I use the awesome Notepad++ text editor all of the time, and it's an excellent tool for making quick edits to code or other specially formatted files such as XML. For dozens of different file types it is able to perform syntax highlighting where it formats the text with various colors to make reading the files easier.

Sometimes it can be a huge pain when needing to transfer files between machines because things don't always go smoothly.

There are a lot of backup utilities out there, but GoGet takes a different approach that I figured some of you may find interesting. You can give it a search expression (using an asterisk for a wildcard), a starting folder, and a destination folder. It will then pull all of the matching files over regardless of how many subdirectories they are nested in.

I love using Wolfram Alpha, but their recent push to get people to upgrade to their "Pro" version really started to turn me off of this awesome service. Sure the frequent popups asking you to "Go Pro" is pretty annoying, but what was even worse to me is that they disabled the ability to copy results without at least signing up for an account.

There are several applications that I use on a regular basis that don't have a "paste as plain text" option in them. I'm sure most of you have experienced this at some time or another, and generally what I do in those situations is fire up Notepad, paste in the stuff I just copied, and then re-copy it from Notepad. It's not ideal, but it works.

My favorite CD/DVD burning application is definitely CDBurnerXP. It's always been free, has an enormous number of features, and I've never really come across something I've wanted to burn that it wasn't able to handle. The only thing that keeps me from recommending this app to everyone is that the interface can be overwhelming for casual computer users.

Copying and pasting is something that we've come to do on a regular basis without thinking twice. What I find interesting is that over all of these years the basic concept has not changed. On most operating systems you copy one item, it gets stored on a clipboard, and is immediately overwritten when a newer item is copied.

Looking for a way to back up your old DVDs onto your hard drive? Want to watch your purchased DVD movies on your iPod? You're certainly not the only one. For some reason however, developers are not very keen on developing tools that do this. Luckily, HandBrake has stepped up to the plate with a free tool that lets you take control of your media.