my thoughts

Dropload is a useful free service which allows you to store any file (up to 100Mb) for up to a week. You then give your friends some simple instructions on how to pick up the file. This is a great alternative to clogging up inboxes with huge attachments.
www.dropload.com/

Here is a convincing argument from a microsoft security expert on why you should forget about using passwords on your Windows PCs: They are just not secure! In fact, many can be broken very quickly. It is far more secure to use a pass-phrase, which cannot be broken computationally within a reasonable amount of time.

It is very easy to remember a sentence or a line from a favourite song than it is to remember a string of 10 random letters, for example, and you can actually have a password of up to 128 characters in NT based operating systems (Windows XP, 2000, 2003 etc.)

There are plenty of reasons why you would want to do this (it is not just for the paranoid). The rise of internet "worms" and virii presents a continual risk for any internet-connected PC.
blogs.msdn.com/robert_hensing/archive/2004/07/28/199610.aspx

Mind mapping is a technique for helping people learn more effectively. I use some free mind-mapping software to as a method of writing down my ideas in a natural and rapid manner. I have found that once you've mastered a few keyboard shortcuts you can really let the creativity rip (some people call this the "flow state"). When was the last time you can say that about a technique for recording an idea quickly?

Interestingly it also makes for a great way of producing any heirarchical (tree) structure quickly. I've used it for website structure (mapping the information architecture) but it would work well for organisation charts, project structure etc..

Freemind: free mind mapping software, very good, intuitive, requires Java. Get it.
freemind.sourceforge.net/

Summary of mind mapping benefits:
www.mind-mapping.co.uk/

Slashdot reports that a group in New Zealand have made a parabolic reflector to boost 802.11 wifi signals by 17db. The interesting part is that they've got a line of sight range of 3-5km for around US $5 by using a cheap usb wifi adaptor and chinese cookery utensils (woks, mesh scoops etc..)!
Original site: www.usbwifi.orcon.net.nz/
Mirror: www.stanford.edu/~jstockdl/tmp/usbwifi.orcon.net.nz/
Slashdot story: slashdot.org/articles/04/05/25/229245.shtml?tid=137&tid=193&tid=215

One of the security features present in later versions of Microsoft Outlook is the automatic blocking of certain attachment filetypes (.reg; .exe; etc.) such that when an e-mail message with one of these types is received, you will not be able to open or extract it from the message. You will see "Outlook blocked access to the following potentially unsafe attachments" in place of the offending file(s). So how do you get at the attachment, assuming that it is safe?

It is possible to manage the list of restricted filetypes yourself by changing a value in the registry. The following page explains how to do it in a simple manner:
www.slipstick.com/outlook/esecup/getexe.htm

One way to speed up access to your data is to buy another drive and set up a RAID, if your motherboard supports it. I have one 36Gb Western Digital Raptor drive which is pretty fast anyway, but it is possible to add another in RAID 0 configuration (where data is "striped" across the disks) to obtain higher performance. RAID 0 gives the full capacity of both drives, at double the transfer rate, accessed as though they were a single volume.
www.wdc.com/en/products/WD360GD.asp

All about RAID
www.computing.co.uk/Features/1144195

Updated:
Obviously RAID-0 (two drives sharing the data with no redundancy) will halve the mean time to failure... I should have mentioned that Additionally, while synthetic benchmarks and theoretical models show significant performance gains it is quite a different story when tested in a real environment. Here's what Anandtech.com have to say about it:

"If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop."
www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=1

Old news perhaps, but google has a particularly useful calculator. It understands almost anything, type in a question or a sum and it provides you with the answer. My favourite query so far is "what is 100kph in furlongs per fortnight"!

Try these examples:
radius of the earth in meters
pounds in a kilogram
cube root (6 * 4) to the e times i
5 factorial factorial
www.google.com/help/features.html
The definitions feature looks handy too:
define website
define dominic

Not to be outdone...
Alltheweb provide a calculator too but it does not accept natural language queries.
Ever wondered how many drops in a dash?
www.alltheweb.com/help/faqs/convert

The Proactive Windows Security Explorer is a tool for evaluating the security of windows networks and passwords. It can recover passwords by brute-force: The password is considered to be insecure if it is recovered (guessed!) within a reasonable amount of time. The theory is that you can identify the users on your network who have a weak (guessable) password and tell them to change it. I wonder when proactive security analysis becomes outright hacking? Hmm. The program is freeware.
fileforum.betanews.com/detail.php3?fid=1068026081

A look at trends in software development, especially the hype surrounding many current (XP, Struts, .NET) and past (WAP) technologies.
www.softwarereality.com/soapbox/softwarefashion.jsp

Despite the general public not knowing what a WiFi hotspot is (article), there are a number of useful Wireless networking resource websites around. Here are a few that I've found useful:

airshare.org/
www.oreillynet.com/pub/q/all_wireless_articles
wifinetnews.com/
www.wi-fiplanet.com/