Some worthy links:

• Phun: 2D physics sandbox
• dgminiscavi, one of my first sites, with some basic PHP stuff
• adcomunicazione, a site developed by a friend

And some worthy apps:

• imagemagick
• pdfcreator: .pdf printer driver
• 7z archiver: good file compression/decompression tool
• Lingoes: instant dictionary
• Music score
• yEd

Some criterion to choose a tool:

• Free or open source
• Storing/exporting to open formats like xml to reuse your work
• State of the art
• One perfect example is yEd for diagrams

Along to the editors bundled with Eclipse Borland C++ Builder NetBeans Aptana Almost every programmer The search for the perfect text editor for a programmer is like the holy graal quest In my experience I used ConTEXT, Notepad++, PSPad and now Sublime text. and so on Typically my needs are encoding/line ending,

• PSPad
  • Very good scripting support (WSH), I used javascript, you can do everything with it, very powerful!
  • Code explorer, very useful to navigate source (also XML files)
  • Code highlighting rules too simple (just keywords list)
  • Dark theme applies just on editor area, the rest is up to Windows
  • A lot of things I do not use
  • Very basic editing features, there is column selection but no column editing nor smart token highlighting
• Notepad++
  • Column editing
  • Multiline search and replace
  • Smart token highlighting
  • Good plugin system, but not so immediate obtain what you want with LUA
  • Code highlighting rules does not support regular expressions