Organized into these sections:
For book-lovers, I think this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. For under $100, you get a little barcode scanner and some software. You scan the barcode on your books, it extracts the ISBN, looks the book up on your selection of LC, Amazon, Powells, and many other sites, and adds the book to a bibliography database. I cataloged over 250 of my psychology books in about an hour (most of which was spent typing in ISBNs and LCCNs for books lacking barcodes). You can also find a book yourself online, and drag its page onto ReaderWare to get it cataloged.
I used to like Visio for drawing, mainly because you can stick a connecter line to a box, and when you moved the box the line adjusted to stay stuck. This one feature is a big deal if you do a lot of diagrams. But MS bought Visio, and it's Windows-only, and it's way expensive. Then I found ConceptDraw, which runs on everything, is far cheaper, has at least as good a library of drawing objects, and has that critical sticky-connectors feature as well as many others.
It comes from a software company in Odessa, and they know what they're doing. I don't think I've ever seen it crash. The documentation is clear (though I think a few important details need more emphasis -- I'm adding them as a Guide. It reads and writes a ton of formats, including Visio and including XML (though not specifically SVG yet -- I suppose I should write an XSLT transform for the world). Perhaps best and most unique of all, support is fast, knowledgeable, and friendly.
Computer Systems Odessa also provides a free ConceptDraw viewer. Since ConceptDraw is not as widely known (yet!) as Visio, I suggest you include a link to this with any ConceptDraw files you post. I also think it would be good to put something like "Powered by ConceptDraw" in the corner of your graphics -- if you like it, give them a hand getting better known.
Gotta have it. Find duplicate files, invisible files, rename things with sequence numbers or to get rid of funky charcters i filenames; you name it.
I prefer this over Retrospect by far. As far as I know, Retrospect is the only thing that can backup whole volumes to multiple CD-Rs; but I have experienced it as very prone to crashes: usually after burning all the CDs while trying to finalize -- and leaving all the data unusable. I also don't trust software that compresses my data into a format I can't even find out about. So I use Synchronize to mirror my hard drive onto an external firewire drive, and once in a while burn CD-Rs to go off-site. The only snag is having to break up folders over CD-size manually.
Buy it. Use it. Unless your fingers are wired for emacs, this is the editor to use. Best regex processor and multi-file search aroundl; options for everything. Now, if only they would really support XML (they do at least do XML syntax highlighting right, by virtue of XHTML support).
My ISP recommended this for maintaining my website. Open a connection and you have a local folder on the left, and a remote folder on the right. Double-click to copy a file across; Cmd-J to open a file in BBEdit; click "Synchronize" to make the folders match. Makes Website maintenance far less painful.
Make lots of maps. Sadly, the excellent hint guide maintained by Doug Ingram at Texas A&M seems to have disappeared. But it's more fun without hints anyway.
HandyShopper Secret iSilo BibleReader
Google, of course. It's worth reading up on how it works, if only because it is so interesting (and because I believe the same class of methods will be used for an awful lot of things over the next decade) -- but the main point is that it does. Some tips people often forget:
Back to home page of Steve DeRose or The Bible Technologies Group. or The Bible Technologies Group Working Groups. Or, contact me via email (fix the punctuation).