Nothing will take the wind out of you like discovering you deleted some very important files. Fortunately for me, I got a hold of a licensed copy of Handy Recovery and was able to completely restore the information. This little program does a really good job of finding and recovering deleted files from your HD or portable media like a memory stick. The free version will recover only one file a day but for only $39 a licensed copy will allow you to restore to your hearts content. From reading the site, this looks to be a Windows only product.

If you are looking for a new website for your business or group, I encourage you to check out the offerings from Element Fusion. Tim Wall and the fine folks there have turned out a top-notch service with their Water CMS system. It features all of the elements you would expect - calendar, blogs, forms, photos, etc, but this isn’t a cookie-cutter service. It’s built for custom design so you can get exactly the look and feel you want without sacrificing usability.

With price plans to fit any need, including a free trial, give it a shot and see how a Water click-and-publish site can get you and up running with a professional look and feel.

If you’re a designer or agency - check out their LightCMS product which allows you to incorporate their professional tools into your custom design. Provide top-notch service to your clients with a site they can manage themselves.

Ready to launch a new site design but want to make sure it is cross browser compatible? Browsershots is a great free open-source online service that makes screenshots of your design in several different browsers.

Using the power of distributed computing, when your job is up in queue a number of computers will open your site in their browser and upload your screenshots to the central server.

The choices are staggering really - choose screen sizes, colors, java, flash and more. Really very helpful and highly recommended.

Wufoo is an easy to use application that makes the process of form building and online data collection a breeze. Using a simple drag and drop interface, it’s a snap to create a good looking online form to drop into your website or blog.

With powerful integrated statistics, excellent data export features and full reporting and notification capabilities, Wufoo’s offerings are impressive indeed. I especially like the flexibility they offer in theming - whether you are a novice or you need full CSS / XHTML mark up, the options for integration into your site are outstanding.

Check out the Top 10 Reasons you should be using Wufoo, look through the sample gallery, and then check out their plan offerings - a free account is available to let you experience their service without risk..

The folks at 37Signals rolled out some major upgrades to it’s trusty Backpack service today, repositioning it as a small business intranet with a host of enhanced features and multi-user capabilities.

Added are shared calendars, the newsroom dashboard, messaging capabilities and multi-user reminders. While always quite handy as a personal information repository, the new multi-user capabilities turn Backpack into a real small business information powerhouse or even a lightweight project manager.

Read about the new features or take a tour.

Anyone who does much development in WordPress will quickly find that not all WP themes are the same when it comes to licensing. There are a some sites out there that offer great themes that are true open source. Freewpthemes.net is one of those sites.License info from the site: "Are 100% free for personal or commercial use, since they’re released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attributions 2.5 license. You don’t have to pay me (or anyone else) anything to use them, regardless of what you want to use them for."

I’ve recenly been evaluating Teamwork Project Manager as a means to keep my projects and teams on task and on schedule. Featuring a nice clean interface, efficient time and task tracking (including due dates on individual tasks), and really nice collaboration options, I’m really impressed by all of the available features.

Support has been prompt and excellent, updates are frequent, and communication from the developers via their blog is outstanding.

The online project management arena is crowded for sure, but I recommend giving this one a shot if you are in the market for such a solution. Try a demo or sign up for a free account.

One of my favorite Tech News sites is the inronically named blah, blah! technology. Ironic in that there is nothing boring or uninteresting about the info and opinions found here.

Where other sites just echo news from elsewhere, blah, blah! technology is full of original commentary - this is no retread news site. Author Wayne Smallman does a great job of distilling big topics into concise articles that help put things into real perspective. A daily read for me, highly recommended.

Wayne is also the author of the Socialize Me Wordpress plugin which we’ll be reviewing later.

SB

Tech people work hard, but we need to have fun too. I love ThinkGeek and their wide assortment of toys, tees, and other fun gadgets.

Whether you need to decorate your cubicle, prepare for office warfare or get your caffeine jones, you can surely get your fix at ThinkGeek. Regular customers also get Geek Points to use for free stuff.

After having experimented with Jing for recording video of the desktop, I’ve come back to CamStudio. While Jing has some nice features including capturing still images I find CamStudio to capture higher resolution video and is a little more flexible. Jing has its strengths as well which I outline in a previous review on thoughtsparks.net. CamStudio’s interface is not as slick, but for serious video capture of desktop and voice recordings, it is seems to produce a higher quality with the option to save as .avi or .swf formats. Being opensource the price is certainly right.