Eagle V3.55 will let you design electronic circuitry and corrisponding circuit boards. The freeware version may be used for private or educational purposes only, and while having the same functionality as the commercial versions, it limits board size to 100x80 mm and 2 layers, and the schematic must be contained in a single sheet. Despite the limitations, the program is quite adequate for most personal projects.

The program is really complete and features, amongst others, a simple autorouter, a huge component library (with some additional libraries being available for free download).
Like many other CAD programs, commands can be entered both with the mouse and through a command-line interface. The command line interface can be scripted, that is you can make batch files containing several commands that can be executed by calling the batch file from the command line.
In addition to the batch scripting, you can use a macro language with a C-like syntax to perform various nifty tricks such as generating text files containing a listing of all components in a project ("bill of materials") and such.

In addition to the Windows version, Linux and DOS versions are available.

Another nice electronics CAD/CAE program. This one limits board dimensions to 100x60 mm on 2 layers, and your project can contain a maximum of 3000 "data elements", which boils down to about 50-100 components.

It comes with a handful of libraries, and it has a very nice autorouter. It does not have a true library editor though, and this makes the procedure for editing library components a tad cumbersome.

A vector-based drawing program, very useful for quickly drawing charts and diagrams of any type. It has a fully editable symbol library with drag-and-drop functionality. Library symbols may be connected between them with special "connector lines": when you move a symbol, these remain connected!

I found this program a while ago on a freeware-CD - back when I didn't have Internet access yet. The program was written in '97 by one David Lambert from France. I tried several times to contact the author, but I did not find any trace on the 'web of neither the author nor the program.

I find the program very useful, especially for quickly drawing circuit diagrams and such. Thus, I decided to upload the program to my personal webspace in order to make it available to whoever may find it useful. If anyone has any news about the author, please contact me!

A very nice viewer for graphic files, with lots of features. It will correctly display any current graphics file format, and it will also play a number of multimedia formats like .mov, .avi and .wav, provided your system has the correct drivers installed.

Unlike most graphic file viewers, it will perform a number of editing operations like annotation, resize/resample, rotation, color palette editing and even apply filters! Plus it will acquire images from TWAIN scanners and do screen captures.

A versatile and complete web page editor, suitable for use by experienced coders as well as beginners. It has everything a good editor needs (syntax-highlighting, tag libraries, etc.) and can be customized to fit your personal taste.

An interesting feature for beginners: The help file containes a detailed description of any HTML tag and associated syntax. Therefore I'd recommend this editor to anyone who wants to get his/her feet wet with writing real code.
I used this program for the preceding version of this site, and if it wasn't for me bumping into an even more sophisticated editor, 1stPage would probably still be my editor of choice.

Due to (probably) trademark troubles, 1stPage is due for a name change in the near future, with the release of the next version of the program.

Update!
The new release (2.0) is out, and it's still called 1stPage anyway. I did not have the possibility (read: time) to check it out yet, but it seems fairly similar to the preceding version, with some added functionality - even an integrated chat!

Paul Lutus' Arachnophilia has been among the first dedicated HTML editors. It comes with a no-frills interface and it behaves a tad idiosyncratic at times, but once you get the hang of it, it works very well.

Note that, while the program is available free of charge, the author does not consider it as freeware, instead he coined the concept of "Careware". Click on the link to find out what that means.

Just in case you're looking for the most powerful freeware text editor on the planet...you've found it. NoteTab Light probably is the most sophisticated and versatile editor currently available.

Don't be fooled by the "Light" suffix. The editor is packed with more functions than you can shake a stick at, and is very suitable for writing any type of code, including HTML. The only reason I did not classify this program as "HTML Editor" is that it does not offer syntax highlighting - the "Pro" version used by yours truly to code these pages does, but is not available for free...

Among the many features of the editor is a scripting language, a built-in favorites list, and people familiar with tools like AWK and/or EGREP will be delighted to find that NoteTab now offers support for Regular Expressions in its search/replace functions.

If you need an editor that can perform about any operation on text that you can think of (and many you haven't thought of yet), give this editor a try. Once you've got the hang of it, you won't want to be without it.

A nice, simple editor, lean & mean, it eats the Windows notepad for breakfast. You can just drop it in the Windows directory, thereby brutally overwriting the existing Notepad.exe (how rude!).

A free spell-checker from AutoSpell is now available that can be used with Notepad+. Check out the Notepad+ author's site to find out how to get it at a mere $0.00.

Not many people know that most personal computers, when connected to the Internet, can be spied upon in a variety of ways. Anyone having the necessary hardware and software can get into your machine and browse your files in search of "useful information", or install nifty little programs that will log everything you do on your machine and periodically connect themselves to send these informations back "home". The average user will not notice anything.

To avoid these "inconveniences" there are so-called "firewalls" that check all data traffic on the Internet connection. Most of these are not really easy to use and set up. ZoneAlarm is the exception to this rule, and it's available for free! On top of that, it works pretty good too. It will warn you of any attempted "unauthorized access" to your machine, and will stop any program from using the data connection if you did not expressly authorize it.

Better safe than sorry...

PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy and that's exactly what it provides. It allows you to send encrypted e-mail that can be read only by the legitimate addressee, and to encrypt files on your system to keep unauthorized people out of your confidential information.

It integrates seamlessly with most e-mail clients, and the cryptography it provides is powerful enough to keep even the CIA from trying to decrypt anything you encrypt with it.

If you care about your privacy (and you damn well should!) this is a program you can't do without.

Note: Since PGP and its encryption algorithms are developed in the U.S. and the U.S. has export restrictions in place on strong encryption technology, non-U.S. users must use a slightly different version of PGP, which however isn't crippled with respect to the U.S. version. This version resides on an European sister server.
Both the U.S. and the alternative versions are freeware, but do require registration.

PGP Freeware is available for both Windows 95/98/NT and Macintosh.

For anyone who uses a lot of different fonts, this little utility is a must-have.

Having a lot of fonts installed on your machine may be troublesome. First off, if your machine is not too recent (read: slow) and/or doesn't have a lot of memory installed, lots of installed fonts will noticeably slow it down. Second, it's no fun to have to scroll through hundreds of fonts when choosing one from the dropdown list.

The Font Thing will give you a hand. It allows you to preview fonts (installed or not) and organize them in collections. Eg you may organize a number of fonts you're using for a specific project into one collection, or you may classify fonts according to type.
It also allows you to temporarily install selected fonts. These will then be accessible for use until you shut down or reboot.
Thus, you can permanently install only those fonts you frequently use, and quickly access any other font you use only occasionally, without having them weighting down your system.

A nifty small program by Paul Lutus of Arachnophilia fame. It will synchronize your computer's internal clock with the exact time (from an atomic clock) supplied through one of several "time servers" present on the Internet.

The program can compensate for time delays caused by the connection, to achieve 50 milliseconds accuracy. It's internal directory holds the addresses of 3 U.S. based timeservers, and others can be added if required.
Like most other software by Paul Lutus, this isn't Freeware but "Careware".

How about a cat for company on your desktop?

I've seen quite a few feline desktop inhabitants, but Felix is by far the most realistic of the bunch. Not only is the animation very graceful, it also behaves in a squisitely feline manner.

Felix is originated by AdTools for publicity purposes. I haven't seen any banners so far, anyway.