Many of us have accrued a massive collection of DVDs and Blu-ray discs, but not everyone has gone to the trouble of cataloging what they have. But keeping a precise inventory has its advantages, and that is where the free and very capable My Movies more than ably fills the need.

First of all, if you only have a small collection, seeing what you have is easy enough. But if you have a huge collection of hundreds or even thousands of disks, it's very easy to lose the overview of your collection. You may start accidently buying duplicate disks.

Another thought: If you have a disaster such as a burglary, fire, or flood, you can lose your beloved collection.  Home insurance requires exact property lists if you want to make a claim. Again, a few disks makes this an easy task, but if you have hundreds, that's another kettle of fish.

Even your own generosity can do you in. If you are in the habit of loaning disks to friends and colleagues, it can become easy to lose track of who has what, and for how long. Keeping a record will help you to recover disks from forgetful friends.

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There are few things more appetizing than gorgeous, high-resolution photos of delicious food. Cookbook editors have known this for years, and the modern cookbook is bursting with full-page glossy photos showcasing the recipes. iCookbook is a $5 cooking app for Windows 8  that takes this aesthetic and brings it to life with thousands of photos, each leading to a beautifully typeset recipe.

Windows 8's Modern UI is all about tiles, and iCookbook uses them to good advantage. Every recipe is represented by a tile bearing a photo and caption, but they're not all the same size: The main screen is subdivided into several categories, each with a large centerpiece tile and three smaller tiles below. These categories let you browse recipes by dish, ingredient, theme, cuisine, occasion, and brand.

If one of the images on the main screen catches your fancy, just click to open the full recipe. But if you'd like to drill deeper into a category, you can click its header and find yourself in a submenu with vertical tiles, one per subcategory. So click Dish, and you get Appetizers & Snacks, Beverages, Breakfasts & Brunches, and many more. Click a subcategory, and you'll find yourself in a screen full of alphabetically sorted tiles, each for a recipe in that subcategory. There are often more recipes in a subcategory than can fit on the screen, so you can scroll to see more – horizontally. In fact, all scrolling in iCookbook is horizontal. This can be strange and distracting at first, but such is the way of the Modern UI.

With thousands of recipes available, search is a must-have feature. At first I just tried typing, expecting a search bar to pop up with my first keystroke, like it does in the Windows Start Screen and Windows Store. When that didn't happen, I brought up the Windows 8 Charms bar and clicked the Search icon. That did the trick, and I was able to quickly search for recipes.

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How's your day going? You probably don't need a piece of software to answer that question.  But what about your week or your month? DayScore is a free web-app that believes it's all about habits. Do the right thing enough times, and eventually it will become a habit. DayScore tries to help by letting you define habits you'd like to make or keep, and effortlessly track them over time with a huge, bold score and a pretty graph.

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With Autumn in full swing, what better way to celebrate the cooler days and longer nights than with these free fonts. From falling leaves to pumpkins to pilgrim's hats, whatever your font-needs this season, these typefaces will fill your font cornucopia. You'll feel a wealth of abundance with this selection, because these are all free for personal use.

To find all these fonts in one place, see our "Autumn harvest fonts add a crisp, cool breeze to your text" collection.

Autumn Gifts

Do you remember those days of your youth when you'd get lost in the corn maze for hours, until your parents had to send in the farmer to look for you? If you do, Autumn Gifts—a TrueType Outlines font from West Winds Fonts—could be your new personal favorite. Each letter comprises corn and husks or oak leaves and acorns, stylishly drawn yet relaxed and fun. Autumn Gifts includes just upper case letters—lower case would be too complex to display well—-plus numbers and common punctuation.

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Whether it's for swim camp or pony camp, sleep-away or day camp, or even stay-at-home-and-play camp, we have a font to make your summer fun even more sugary, scary, and silly. All these fonts are free for personal use, so load them up and enjoy the memories—without the mosquitoes.

(For links to all of these downloadable fonts in one convenient list, see our "Five Free Fonts Welcome You to Summer Camp" collection.)

JI Marshmallow Roast

It includes no punctuation (which makes writing s'mores difficult), so you must choose your headline well. And instead of producing an empty marshmallow, pressing the spacebar creates an additional part of a stick. The sticks are brilliantly executed, however—you can use the parentheses and square brackets to add stick ends in either direction. Whether you like your marshmallows blackened or lightly toasted, JI Marshmallow Roast is a fun way to advertise your campfire s'mores night. JI Marshmallow Roast is free for personal use; for commercial use, contact Ingalls.

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Legacy Family Tree is a free software tool that can help fill in the gaps in your background and dig up your roots whether they're Jewish, Mormon, Catholic, atheist, or any other denomination.

There are other places too, where you'll notice a connection with the LDS Church. The Temple button, for example (used for church members to add LDS Ordinances) and many reports. All of this appears by default, which makes Legacy Family Tree a great tool for LDS Church members, but may be mildly irritating for users who are not.

If you choose to use the Legacy Guided Startup Wizard to enter names, it's much like GenoPro ($50, family tree and genogram maker), or Family Tree Maker ($40, an ancestry research tool), in that it's easy to add all the pertinent information, names, birth date, birth place, sex, spouse and parents—except that you need to start with yourself. If this is not where you want to start, try creating an empty family file (an option within the Guided Start) and go from there.

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Genealogy software Family Tree Builder is a helpful research tool for people who find it a daunting task to figure out the best way to link together all the information they collect about relatives through letters, old documents or photographs.

You also may use Family Tree Builder to start from scratch, which the smooth, well thought-out UI makes easy and intuitive. Either way, growing a family tree with Family Tree Builder is very similar to that of Family Tree Maker 2012 ($40). Family Tree Builder's process makes sense: You start anywhere on your tree and add parents or children as you go. There are a few features in Family Tree Builder I prefer over Family Tree Maker: You can include both maiden names and married names in Family Tree Builder, which eliminates the confusion when researching your extended family; there's also a deceased checkbox.

Much like Legacy Family Tree (free), you can easily add images, documents, and video/audio to your Family Tree Builder database. In addition, you can associate photos to multiple people, allowing you to upload a group image only once and include it in multiple database entries.

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The United States is a country of immigrants. It's rare to find anyone who doesn't have to start looking outside of the country for information about their grandparents or greatgrandparents. If you don't have the funds or the time to cross the world in search of ancestors, Ancestry.com's Family Tree Maker 2012 ($40, buy-only) may be your answer.

Unlike similar family tree catologs and creators—GenoPro ($50, family tree and genogram creator) and Legacy Family Tree (free Standard Edition family tree database) in particular—Family Tree Maker has a very professional and sleek user interface. Family Tree Maker is a lot like Family Tree Builder (free) in its professional appearance and ease of use. Just like Family Tree Builder, when you start from scratch using Family Tree Maker, it makes no difference where in the timeline you begin: Adding parents, spouses, children, and siblings as you go is not difficult. And Family Tree Maker's UI won't take you long to understand, and even if you have a very complex family tree, you won't get too lost after you've used it for just a short time.

If you import a Legacy Family Tree (a free shareware program that excels at keeping track of details of your extended family), database, Family Tree Maker advises you to go to Tool > Resolve All Place Names since Legacy and Family Tree Maker have a known conflict with the way places are cataloged in each database.

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Tracing can be like a forensics procedural, only with fewer neat answers. There are many reasons for wanting to know who your ancestors are, from being curious as to where you came from; to needing to know medical conditions you may pass on to your own offspring; not to mention the complexities of recording nuances of personality and eccentricity. Fortunately, GenoPro has been designed with all this in mind.

GenoPro also opens with five different toolbars. It's a little daunting, but you can hide them all by visiting the View menu.

Once you have GenoPro's UI under control, you can either import a GEDCOM file (GEDCOM is the standard Genealogical Data Communication format used by most genealogical software to share information) or start entering family information into the database.

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Facebook is a lot of fun...until you realize that much of the information posted there could be found by someone you might not want to see it. Like your boss, or potential boss. Your mother, or your potential mother-in-law. Ever wonder how your Facebook page might make you look to someone else? NetworkClean can show you: This free service scans and monitors your Facebook account, alerting you to any problems lurking there.

To use NetworkClean, you need to grant it permission to access your Facebook account. And the first thing it does is post a big ol' advertisement on your Timeline, letting your friends know about NetworkClean. Then, when it begins scanning your Facebook account, NetworkClean displays a pop-up suggesting you like its page on Facebook. I was able to dismiss this pop-up on the first computer I used for testing, but then when I tried NetworkClean on a second computer, I had to like the NetworkClean page in order to continue using the service for free. While I understand the need for advertising, I could do without these intrusions.

Luckily, NetworkClean offers useful features that make up for the ads. Once your Facebook account is scanned (which takes several minutes, but not an inordinate amount of time), the service presents you with an overview via its neatly organized dashboard. It told me that the overall tone of my Facebook is mostly positive, which seems fairly accurate. So, too, does the face that recent trends on my account include "love" and "liane"--but I'm not sure how useful that information is.

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It's that time of year when mosts of the Northern Hemisphere is starting to warm up to the idea of being outside. Going for a run in the fresh air sounds appealing, but don't lace up your shoes just yet. Spending a few more minutes at your computer (or in some cases, your mobile device) can help you choose the best route and make the most of your workout.

MapMyRUN

Read the full review and sign up for MapMyRUN (free).

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If you took a little bit of Twitter and added in a big scoop of enthusiasm for running, you'd end up with something a whole lot like dailymile. This is a workout planning and tracking service that's heavy on social networking features.

Once you've logged your workout, dailymile displays your progress in a variety of useful ways. A bar chart, organized by date, lets you see the miles you've logged at a glance; clicking the training tab takes things a step further, displaying your average distance, pace, time, intensity, and more. And your lifetime stats serves up your total miles and time, as well as pounds burned, gas saved, TVs powered, and donuts burned off. The presentation and the information offered up are both entertaining and useful.

Dailymile's appeal is only partly about its fitness features: It's just as much a social networking site. The home page offers a Facebook-like status update bar that lets you share information about your training with other dailymile users; updates also can be posted to Facebook and Twitter. Anything you share on dailymile is offered up to the entire site's audience, though, as there are no privacy controls for limiting who sees the info you post. Likewise, you're free to view and comment on the updates that any other users post.

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Working out is hard work. And all too often, so too are the fitness services that are designed to help you map and track your workouts. But not FriendFit: This social network-meets-fitness logging and mapping service offers plenty of practical features for fitness buffs of all levels, but manages to make using them a whole lot of fun.

FriendFit's focus is on fitness in general, unlike rivals such as WalkJogRun and MapMyRUN, which are more geared toward users who walk, bike, or run outdoors. FriendFit, meanwhile, lets you log all sorts of fitness activities, from bowling and Wii Fit use, to swimming and kayaking. When you log an activity, it shows up in your activity feed, which allows you to see, at a glance, how much exercise you're getting and how many calories you've burned. It's a great way to track and monitor your activity level.

Like WalkJogRun and MapMyRun, FriendFit does let you map your outdoor routes, using embedded Google Maps right on the site. I found FriendFit's map controls slightly more refined than those of its rivals, as Friend Fit automatically adjusted routes to match the curves and bends of the roads on the maps. Both MapMyRun and WalkJogRun plot your course in a straight line, regardless of bends in the road, and require you to make these adjustments manually, which can be time consuming. And, like MapMyRun, FriendFit lets you see 3D flyovers of workout routes, using a Google Earth plug-in.

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Whether you're a serious runner or a casual jogger, tracking your workouts will help you get and stay in shape. Enter MapMyRUN. This free (but ad-supported; ad-free paid versions available) cloud-based service offers a host of tools for runners of all levels.

Clicking the "Routes" tab takes you to the key section of MapMyRUN, where you can create new runs and search for existing routes nearby. You enter your location, and an embedded map shows nearby routes that have been created by other users. You can narrow your search by workout distance, activity type (running, biking, hiking, dog walking, commuting, and more), and location. If you're one of those runners--like me--who easily tires of the same scenery, this is an easy way to find new routes. I was impressed with the number of routes I found near my house in suburban Boston, and I liked how I could preview the route on a map or in a 3D flyover, powered by Google Earth, but displayed inside the MapMyRUN window.

I was also impressed with how easy it was to map the distance of my favorite running routes--as long as the route was pretty basic. MapMyRUN lives up to the promise of its name by allowing you to track your route on a map, and shows you both the distance and elevation of your workout. On occasion, though, I found that some of its controls needed a little fine-tuning. When I mapped a basic loop that I jogged around town, MapMyRUN worked great. I easily clicked on the roads to track my steps, and saved the route without a problem. But sometimes, when I backtracked or used the same roads more than once during a run, MapMyRUN didn't understand my intent. Instead of understanding that I had backtracked, it instead assumed instead that I was editing the route on the map.

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The biggest challenges for all growers--commercial or recreational--is keeping track of the variables of the season and making decisions based on past performance. MyGardenBytes is a database that allows you to track seeds, clones, plants, and fertilizer use, in general and through daily journals, and across multiple locations.

There are a few things that you can't track: weather conditions, location, sales, or profits, but MyGardenBytes includes comments fields on each entry which you can use for text. And there are a few annoyances: You can add images, although if they are tall orientation they'll stretch to fit the wide aspect; the highly patterned user interface makes the text difficult to read; and there's no obvious way to back up your files.

You can export your files and reports from MyGardenBytes as .XML or JPEG, or print them. Currently, you can import .XML files only, but MyGardenBytes' developer hopes to soon add a utility to import any spreadsheet into the program.

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The big room with the blue ceiling can be a scary place. Free screensaver YoWindow 2.0 shows you what it's like out there from the comfort of your cubicle or mancave.

In addition to the stock image, any picture with a sky component can be used. Users have contributed dozens of such images, all prepared for use with YoWindow. I liked one called Cabrera, a ruined castle on a rocky hill; others include cityscapes from New York or Hong Kong, or various outdoor locations. When one of these images is chosen, the same sky effects occur--darkening, lighting, storms, and so on--but there is obviously no animation. I found I liked the static image + weather effects better than the animated screens. Tastes may differ, of course.

YoWindow allows you to select several locations, so you can check the weather in many places. Here's where I found some problems--the default "Add Location" menu item did not work for me (Repkasoft is looking into the bug), and using the "Manage Locations" dialog, while it did work and I was able to add several places, from Anchorage to Tokyo, had some odd glitches with items sometimes duplicating.

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