Picasa also makes it easy to edit and enhance your digital photos with simple and intuitive controls. Picasa includes 12 visual effects as well as many basic fixes.

Picasa’s Basic Fixes are buttons that make it fast and easy to crop, remove red eye, fix the contrast and color, and enhance your digital pictures.

One of my favorite features in Picasa is the screensaver album. Once Picasa is installed, go into your desktop properties and select Picasa as your screensaver. Whenever your screensaver kicks on, Picasa will play a slideshow of the contents of the screensaver album. If you keep lots of family photos on your computer, your idle monitor can become a digital photo frame.

Its easy to share your photos with Picasa too. If you have a CD burner (and who doesn’t anymore), Picasa can burn Gift CDs and DVDs that instantly play photo slideshows on grandma’s computer. Picasa has plenty of print options for your home printer as well as uploading your photos to order professional prints.

Picasa supports jpg, bmp, gif, png, psd and tif images as well as RAW data files, including cameras from Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Minolta and Pentax. Picasa will also recognize and organize your avi, mpg, wmv, asf and mov video formats.

Picasa is a free download from Google.

While Windows XP has Zip Compression built into it, 7-Zip supports many more compression formats including, TAR, RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ and more. 7-Zip integrates with the Windows Shell, so extracting a Zip file is just a right-click away.

7-Zip is an open source, free download for Windows. There is also a pz7ip project at sourceforge for Posix/Linux systems.

Once you’ve installed Ted, all you have to do is add a show you want it to watch for. You can have it start with the most current episode by clicking the “Get latest” button. If the show you want isn’t in Ted’s list, it allows you to manually enter the name and the RSS feeds to watch for it.

Ted is a cross platform free download.

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

Handbrake can take in any DVD source (VIDEO_TS folders, DVD images or real DVDs) and output it to either MP4, AVI, or OGM format. Handbrake supports chapters, auto-cropping and scaling so running the program is about as easy as 1. browse to your DVD source 2. pick your output format and 3. output to your destination file.

Obviously, the 4th step would be watching your movie on your computer or mobile device, but 1, 2, 3 sounds so much better.

Handbrake is a free download.

Here’s a real handy way to help your lost USB drive find its way home.

Daily Cup of Tech gives us some simple files to put on your USB drives to encourage people to return it.

Download this ZIP file and unzip it to the root of your USB drive. Edit readme.txt with a nice note encouraging the finder to return the drive to you. Unplug the drive and plug it back in.

You (and everyone else) will get this Auto Play menu.

Clicking OK or double clicking the drive in My Computer will result in the Help.exe program displaying your text from readme.txt, thanks to the autorun.inf file.(Note: If your drive already has an AutoRun.inf file, compare the two and add what is needed.)

What other steps can someone take to ensure the safe return of their portable drives? Let us know in the comments.