E-rewards

On the same lines as e-miles is e-rewards. Again, you get paid for answering surveys. But, this website is fairly clever in terms of getting good responses. You get paid with e-rewards currency for answering survey questions. $25 in e-rewards currency can be encashed for a $25 travel certificate or various other items. The catch however is this. The surveys are well designed to prevent people from faking results and opinions. Instead of simple Yes/No questions, there are multiple filters which decide whether you are eligible or not for a survey. Further, some of these filters are not relevant to the current survey, so in some sense you do not know which questions are really the ones deciding you eligibility. In any case, you get paid $0.50 on the average if you are not eligible. If you are found eligible and complete the survey, which can take anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes, you can earn around $5-6 on the average. That, according to me, is pretty decent cash for doing something in your spare time.

Free Software

This website gives free software every day. Each day, the full version of a licensed software will be available for download for free, but these links for download and activation will only be valid for 24 hours starting 12 midnight PST. The software changes each day, and it also has an active community, whose members provide good feedback on the quality and utility of various software. I have personally found some very good utilities here. The catch is that none of these software are eligible for updates and upgrades, so if you end up upgrading to a newer version, you will invariably lose the full functionality of the software. A very good website nevertheless.

E-miles

A program that pays you in frequent flyer miles for time spent answering 2 or 3 survey questions at a time. The frequent flyer miles can be deposited in any airline of your choice. I think this is reasonable compensation for a couple of minutes of time. I have earned over 2000 miles on this to date. The website can be found here.

Visualizer Photo Resize

Visualizer Photo Resize is a free utility to resize jpg files to a lower resolution. I think this is extremely useful since the resolution of digital cameras seems to be increasing everyday. It is quite irritating when someone sends a digital photo, which is 3MB in size with a resolution of 3k by 3k pixels. For view photos on a computer screen, a resolution of 1600 x 1600 is more than sufficient. I find this utility very useful to resize photos in bulk and email to friends and family. This free software can be downloaded here.

Utility for merging and splitting PDF files

I was looking for a free utility to split and merge PDF files and the best option I found was pdfsam. It had quite a few useful options and best of all it is completely free for the basic version. It also has an enhanced version, which is best described by this from the website.
"pdfsam enhanced is “almost” free, you can download the source code, compile and use it or, if you think it’s worth it, you can make a donation."
The enhanced version comes with some advanced features, which most users would not require. Give this software a shot if you are looking to play around with PDF files. The download page can be found here.

Dropbox

Dropbox - A great new way of sharing and organizing files between multiple computers. I wonder how much disk space they would be able to afford for each user when they go public. Right now I'm still waiting for my beta invite, so maybe I will put up another post when I find out more about it. An article on Digg about the same.

Very interesting advertisement

I thought this was brilliant