Not Yet Ten

Ten Things I Found on My Ten To-Do List

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

1. To help manage your home-based business, Microsoft is offering free downloads of Accounting Express 2008, and free trial downloads of the professional version; there's an extensive product overview here (OS: Windows XP/2003/Vista)

2. Cheap as Free Color Picker freeware is "a standalone application which lets you generate HEX color codes for HTML. This is particularly useful if you use a software IDE or text editor for creating web pages." (OS: Win 98/ME/2000/XP)

3. Help4J freeware is "the largest, most comprehensive source of knowledge about the Java programming language with more than 25 000 code examples, thousands of utility functions, tips and links. It seamlessly integrates with the standard API documentation. A click on a method or class and up to 20 code examples are at your fingertips." (OS: Windows, Unix, Linux, Solaris; Requires JRE 1.4.2 or up, 70 MBytes of disk space)

4. MB Free Psychic Dictionary 1.25 is one of the many free guides and e-books provided by MysticBoard.com, a community of folks interested in the mystic world (OS: Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista)

5. Mosaizer freeware that allows you to create photo mosaics and photo libraries from large collections of bitmaps; appears to have some very cool special effects features, too (OS: Win 9x/ME/2000/XP/Vista)

6. Open Office 2.3.1 RC1 freeware is "an Open Source, community-developed, multiplatform office-productivity suite. It includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. Localizations of OpenOffice.org are available in 27 languages with more being constantly added by the community. (OS: Win NT/2000/XP; according to the web site OpenOffice "runs stably and natively on Solaris, Linux (including PPC Linux), and Windows. Additional ports, such as for FreeBSD, IRIX, and Mac OS X, are in various stages of completion.")

7. PCGen 5.13.4 Beta freeware is "a Java-based RPG character generator and maintenance program (d20 Systems mainly) for role-playing games. It currently is aimed at supporting as many RPGs as is humanly possible. The project´s current focus is on OGL games (OGL is Wizards of the Coast´s Open Gaming License). All datafiles are ASCII so they can be modified by users." (OS: Win 9x/ME/NT/2K/XP/2K3)

8. Mrjz.net's Personal Finance Manager freeware is "a simple tool for managing accounts and expenses. It was designed and written to be intuitive and easy to use for home and small business users not familiar with accounting principles like single or double entry accounting. Mjrz PFM is a basic implementation of double entry accounting principles." (OS: Win NT/2000/XP/Vista; MacOS and Linux.)

9. Roadkil.net's Unstoppable Copier freeware "recovers files from disks with physical damage. Allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or that just give errors when reading data. The program will attempt to recover every readable piece of a file and put the pieces together. Using this method most types of files can be made useable even if some parts were not recoverable in the end." (OS: Win 9x/ME/NT/2K/XP/2K3)

10. Jason Horman's WikidPad 1.9beta12 is "a wiki-like notebook for storing your thoughts, ideas, todo lists, contacts, or anything else you can think of to write down. What makes WikidPad different from other notepad applications is the ease with which you can cross-link your information." (OS: Windows: Use of a binary installer is recommended; users of Windows 98/ME should read the hint at the designer's site before downloading; Linux; MacOS)