RunMe is a free program launcher that can dock into sides of your screen and become available on mouse-over. It is similar to the Windows’ start menu in its look and feel, in that allows for placing shortcuts in folders within folders. It supports special effects, animation, transparency, and a good number of very good looking skins.

Chaos Wallpaper is a free program that has the dual function of shuffling your wallpaper as well as embedding RSS/ATOM feeds into your active desktop background. You can optionally use any one of the two functions or both together.

’Starred Items’ are a feature of Gmail and Google Reader designed to give you quick access to these items. What you might not know, however, is that it is possible to broadcast your Google Reader starred items into their own RSS feed that you can share with friends or display locally on your desktop, or even use them in a Widget within your site or blog. This posting is a step-by-step guide on how to do this.

Special Characters Menu is a tiny memory-resident program that can display a pop-up window of the most commonly used special characters for easy insertion into any document or text. The free program can be kicked into action whenever needed by pressing a hotkey combination.

EasyNotes is a simple hierarchical note taking program that offers a good range of functions. The open source program can be installed locally or used portably from a USB.

Threatfire provides real-time protection against spyware and other malicious threats. It employs sophisticated behavior-based technology that can determine a threat based what it does within your system, and is therefore well suited for unknown or brand new "zero-day" threats. It is also low on resource consumption.

Freeware program StyleFolder can perform a handful of interesting folder customizations straight from the Windows right-click context menu, including changing the folder’s icon, using an image as folder background, and changing the font color used inside the folder. All customizations are saved into the folder itself and are preserved across PCs or over the network.

Tag2find is a memory-resident program that can apply tags to all of your local files. It can be optionally accessed from the right click context menu, a search box within the taskbar or the IE toolbar, or a floating searchbar (tagbar) that can be launched from the tray menu and moved around the desktop. Currently Tag2find supports NTFS file systems only, and is free for personal use.

Free PDF to Word Doc Converter is a small, free program that can convert PDF files into DOC files used by MS Word. It can handle all elements of a PDF document including text, shapes and images.

MediaCoder Audio Edition is a free, full-featured audio conversion program that can both read and write to almost all popular audio file formats as well as audio streams in video files. MediaCoder AE contains all the necessary codecs it needs for encoding/decoding audio within the standalone software.

Someone took the “Death Star Canteen” skit by British comedian Eddie Izzard and created an animation using LEGO figures that is truly hilarious.