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If you run multiple systems, you probably long ago ran out of desktop space. With a keyboard and mouse for each machine, your work space probably looks more like a used computer store.

Input Director is a tool that allows you to run multiple systems with just one keyboard and one mouse. You can transition from one machine to the next by hitting a hotkey, or you can simply move your mouse cursor from one monitor to the next.

One slick feature that Input Director offers is a "shared clipboard." This means that you can copy-and-paste from one machine to the next. The clipboard supports both text and images.

Input Director is a Windows app, and it's free for personal use. It requires Windows 2000 or later, and all your machines must be networked.

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If you live in the world of cut-and-paste, then you know what a pain your system's clipboard can be. With only one chunk of text, or one image, you have to do a whole lot of back-and-forth to really get anything done. What if you could work with multiple clipboards? Wouldn't it be nice to grab all the pieces you need and just go from there?

ClipX is a clipboard manager for Windows that allows you to grab multiple text and image items and keep track of and use them. Sitting in your System Tray, ClipX can keep track of hundreds of clipboard entries and call them up as you need them. No longer will you need to copy and then paste into a text editor to keep track of what you're working with.

Configurable hotkeys let you customize ClipX to work best for you. There are bunches of plugins available to extend the functionality of this helpful tool, as well as a software developers' kit (SDK) that allows you to customize it even further.

ClipX is a Windows application.

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There's always a need for more computer programmers out there, but unfortunately not everybody's thrilled at the prospect of keeping track of semicolons and curly-braces. With this in mind, the folks at Carnegie Mellon University created Alice.

Alice is a development environment that allows for error-proof programming. Using a drag-and-drop interface, users write code by dragging onscreen tiles that fit together into programs. As the result of fitting these pieces together, students actually create 3D animations. While interesting in their own right, these animations allow immediate feedback to the user, showing how re-ordering a series of tiles (instructions) impacts the behavior of the resulting program.

While users think they're creating animations and games, they are also seeing how languages like Java and C++ work, since the tiles correspond to statements in those types of high level programming languages. They claim that upwards of 10% of all computer science programs in American colleges use Alice in their curriculum.

Alice is a free download, and is available for Windows (Win2k or later), Mac (OS X 10.3+), and Linux.

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As you work your way through revision after revision of a document, have you ever realized that you just shouldn't have made that last change? How do you go back and undo it? You may just be out of luck, unless you're using Keep-It.

Keep-It is a real world archive tool that sit somewhere between a version control system and a file archive system. You don't need to check documents in and out, so you don't have to remember to do anything—hey, if you remembered, you wouldn't have gotten into this situation to start with!

Archives comprise "snapshots", a moment-in-time capture of your document. You can create them as needed, or schedule them in advance, so you're always protected. Keep-It compresses the archive it creates, so you aren't filling up all your spare disk space with changes. Browsing through your snapshots is easy, using its Windows Explorer-like interface.

Keep-It is a Windows app and requires Win95 or later.

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Do you run a website? Do your customers need to communicate with you? Is email too slow for your needs? How about adding Live Chat to your site?

ChatStat lets you chat with your visitors—soon to be your customers—in real time as they work through your website. Not only can yo chat with visitors through your site, but since it supports the major IM clients (AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, GoogleTalk, and Skype), you can chat with virtually anybody. This free version supports two operator seats, so you don't have to be tied to your desk all the time.

For the ultimate in security, ChatStat supports 128-bit encryption. This means not only are all your sessions private, but you can put chat buttons on secure pages without getting the dreaded "there are secure and non-secure items on this page" message.

ChatStat is a Windows application and requires that you be running Windows 2000 or later. You must also have the .NET 2.0 Framework.

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Okay, so you've been reading all about Linux, and you've decided maybe you'd like to try it on for size. You've got a huge investment—money, sweat, and tears—in your Windows system and don't want to kill it just to try Linux, but you don't have a spare box lying around to load it on either. Maybe you should give Wubi a try.

Wubi is a Linux installer for Windows systems. Rather than having to reformat your hard drive—and lose all your applications and data—Wubi will let you install a fully functioning Ubuntu Linux system on your machine without having to mess with your current partitions and data. Instead of a separate partition, Wubi puts the entire Linux into a file in your Windows filesystem. It simply adds a Linux entry to the Windows boot menu. At any point, just reboot your system, choose Linux, and you're off and running. It comes with all the goodies you'd expect on a Linux system.

As a simple installer, you just run Wubi like any other Windows app—there's no need to burn ISO disk images to CD, or anything else like that. And at the end, if you decide you don't want to keep it on your system, you can use Windows' own uninstaller to remove all traces from your system.

Wubi is a free download for Windows, and supports all flavors from Win98 and later.

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Collaboration can be a real challenge, especially if your team is scattered around the office or the world. Keeping in touch with everybody can be a challenge, and running a handful of apps just to stay in contact can quickly exhaust your screen space, to say nothing of your system resources.

Spicebird is a collaboration tool that helps people work smarter together. It integrates all the tools necessary to make sure that everybody's on the same page: calendar, tasks, contacts, email, and chat are all represented. Built on top of Mozilla's Thunderbird (email), Sunbird (calendar), and SamePlace (chat) platforms, you have access to all these tools in a single application.

Individual tools are accessed via applets that sit on the desktop. You can choose which applets to activate, and customize their content, adding, for example, your favorite news feeds to the RSS applet.

Each of the individual tools boasts the standard functionality you would expect: the calendar allows you daily, weekly, or monthly views, for example. The email tool will examine incoming messages and if it spots time information, it will ask you whether you want to schedule an event that corresponds with that time. The email and chat tools let you know in real time whether your contacts are online, making it easier to ping them right now if you need to communicate with them.

Spicebird is a free download, and is available for Windows and Linux.

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How can you possibly keep track of all the "stuff" you've got to do? There are lots of organizers and calendaring tools out there, to be sure. Even then, it's not always easy to stay on top of things. Sure, if you're at your computer, an Outlook-generated reminder is fine, but what if you're using a different machine? An emailed reminder may suffice. Need more flexibility than that?

Remember The Milk is a free online service that allows you to easily create reminders, but it comes with more. Along with pop-up and emailed reminders, you can have it send reminders to your favorite IM client. Or even send SMS text messages to your phone. Now you'll be on top of your schedule no mater where you are or what you're doing.

Along with the basic functionality, Remember The Milk supports a bunch of plug-ins. Use the iGoogle Gadget to manage your life from your homepage, use the mobile version on your iPhone, or even do it all offline with the Google Gears browser plug-in.

Remember The Milk is an online service. You should be able to use it with most any modern web browser.

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In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.
— Benjamin Franklin

While taxes are a certainty, there's nothing that says you have to suffer while you're preparing them. "Adjusted gross" this, and "Line 27" that could lead you to lose your mind.

There are many different automated solutions out there to help you do your taxes, but many of them are still pretty complicated, and most of them require that you pay for the privilege of using them. TaxAct is a totally free solution that allows you to prepare, print, and e-file your Federal taxes. Whether you prepare your taxes online, or download the software (or order the free CD-ROM, shipping charge added) and run the tool locally, you are in control. Using a simple interview technique, this tool walks you step-by-step through preparing your Federal tax return. E-file helps you get your refund sooner. Accuracy is not a problem, either: they guarantee that your return will be 100% accurate, or they will pay the penalty for you.

State tax computation is also available, for an added fee. Available paid versions of the Federal return give you telephone support.

TaxAct is available as an online service, and should support most modern browsers for Linux, Mac, or Windows. The download is compatible with 32-bit Windows systems, from Win95 up through Vista.

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Are you responsible for the care and feeding of a large website or an online application? Given the speed with which everything on the Web changes, it can be a constant headache to plan, implement, and then test changes and updates to your site. We've found a tool that may help you to at least get through the testing phase easier.

Watir (pronounced like water) is a Ruby library that helps to build test suites for your online applications. Watir (Web App Testing in Ruby) is designed to interact with browsers the same ways that human users do: click on buttons, fill-in forms, follow links, and all the other types of interactions that you need to use to really test the stability and performance of your complex online apps.

Not a keystroke recorder, Watir allows you to really get in there and test the logic and results from working through your complex site or complicated online app. You're programming in Ruby here, so it's going to be helpful if you have experience in the language, or at least a couple of good references to work with.

Watir is available for Windows and Internet Explorer. There are also ports for Firefox (on Windows, Mac, Linux) and Safari running under OS X.

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