Instant messaging has been a popular way to get in touch for over a decade, but the smart phone feels like the device that could take messaging into the stratosphere. The bite-size, quick-hit nature of instant messages is well suited to an on-the-go lifestyle, and since most people have a cellphone on them from dawn to dusk, they can always be connected to friends and family alike. No surprise, then, that mobile app stores are chock full of instant messaging apps.
Free instant-messaging client for iPhone/iPod Touch, Android (also available via web for mobile devices) by Meebo
Meebo was one of the pioneers in bringing instant messaging to the web browser, showing that you didn't need a specialized IM client to talk to your friends. For a long time, they were content to bring a similar experience to smart phones via their mobile website, but the release of native iPhone and Android apps is welcome nonetheless. The messaging veteran strikes the right blend of power and simplicity, offering much-desired features like chat histories and push notifications behind an uncluttered, straightforward user interface.
As free IM clients go, Meebo is quite good. Notifications, for example, have been relegated to paid messaging applications in the past; Meebo offers them right out of the box and turns them on automatically when you close the app so you don't have to think about them at all. It also offers one of the widest array of messaging services of any app-aside from usual suspects like Windows Live, AIM and Facebook Chat, Meebo provides access to dozens of niche chat services. One notable omission is Skype, a service that few clients support (look to Nimbuzz if you need your Skype fix in a multi-IM client). Otherwise, Meebo is a full-featured messaging client at a bargain price, making it an easy recommendation.
Free web-based password manager for Windows/Mac/Linux (via Firefox); third-party Keygrinder app for iPhone by developers Blake Ross, Collin Jackson, Nicholas Miyake, Dan Boneh and John C. Mitchell (Stanford Security Lab)
Phishing is a common security risk on the internet; you've probably encountered your fair share of e-mails pretending to be from PayPal asking you to enter your login information. Lately, the attacks have become more sophisticated. Twitter recently reset the passwords for a number of users because they signed up on various torrent forums using the same login information they use for Twitter. When those forums were later compromised, the attacker had logins not only for the affected sites, but a whole lot of Twitter accounts as well.
The brute-force defence is simply to have a different password for every online account you have, but that's a tall order for most people. PwdHash doesn't ask you to remember hundreds of passwords, nor does it store hundreds of passwords for you like most password managers. It's based on a simple but very smart idea: take a user password and the domain of the site you're logging into, and from that information generate a new, obfuscated password. If your login information somehow falls into the wrong hands, all the attacker gets is the password unique to that site; they won't be able to use the generated password anywhere else, nor will they be able to figure out your master password.
All you have to do when signing up or logging into a site is to add the characters "@@" to the beginning of your usual password; PwdHash takes care of the rest. If you can't use the Firefox extension, you can use the PwdHash website to generate the password instead. And if you're paranoid, you can even save the site to disk and generate your passwords locally without an internet connection. PwdHash will help contain the damage should one of your online accounts ever be compromised, all without much in the way of extra effort.
Free (for non-commercial use) CD/DVD image emulator for Windows by Alcohol Software
With hard drive capacities and bandwidth limits rapidly outstripping the holding capacity of even dual-layer DVDs, it makes less and less sense to archive your multimedia and documents to the plastic discs; you'd need so many of them to back up your personal data that it'd be cumbersome trying to restore any portion of it. Indeed, you might find it easier to do the opposite: archive your old CDs and DVDs onto extremely large hard drives. A single two-terabyte hard drive can hold the equivalent of almost 200 dual-layer DVDs.
But often you can't just copy the contents of a DVD over to your hard drive and expect everything to work. Software install discs, for example, may rely on autorun instructions that won't work off a hard drive. Or you may want to use a CD or DVD on a netbook or laptop without an optical drive. What you need, then, is a CD and DVD emulator: software that can take a disc image and load it into a virtual DVD drive so that it shows up in Windows just as a physical CD or DVD would. Alcohol 52%, the little brother to the commercial program Alcohol 120%, is a great tool for just this purpose.
Alcohol 52% is your one-stop shop for making, organizing and using disc images. Aside from the comprehensive image creation and search tools, Alcohol 52% supports up to six virtual drives-enough for any home user. Once you've loaded the disc image in the media library, you can mount or un-mount images onto a virtual drive from within Alcohol 52% or by right-clicking on a virtual drive in Windows Explorer and selecting an image from a fly-out menu.
Physical discs may not be around much longer if the naysayers are right. Alcohol 52% can help you shelve all the shiny silver discs in your collection for good.