Intellibuild - "Quickly and easily create your own custom GNU/Linux LiveCD Distribution (like Knoppix and Morphix)."

ThinBrowser might finally give Gmail some serious competition. 1GB of storage space, a 30 second signup (just name, desired email address & password are required), cool interface, and a slew of features: Advanced Spam Filtering, Virus Screening, Check Other POP/IMAP Accounts, Outlook-to-Webmail Sync, Enhanced Address Book & Calendar, Block/Approve Senders, Forward to Email Address or Mobile Device, Track Delivery, Password/PGP Encryption, POP/IMAP Access, and much more.

Foxit PDF Reader 1.2 [903k] + View and print PDF documents. CJK support with additional download. Free for non-commercial use.    (via CleanSoftware.org)

Port-to-process mappers have been covered before, but CurrPorts is worth a close look: a mere 36k with no installer, it operates under Windows 9x and higher. From the included text file:

CurrPorts displays the list of all currently opened TCP/IP and UDP ports on your local computer. For each port in the list, information about the process that opened the port is also displayed, including the process name, full path of the process, version information of the process (product name, file description, and so on), the time that the process was created, and the user that created it. In addition, CurrPorts allows you to close unwanted TCP connections, kill the process that opened the ports, and save the TCP/UDP ports information to HTML file, XML file, or to tab-delimited text file. CurrPorts also automatically mark with pink color suspicious TCP/UDP ports owned by unidentified applications (Applications without version information and icons)

Last year (Jan 4-8, 2004) we were searching for freeware calculators with virtual tape. Iain has reviewed several and recommends ESBCalc v4.5: "Scientific calculator for Win32 platforms with infix notation, brackets, scientific functions (trigonometric, hyperbolic, logarithmic - including base 10, base 2 & natural - plus more), memory, paper trail, result history list and more."

WSedit - "Freeware editor with CUA (default Windows) and Wordstar key commands. If you know the behaviour of Wordstar DOS, the 'feeling' of WSedit will be similar. WSedit reads and writes the file formats Wordstar 3.4 - 7, ASCII ISO and IBM codepage and works fine with very large files up to 20 MB." (via Robert Bull)

If you haven't read Free and easy remote access (through firewalls and NAT routers) with VNC reverse connections yet, be sure to check it out. But there may be an even easier (and still free) option coming from WebEx on January 24th: MyWebEx. See WebEx to offer free remote PC access for more information. And don't forget LogMeIn (mentioned last year).

If you need to support remote Windows users through firewalls or NAT, GoToAssist is hard to beat for ease of use. However, the price (over $300 per month) seems rather expensive.

Another option, almost as easy but completely free, is to use VNC's Viewer in listen mode as discussed here: Remote control tech support.

Also see Fred's comprehensive list of remote control applications.

UPDATE: Created a tiny tutorial with screenshots: Free and easy remote access (through firewalls and NAT routers) with VNC reverse connections.

DriveUse v1.00 [7k] + Reports detailed disk space usage on all drives and presents the results in a clear, sorted, tree-like structure.  

isnoop.net's gmail invite spooler - "A place for people with Gmail invites and those who want them to come together with minimal effort and fuss. Currently, we have 254 invites available to share. Thanks to the generosity of folks like you, we've distributed 153,696 invites since this page went up on Sep 13, 2004."

Barry Klein kindly sent in two tiny DOS apps by Tom Kihlken (quotes are from the included docs):

TinyView 0.9k (released into the Public Domain) - "The best text file viewer your ever going to see. It's tiny (958 bytes), it can view ANY size text file, it displays lines up to 1024 characters wide, and it uses all 25 lines of your display. How does TV do all of this? Through the magic of assembler. This program is written in 100% pure assembly language for the smallest, fastest program possible."

TED 3k - "A small, full-screen editor for line-oriented files of up to 64K in length that supports scrolling, cut, copy, paste, and printing operations, and permits entry of all members of the IBM character set."

Search and download 86775 BBS files. (via Mike Mills)

Russian Password Crackers - Reviews and benchmarks for a wide range of password crackers.

"At the center of the universe is a loving heart that continues to beat and that wants the best for every person. Anything we can do to help foster the intellect and spirit and emotional growth of our fellow human beings, that is our job."

Fred Rogers (AKA Mister Rogers)

(via World Prayers)

Beatles Mash-up Medley - 40 Beatles songs smushed into 3m34s. (via goodblimey!)

Bob Cerelli's Windows Site has an amazing amount of useful information in a fast-loading and easy-to-read format.

Begin a forensics investigation with WinHex (and be sure to check out its other impressive features).

GLtron - Open source game based on TRON with binaries available for Windows, Mac OS 9/X, and Linux.

UPDATE: Jalada kindly points us to Armagetron, another open source Tron clone with binaries for Linux, OS X, and Windows and more features than GLtron.