Free Download A Day

They may not be glamorous, but FTP programs are vital to getting through the day. Whether it's uploading new web pages, posting downloads, or sending that huge spreadsheet to headquarters, you've really got to use a dedicated tool. Sure, if you're gutsy enough-or nerdy enough—you can do all that from the command prompt, but who needs that kind of grief, right?

Core FTP LE is a free FTP client. With an easy-to-understand GUI, it helps you get your work done, instead of becoming a job in its own right. Along with standard quick-and-dirty FTP transfers, Core FTP LE supports secure SFTP as well. With regular FTP, all your data, including passwords, travels out in the open across the Internet; with SFTP, everything is secure, so you don't have to worry about who's looking at your data as it moves up the wire. It's even HIPAA compliant, so you know that your data is secure.

Core FTP LE is free for personal and educational use. It's a Windows application and runs under Win98 or later.

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"Tonight's forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning." —  George Carlin as the Hippy-Dippy Weather Man

While we could each probably make a forecast at least as accurate as that, getting the real weather forecast is a little more complicated. Whether you read the paper, watch TV, or listen to the radio, there are plenty of ways to find out whether it's going to be sunny or stormy.

Weather Channel Desktop hooks you directly into the resources of The Weather Channel. Sure, it's not the most exciting station on your local cable or satellite system, but you know you can always get weather info from them. With this tool, you get the local temperature in your System Tray. One click gets you current local conditions, severe weather warnings, and short- and long-range forecasts.

If only you could keep it from raining right after you wash the car.

Weather Channel Desktop is a Windows app. It runs under Win98 or later.

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Who's on first? Sure, it's the punchline to an old Abbott & Costello bit, but it's also a question you may ask when you're at work on your PC. You know the drill—you've got several apps running, and each of them has a document or three open, along with a couple of websites, your email client, and all that. Every time you click on a new window, it gets the focus, and everything else goes into the background. It can take a lot of [Alt]+[Tab]-ing to get back to the window you really want to have on top.

PushPin can help you keep that important window on top of all the others. Install this tool on your machine, and now you get an "Always on top" menu item for all system menus (the menu you get when you click on the program icon in the upper-left corner of an application window). Click it, and you'll never have to hunt for your most important window again. Change your mind? It's easy to turn PushPin off as well.

PushPin is a Windows app, and runs under Windows 95, 98, and NT.

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Printer sharing is a cool thing. You can make the most of your resources by having everybody print to one machine, rather than putting a printer on everybody's desktop. If only it weren't so complicated to configure and set-up that sharing.

PrinterAnywhere lowers the bar on printer sharing. Rather than relying on your expertise in networking, all you do is install the app and let it figure everything out. It detects your local printer and any network printers to which you're connected. Use is simple: you just print the way you normally do from your applications, you just choose the remote printer instead of the one sitting on your desk. And doing regular printer sharing one better, with PrinterAnywhere you can print beyond your network as well.

Your print job is encrypted, so you're safe printing around the block or around the world. And unlike e-mailing documents to other folks for them to print, with PrinterAnywhere the recipient can't keep an electronic copy or accidentally forward it to their whole email address book.

PrinterAnywhere is a Windows application. You need to be running Win2k or later to use it.

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How do you spend your time? By the end of the day, we've been so many places and done so many things, it's hard to reconstruct exactly what happened. And what about the little tasks that don't take any time themselves, but add up to several hours by the end of the day or week?

Sure, you can keep track of what tools you've used and which applications you've run, but pretty quickly it becomes clear that the overhead involved in breaking your time down can easily grow into a big task itself, which doesn't really benefit anybody.

With RescueTime, you install a "dohickey" on your system (their words, not ours). Data is store remotely, so you won't take up all of your hard drive space keeping track of how you use your hard drive space. Tell it which applications you want to keep track of, which websites you're interested in, or even which categories of work you want to track. It then keeps track of how much time you spend with a particular application active on your desktop, or how long you spend on those websites. You can track where you've been, or how how much time you've spent surfing the web. Want to spend less time on email? Set a goal—maybe an hour a day—and let RescueTime tell you whether you've achieved that goal.

RescueTime is still in Beta, so there may be a few rough edges. The up-side is that as an early adopter, your feedback can help make this an even better tool.

RescueTime is available for Windows, Mac, and even Linux, and requires an active Internet connection.

Download RescueTime

Let's face it, it's just hard to get up in the morning—or any other time….

I've got an alarm clock, and I'm sure you do, too. Mine yells at me: BUZZ! BUZZ! Fist hits top of clock.

Sure, there are clock radios, but what about an alarm that talks to you. "Excuse me, but don't you think it's time to get up?" Much more calm.

Talking Alarm Clock is an alarm for your computer that lets you choose how to alert you that time's up. You can choose daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly alarms, or just set it for a once-only reminder. You can also decide how you want to be alerted. Whether it's popping up a window with text in it, speaking that message to you, playing an audio file (we don't recommend Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture), or with Microsoft Agent you can even have an animated character make the announcement. Sure beats the clock radio with the political talk show host screaming at you.

Talking Alarm Clock is a Windows application. It requires Windows 98 or later, and optionally Microsoft Agent.

Download Talking Alarm Clock

For your website's pages to show up in search results in Google, Yahoo!, and the other search engines, their "robots" have to be able to find your site's pages. That stands to reason: how can they report on what they haven't seen? The "seeing" part, however, isn't always so easy.

Search engines run on a numbers game. They want to be able to report the greatest number of relevant results to their visitors while expending the least amount of effort on their part. Generally search engines find your site by following links from other sites; then find other pages by navigating through your site. There are some types of navigation that work well for your human visitors that just don't work for search engine robots.

Search engines can't click buttons, they can't follow JavaScript links, and they don't like big, long, nasty URLs like

   http://www.example.com/somepage?arg1=one&arg2=two&arg3=three…..

So how do you get those pages indexed?

The major search engines support what they call "site maps", a way that you can submit a list of your pages to Google, in effect telling them "these are the pages on my site that you should crawl." This site map file is a specially-formatted XML file that adheres to specific standards. While Google makes available a tool to help you do this, it is written in the Python language. That's nice, but if Python makes you think of an English comedy troupe rather than a computer program, it may not the solution for you.

GSiteCrawler is a Windows tool that generates site map files that can be used by Google and Yahoo!. You can load it onto your Microsoft web server, or presumably grab the log files from your Apache server, turn the crank, and generate that standards-compliant site map file. Much easier than learning Python.

GSiteCrawler is a Windows app, and will run on any 32-bit Windows platform—Win95 or later. It also requires Internet Explorer 5.5 or better.

Download GSiteCrawler

Work is a noble thing. It helps give meaning to our lives. It keeps us occupied and engaged. Oh, yeah, it pays the bills, too.

No matter what other benefits may accrue to us through work, that paycheck is a strong motivator, and a reward for a job well done. Some folks work on salary, or are paid by the project, so everybody agrees ahead of time what will be in the pay envelope. With hourly folks, that's not true.

Whether you work on an hourly basis, or simply want to track your time as it's split between multiple projects, it's important to keep track of how many hours you work, and when those hours are. Whether you track your hours with an electromechanical time clock, a pad of paper on your desk, or some other form, at some point those lists of hours have to be summarized, and the hours turned into dollars.

PrintableTimesheets.net offers more than 40 employee time sheet templates that you can download and print. Categories include weekly, bi-weekly, semimonthly, and timesheets with overtime calculation. These PDF files allow you to standardize your data collection, and make it easy for the payroll folks to do their job. Everybody likes it when payroll goes easier.

Customizable versions, which perform the actual calculations, are also available for a nominal charge. These are compatible with Excel, Google Docs, and most other spreadsheet apps.

PrintableTimesheets are compatible with most systems that support PDF files and spreadsheets.

Download PrintableTimesheets

Interested in Linux, but don't want to trash your Windows setup? Doing a full-on install may be more of a risk than you want to take, especially if you're just taking it for a spin. There are several packages out there that allow you to run both Windows and Linux on the same box; andLinux may be one of the better ones.

andLinux is a complete Ubuntu Linux system that runs under Windows. It comes with a full complement of applications. Rather than a full Linux desktop, you'll run apps on your existing Windows desktop. You can run andLinux as a command line application, or you can use it as an NT service, where you get a control panel at the top of your desktop, or a new start menu in your System Tray that allows you to run Linux apps. Unlike some dual systems that require you to boot into either Windows or Linux—but not both—with andLinux you start Linux, you don't boot Linux. That means that you can cut-and-paste between Windows and Linux apps, since you're using your standard Windows clipboard.

andLinux is a Windows app. It requires Win2k or later running with an NTFS file system.

Download andLInux

One of the greatest advantages of a graphical user interface for an operating system, as opposed to a straight-up command prompt, is the ability to copy, cut, and paste things from here to there. Grabbing something and moving it is a lot easier than typing torturously long path-and-filename combinations to specify that you you want to move a file or directory from here to there. Unfortunately, if you need to move a lot of things, it can still take quite a bit of time, since your clipboard can handle only one item at a time: grab this file at its original location, stick it on the clipboard, paste it into the new location, repeat. Several times, if you're not lucky.

With Piky Basket, you can grab all the files you want to move, drop them all into the clipboard, and them go paste them en masse into the desired new location. Instead of copy-paste, it's copy-copy-copy-paste. It's great for moving files and directories around, and outstanding if you need to drop those files into multiple locations—like in burning a CD, making a back up, and so forth.

Piky Basket will work with just about any 32-bit version of Windows, from the oldest Win95 up to the latest release of Vista.

Download Piky Basket