Here are the software packages, web services and programming tools I use, and maybe you can find something interesting for yourself:

Google News Alerts: I keep track of my name as well as my web sites whenever they appear in the Google News network. Keeping track of terms such as "Google" or "Gmail" floods my inbox.

Google News: Here I check for "Google" and related terms.

WebSite Watcher: This will alert me of changes on several pages.

PHP: I wrote OpenTrivia, FindForward and others using PHP. PHP is not the most elegant language (no standardized function names, dollar preceding every variable, no hidden class members, no way to force variable declaration) but it gets the job done.

Python: Just to play around, I also wrote a QML http://www.questml.com parser with it. More elegant than PHP but only run in a special directory on my server, so it's not that interesting to me.

MagpieRSS: To parse RSS in PHP
Thumbshots http://www.thumbshots.org : Puts little images next to search results, if you have a search engine on your server.

Amazon Web API

Google Web API

Netpadd: For everything I write and program I use my Netpadd http://www.netpadd.com .

XML: I use XML as basis for QML and OpenTrivia http://www.opentrivia.com .

Blogger Pro account: my weblog software, which FTPs content to my server via Blogger.com. (Why can't I set my default blog to edit? Would make creating new posts even faster.)

Schlund: This is where I host my server. I use Apache/ Linux, along with a lot of htaccess-files, which I'm very happy with. Windows Servers really lack the power of easy URL rewriting. German host Schlund http://www.schlund.de is stable, though their support is somewhat flaky.

Project Gutenberg: publisher of public domain texts. I convert them to XHTML1.0 Strict + CSS for Authorama http://www.authorama.com .

Google: all my searching, of course.

Paint Shop Pro 4: Smaller image editing jobs. Great for working on a pixel level.

Corel Photo Paint 11: More advanced image editing. Nice interface, nice scripting, somewhat buggy. As powerful as Photoshop if you don't care about printing.

Windows XP: well, what can I say. This is my OS. It's not a beauty, but it was on this machine. Hands up, which Windows user actually likes Windows?

Gmail: all my email. Replaced Hotmail for me (two... megabyte). I was also briefly trying Yahoo! Mail but boy, is it useless what with the in-between ads.

Froogle: For product search. This comes in handy once in a while, though it's only for the US market so far.

Google Answers: When I'm out of answers.

Adresses, passwords and others: I use my QuickDat http://outer-court.com/tech/quickdat.html (a PHP application back when I didn't have MySQL).

MySQL: to store data for the forum and other applications. I also have two dictionaries on my server, the small one with around 30,000 words.

Which tools do you use?