If you read the title and sighed because you’re sick of hearing about word processors, do try to read this one because even though you could use MS Word, WordPad, or Notepad for your word processing needs, there’s another cool and free utility that is better than all of those for most people!

Word processors started out as replacement for typewriters and provided a great benefit in those times. However, as the software progressed, Word processors turned into giant bloated applications designed with hordes of features that only corporate users would ever need. Unfortunately, there is no Microsoft Word Lite edition without all of the useless features that make it run slow or crash your computer!

Jarte is a WordPad based, FREE word processor whose unique interface will make you feel like you are piloting a swift, nimble yacht by comparison. It doesn’t look anything like your normal office word processor, but it can handle every task equally well!

From any Word Processor you would expect it to be able to handle Word documents, font and paragraph formatting, spell checking, print preview, and more. And while Jarte performs all the standard functions well, the most important aspect of Jarte is the numerous small details that make it an efficient and enjoyable tool for creating documents. Here are some of the nicer features of Jarte:

• Tabbed document windows for easy access to your open documents
• Larger buttons for the most commonly used functions
• Instant dictionary and thesaurus word lookup (integrates with free WordWeb)
• Spell check and text search tools that do not park themselves on top of the text you are trying to edit
• Single click bookmarking that make bookmarks both useful and usable
• Instant access to the documents and folders you designate as your favorites
• Instant access to the fonts you designate as your favorites
• Use of the mouse scroll wheel button to copy and paste text

It’s based on the WordPad engine, so you can be assured that the code is stable and will not cause problems with Windows. It simply adds a lot of good features on top of WordPad. It’s fully compatible with Windows Vista and it can open RTF, DOC, TXT, and DOCX (Office 2007) files.

Another cool feature of the software is that it does not need to be installed, but simply can be run by executing the EXE file. This means you can run the program from a USB stick if you like on any computer!

Overall, it’s a cool word processor that is better than WordPad and Notepad in terms of features and also still faster than MS Word because it only includes the most popular features. Definitely worth checking out if you’ve been looking for a good Notepad replacement! Enjoy!

Ever wonder how many a people a cup of rice could feed? Your mother has told you one number, you’ve tried it on your own and come up with something else, but really there’s probably some kind of rule of thumb that you can use over and over again when making rice, right?

Or maybe there’s always a certain way you want to play a hand in Blackjack when you get two Kings? There are literally hundreds of rules of thumb that have been passed down from generation to generation without anyone really knowing where it came from or if it’s really true.

Luckily, there is a very cool site that is try to combine all of the rules of thumb stuck in people’s head into an freely accessible online database.

RulesOfThumb.org has a collection of thousands of rules of thumb collected into over 151 categories that you can easily browse. It’s pretty cool and very useful information if you’re someone starting out doing something new like cooking, shooting a gun, hiking or playing a new sport, etc.

I know it’s especially useful for me since I no idea about anything other than computers! One rule of thumb I would add would be "When you have a problem with your computer, restart it!". That solution has saved me many a time!

The definition of a rule of thumb according to the site is as follows:

A rule of thumb is a homemade recipe for making a guess. It is an easy-to-remember guide that falls somewhere between a mathematical formula and a shot in the dark.

Here are some cool rules of thumb that I thought were quite interesting.

Count the number of times a cricket chirps in 15 seconds, and add 37. No, you didn’t just calculate your age in cricket years – you measured the temperature outdoors in degrees Fahrenheit.

BUYING THE FRESHEST ARTICHOKE

FEEDING YOUR FISH

HOW TO CLEAN A FRIDGE

LOCKING UP YOUR BIKE

ASSESSING THE EDIBILITY OF WILD PLANTS

SLEEPING AND SHOES

WHEN TO GIVE UP ON A MOVIE

The best thing about this site is that all of the rules of thumb are rated, so you can quickly sort by the best and worst to find only the most useful ones. Enjoy!

Discussion forums are great way to to get a diverse collection of opinions about a specific topic from lots of different people. There are lots of free discussion forums out there that you can quickly setup without needing to have much technical knowledge, and one that comes to mind is Tangler.

Tangler is a free, easy to setup, and full customizable discussion that you can use to host your own forums for anything that you like. Tangler hosts the forum for you and requires no downloads or installs. You simply sign up and create your forum online!

Here are some of the cool features of Tangler that make it one of the best discussions forums out there:

• Easy to setup and integrate
• We host it for you (no download or install)
• Easy to maintain
• Easy to promote
• Public or invite only forums
• And it’s FREE

• Real time conversations
• Great design
• You customize it
• Images and videos in the discussion

• User profiles
• Add and follow friends
• Private chats
• Desktop notifier option

Once you create a forum, you can create an unlimited number of topics inside each forum. You can also include videos and pictures in all of the forum discussions, which means you can quickly embed YouTube videos, etc.

It also has a social networking aspect to it so you can create user profiles, chat in private with other users, and add/follow friends.

Tangler has an excellent GUI interface and create a very nice Web 2.0 look, rather than the usual forum look where everything is just plain and simple. You can control who enters a forum or you can make it public if you want everyone to be able to access it.

You can use Tangler as a way to discuss something important between friends that are in different locations or maybe as a business tool to discuss projects with colleagues. It can also be used as a kind of knowledge base if you like. Enjoy!

If you’re on a Mac, you probably wish that there was an application that you could use to chat with all of your online buddies at the same time! There are a couple of applications out there, but mostly for Windows. There is also a web site that you can use called Meebo, which lets you chat with buddies from AOL, Yahoo, Google Talk, and MSN for free without having to download or install any software.

Still, if you’re a Mac OS X user and you would prefer a desktop application for your chatting purposes, you can check out an open-source app called Adium. Adium has a really cool looking interface and has a lot of nice features.

All of your friends from all services show up in one window with little icons on the right to show from which service the user is from.

The chat window is tabbed so you don’t have to clutter your desktop with 20 chat windows all over the place! The icons and the OS X interface looks great and really make the application worthwhile just because of it’s looks! Each user is color-coded and you can change the colors or the entire skin or theme if you like.

Adium supports a bunch of different services, including the following:

• AOL Instant Messenger (Including ICQ and .Mac)
• Jabber (Including Google Talk and LiveJournal)
• MSN Messenger
• Yahoo! Messenger (Including Yahoo! Japan)
• Bonjour (Compatible with iChat)
• MySpace IM
• Gadu-Gadu
• Novell Groupwise
• QQ
• Lotus Sametime

Here are a couple of the notable features of Adium which make it an excellent choice for any Mac users looking for a unified chat application:

• OTR Encryption
• Tabbed Messaging
• File Transfer
• Webkit Message Display

It also supports about 20+ languages. Overall, it’s a cool app with great looks and it’s completely free! Enjoy!

Don’t you just hate it when have 10 open tabs in Firefox and you decide to close a few out because they are starting to take up too much space, but you end up accidentally closing out a tab that you actually needed? More than not, you have to go to the History tab and then find the site that you were on, which may or may not be at the top of the history list.

Luckily there’s a cool Firefox add-on that you can use to bring back or undo a closed tab immediately! Undo Closed Tabs Button allows you to undo closed tabs via a toolbar button, via the right-click context menu, or via a shortcut on your keyboard! It makes it super easy to bring back any previously closed tab.

Once installed, you can add the button to your toolbar by going to View, then Toolbars and then Customize. Simply drag and drop the icon to your toolbar. Now when you click on the toolbar button, you will see a list of the previously closed tabs. Note this is not a list of previously visited sites, but of what was the last page loaded before a tab was closed.

You can also right click on any empty space in the browser window and choose "Undo last Closed Tab" to bring back the last closed tab. The keyboard shortcut for bringing back a closed tab is Alt + Z.

The add-on has more options that you can configure by going to Tools, then Add-ons, then select Undo Closed Tabs Button and choose Options. You can change the keyboard shortcut or remove the context menu item if desired.

Overall, it’s very useful for anyone who has accidentally closed a tab before! Check it out!

Are you in the market for a new cell phone or mobile phone? With so many choices and options, it’s very difficult to figure out which phone is the best just by viewing them online. If you really want to make sure you’re buying the best phone, you usually have to end up going to a physical store and checking out each model yourself. However, this is time-consuming and requires going to multiple stores!

Luckily, there’s an easier way to test out a cell phone before you buy it: TryPhone! TryPhone is a new online web service that is aiming to help consumers choose the right cell phone by allowing you to actually test out the menus and functions on the cell phone in an interactive Java application. Using their fully interactive online virtual handsets, you can test drive mobile devices, applications, content and services, as well as watch demos.

So you heard the BlackBerry Pearl had some cool new features? Well using TryPhone, you can actually browse the user interface for a Blackberry device and make sure it’s what you really wanted!

When you hover your mouse over the buttons, they will light up which indicates that you can click on that button. On the right hand side, you’ll see a list of all of the available demos for that phone. Clicking on one of them will guide your through how to perform that task by making the appropriate buttons blink. Once you click on it, you’ll see the next screen and the next button to click highlighted. You’ll see exactly how the screen looks in the interactive application:

The web site also contains other useful information about the phones, including all of the specs, battery life time, memory, OS, and customer reviews. You can also rate each phone and give comments if you like. This is useful if you’re someone who likes to first read what others have to say before making a decision.

Currently, their listing of phones is only 8, but that’s because it has just started. It does include phones like the Samsung Juke, Apple iPhone, Motorola V3m, Nokia N95, and Blackberry Pearl. Hopefully, they add a bunch more phones soon!

So next time you plan on comparison shopping for phones, make sure you check out TryPhone and see if the phone you are looking for is listed there! Enjoy!

[tags]tryphone, try cell phone, compare phones, test drive cell phone, test drive mobile phone, mobile phone[/tags]

Have you ever wished you could automate some common tasks on your computer because you always end up forgetting to do it yourself? Maybe you would like to have the computer shut down every night, but you normally forget and leave it on. If you could just set a timer to say one hour from now shut down my system, you can continue working and know your computer will turn off automatically.

Using the Schedule Task feature built into Windows is a pain to setup and doesn’t work that well. That’s where a nifty freeware application called E-Counter can help you automate tasks quickly and easily.

E-Counter  is a very light-weight utility that displays a digital counter on your desktop which displays a count-down specified by the user. When the time finishes, it can execute any of the following actions listed below:

(1) a sound,

(2) a visual effect in the main window,

(3) shutdown the system,

(4) hang up Internet connection,

(5) hang up internet connection, wait 30 seconds and then shutdown the system,

(6) display an image,

(7) hibernate PC,

(8) run external file,

(9) lock a workstation and

(10) display text message.

It supports up to 11 languages and has a nice clean easy to configure interface. Make sure you scroll down to UK when selecting your language, otherwise you won’t be able to read anything.

First you choose an effect, then you set the time that you want to count down from, and finally you can set whether you want to put a password during the countdown and prevent people from stopping it.

This could also be useful for parents who want to control their kids time on the Internet or on the computer. Set it to one hour, to lock the workstation, and put a password for the program and your kids will be kicked off in one hour flat! Nice. Though I don’t think they would think so.

Overall, it’s not the best program I have ever seen, but it’s useful for certain types of people and circumstances. If you want to quickly auto-schedule any of the above-mentioned items, check out eCounter. Enjoy!