Widgets: neat little applets that live on your desktop or sidebar.
This freebie is an engine from Yahoo that lets you choose from
hundreds of great mini-applications that do just about anything you
can imagine–and probably plenty of things you can’t. When you
download it, you get the engine itself plus a starter pack of
widgets that includes a clock, a battery monitor, a stock tracker,
an e-mail checker, a weather widget, and others. You can position
the widgets on the side of your screen or anywhere on your desktop.
Yahoo’s site has plenty of other free widgets, including RSS readers, games, an iTunes remote controller, and even a tuner for listening to Sirius satellite radio on your PC (but you’ll need a subscription for that). You can even find a widget based on the TV show Lost, in which you can enter the numbers “4 8 15 16 23 42” every 108 minutes, just like the characters did down in the hatch.
–Preston Gralla