Everyone who uses Firefox has their favorite extensions, but this one has to be up there as one of the best pieces of software out there.

Simply: It lets you capture and save any part of a Web page, or the entire page, to your hard drive. When you do it, it saves everything locally you need to recreate the page — images, JavaScript, whatever. It can even go several layers deep to capture an entire site… if you have the hard drive space.

Scrapbook creates a straightforward, human-readable folder structure, and saves everything in the same format you found it — standard HTML with standard JPG and GIF images, and so on. So you’re not locked into in for the long term.

Your Scrapbook ‘collection’ is fully searchable, of course, so it’s a great way to capture stuff you find interesting but don’t know will be around forever (e.g., magazine articles).

Besides being a great tool for doing research and dumping what you find in a convenient place, it also lets you capture those transient pages. I’ve snagged some that I knew would be taken down (because of controversy, errors, etc.).

But wait, there’s more. You can edit what you capture to remove page elements you don’t want. For example, I used it to grab my clips from the Roanoke Times Web site, then removed all the crap on the page — the gadzillion ads, giant site-navigation boxes, etc. I printed the result to a PDF and presto: Clean, electronic clips.

So for doing research, preserving Web sites, or simply saving pages for offline viewing, Scrapbook is a kick-ass extension.

Scrapbook Firefox extension; free.

Every Windows user should get this thing.

If you’ve ever uninstalled software, you probably know that many programs leave crap behind; that’s why there are registry cleaners and unnecessary-file finders and so on. Sometimes it’s just a small entry in the Registry. Sometimes its an entire folder, or more.

It doesn’t matter whether you use Windows’ built-in Add/Remove Programs or the individual application’s uninstaller — junk gets left behind.

This becomes especially apparent when you use the wonderful freeware tool Revo Uninstaller. It finds the crap and removes it. Period.

I won’t go near Add/Remove Programs anymore. Instead, I have Revo on my Start menu and use it instead.

Start the program and you see icons for all your installed software. Double-click whatever you want to remove and Revo gives you four options. I always choose the last: “Advanced,” which “performs a deep and thorough scan to find all of the application’s leftover information in the Registry and on the hard drive.”

And boy, does it. I’ve removed maybe a dozen things since I got Revo, and every one has left a bunch of junk in the Registry, on the drive, or both.

Here are the Registry entries and leftover files it found when I uninstalled BlogDesk, for example:

Why software makers can’t get their products to uninstall properly, I don’t know. But I do know that I’m glad to have found Revo Uninstaller.

(Note: If you have TweakUI, you can use it to remove the Add/Remove Programs icon from the Control Panel completely, so you don’t forget to use Revo instead.)

Revo Uninstaller: Freeware

I have tried a lot of video-editing applications, both consumer and "pro" — Avid, Pinnacle, Premiere (and Premiere Elements), Ulead — and none of them can hold a candle to Sony’s Vegas family, which includes Vegas Pro and Vegas Movie Studio.

It’s a shame that Pinnacle Studio and Adobe Premiere Elements are the two big names that come up when you talk about consumer video editing (aside from iMovie and Window Movie Maker, both of which are free).

Pinnacle is absolute crap. Flotsam. Garbage. It’s not about the dumbed-down interface; the thing just doesn’t work. Read the message boards and you’ll see they’re full of complaints about slow performance and frequent lockups.

Premiere is better, for sure, but compared to Vegas it’s overly complex and certainly unintuitive.

I’m not a video-editing pro by any means, and I don’t intend to be one. But I do like to take my videos and make them a bit better. I add titles and simple transitions (fancy transitions, to me, are a mark of an amateur) and edit hour long videos down to five minutes.

But occasionally I get a bit fancy — I’ll add still photos, or dub in a sound, or do a picture in picture. And I want doing those things to make sense.

With Vegas they do. (Vegas is the pro product; most of you will want Vegas Movie Studio which sells for about $100 — the same as the other consumer editors.)

Most video editors are similar. You have your timeline where you drop and arrange the clips that make up your movie, you have a preview window, you have a list of clips, and so on.

The first nice thing I discovered about Vegas is how it handled transitions. If you have two clips next to each other on the timeline, you simply drag one so it overlaps the other by a few frames (or more). You automatically get a crossover transition — one fades out as the other fades in.

With crossovers and fade-to-black being the most common and useful transition, this makes things really easy. (With Premiere you put the clips next to each other, the make your way through the video transitions lists and sub-lists until you find the crossover, then you drag it between the clips. For a feature you use a lot it’s really annoying.)

All of Vegas is like that: Clean and intuitive. Sure, there’s a learning curve. You’ll have one with any video editor. But so much about Vegas is done right that the curve isn’t that steep. (And unlike Pinnacle or Ulead products, you don’t feel like you’re being treated like an idiot.)

Vegas has a gadzillion features that I won’t bother to list, from HD support to a huge list of output formats, to tons of plugins.

If you want to get into video editing beyond Windows Movie Maker (which isn’t bad, to be honest), Sony Vegas Movie Studio is the way to go. You can even download a 30-day free trial if you don’t believe me.

Sony Vegas Movie Studio: About $70-$129 depending on version

Long I have searched for the perfect pen for daily writing. I love fountain pens, but they weren’t the best for stuffing in your pocket. And I don’t want to spend money on something that is likely to be lost or stolen by a five year old.

So the quest was on for the perfect “daily driver” disposable (or at least inexpensive) pen.

I learned early that a click pen was out; I wanted one with a cap. I tend to put my pens in my front pants pocket, where click pens tend to, well, click. The point is exposed and I get a stain on my jeans.

The Pilot G2 gets a lot of good write-ups, but it’s a clicker (plus it wasn’t quite as crisp as I liked). I loved Uni-ball Micro pens, but when I found the Grip I realized it was better. Perfect, in fact.

It’s not too big, not too small. Having used both large- and small-diameter pens, I know how tiring the wrong size can be. More importantly is the “grip” part of the Grip — the place you hold is rubberized. It’s wonderful to write with. (And unlike the Uni-ball Vision pens, the barrel doesn’t end up looking like it’s leaking ink internally.)

Add the fact that it uses “fade- and water-resistant ink,” and you’ve got a winner.

It comes in blue, red, and black ink (sadly, no green), and fine (.7mm) and micro (.5mm) points. I use the micro, FWIW.

Uni-ball Roller Grip pen: About $1.50 street

The good folks at Saitek sent this to me when I was doing a story on gaming peripherals for the Roanoke Times. Unlike some other gaming keyboards, this isn’t chock full of all sorts of odd gaming doo-dads. And that doesn’t matter; it’s nearly perfect as-is.

The beauty of the Eclipse II is that Saitek emphasized the important stuff. The keys feel great; they have the right amount of travel and require the right amount of force to tap. (There are a lot of mushy “quiet” keyboards out there that are lousy for typing.)

It’s also sturdy. My second-favorite keyboard, the Keytronic EO3600Q, also has great feel, but it went on the fritz after about 18 months, and Keytronic told me it was out of warranty. My 10-year-old Gateway 2000 keyboard, which came free with an old PC, is still working fine, so thumbs down to Keytronic.

Saitek has also put some thought into some smaller things. The Eclipse II is heavy, and this is a good thing; it doesn’t move on the desktop. It also has non-slip feet for the same reason.

Like most keyboards, you can flip out a couple of clips to raise it to a slight angle, but the Eclipse II has two of these so you can use it flat, at a traditional slope, or in between.

Oh, and it’s also backlit — a nice feature if you like to work or play in the dark. Choose from red, purple, or blue, and you can adjust the brightness. (For me that’s mostly a gimmick, but a lot of gamers like it.)

Finally, it has basic multimedia controls in the upper-right corner where they’re unobtrusive. A lot of keyboards have a huge line of these across the top, which seems a waste of space. Oh, and it uses standard Philips screws to open it, if you need to clean it out.

If you’re a typist or a gamer, simply put this is the keyboard for you. Period.

Minor nits: The backlighting isn’t quite even or bright enough for my tastes. The NumLock, CapsLock, and ScrollLock indicator lights are in an odd place, so it takes an extra moment to see if they’re lit.

Saitek Eclipse II keyboard: About $50 street