially useful if you're working with an entire drive at once. Why grab individual pieces when you can grab the whole thing in one fell swoop?

Once you've got this drive image, what are you going to do with it? Sure, you can burn it to physical media—a CD or DVD—but maybe that's not the direction you want to head.

Virtual CloneDrive lets you mount image files as if they were actual drives. Now instead of burning them on your optical drive, you can mount that image file directly as a "virtual" drive. You can see everything that's in there, but without that intermediate step of burning to disc, storing it away, and figuring out what to do with it. It's compatible with most garden variety image formats, including ISO, BIN, and CCD.

Virtual CloneDrive is a Windows application. It should work fine on systems running Windows 98 or later.

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We're always looking for a way to shave a few seconds off of everything we do. After all, once you get done with work, you can go and play. Or conversely, once you get done what you set out to do, there's always more work to do. Either way, quicker is usually better.

ControlPad is a tool that can help speed things up for you on your Windows system. Once it's installed, just hit the asterisk key, and up comes the ControlPad execution menu. Assign a keystroke or three to a particular command, and now when you type "123" you'll open Word or launch Firefox, or you can even daisy chain commands together to accomplish a lot by only typing a little. If you can type it in a Run window or enter it via a series of keystrokes, then ControlPad can accomplish it for you.

ControlPad is a Windows application.

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Everybody's got money troubles. For some of us, it's too little money; for others, it's too much. (We're willing to try to cope with that one.) For everybody else, it's keeping track of what you've got and how it's being used. If you have an accounting background, then you're ahead of the game. For the rest of us, some help might be in order.

Buddi is a tool that bills itself as "personal budget software for the rest of us." It doesn't assume that you have any particular background in finance. All you need to do is to set up your accounts and budget categories, and start entering data. One of the big benefits of using a system like this is its reporting capabilities. Using a combination of tables and graphs, you can get a real sense of where your money is coming from, and more importantly, where it's all going. Along with the included reports, Buddi supports third-party plugins, which provide additional reporting capabilities.

Buddi is a free download. It's a Java app, so will run on anything that has the appropriate version of Java installed, including, most Windows systems (especially XP and later), Mac OS X 10.4+, as well as many UNIX-like systems.

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Does your Windows desktop look like the day after the night before? You know the drill: all your downloads, all the documents you're currently editing, even your last letter to Mom, all sitting there jumbled-up together. You couldn't find anything in that mess if you had to, and it's obscuring that cool wallpaper you worked so hard to find. You might want to check out Deskcretary.

With this tool, you can make sense out of that dumping ground you call a desktop. On a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, it goes through and archives all the important stuff sitting on your Windows desktop. These archives are fully searchable, so you aren't going to lose your important files and documents. You can specify which files or types of files to archive automatically, or even take control manually to decide what goes where. Choose to archive everything, or maybe exclude images or Word DOCs. Compress your archives to save space, or leave them uncompressed to just get those files out of the way.

Deskcretary is a free Windows application.

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If you have multiple machines on your desk, then you've probably got multiple keyboards and mice (mouses?) as well. That means you've probably not got a lot of room for your notes, any reference books you may need, or even your coffee. That's definitely a non-starter. Maybe it's time to tidy up that mess with Synergy.

Synergy is a tool that lets you run multiple computers from a single keyboard or mouse. It's not a remote desktop app, where you're sitting at your laptop but seeing your desktop's output on it; rather when you slide your mouse all the way to the right side of your screen, for example, it literally jumps to the display of the other machine. In other words, you're still looking at each machine's output on its own monitor, but you can do it all through a single keyboard and mouse.

Synergy is a free download. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux (and other *NIX platforms). You install the server on the machine whose keyboard you want to use, and clients on each machine that you want to access.

Download Synergy

UPDATE: There's a new fork to the Synergy project called Synergy Plus that looks to improve this tool. Thanks to David for the heads-up.

Free is good; I think we can all agree on that. Sometimes, though, free brings concerns along with. If it's free, is it worth what we're paying for it? How about free when you're getting what you used to have to pay for? Maybe that deserves a second look.

The folks who publish Nero are making a limited-functionality version of their flagship optical media burning and copying software available for free. It's the same tool that they're more than happy to sell you, but with a more limited feature set. You can use this free version for simple data copying and burning to CD and DVD media. If you want more bells and whistles, you'll need to buy the "regular" version. The free version doesn't have a time bomb in it—it's good for as long as you want to use it.

Nero 9 – free version is a free Windows app. You'll need to be running WinXP to use it.

Download Nero 9 – Free version

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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