Here at ValpoLife, I spend a lot of time at my desk in front of the computer. I like to get the things I have to do on the computer done as quickly and efficiently as possible so I don't have to spend any more time than I absolutely have to. I mean, spring is right around the corner, why would I want to spend more time inside?

I assume many of you are in the same boat. So, I'd like to share seven FREE tools that I use to make my day online easier, faster, and more fun.

Pandora - www.Pandora.com
Do you like music? Internet radio has increasingly become a bigger and bigger part of my day. I am one of those people that, for whatever reason, work better if something is blasting in my ears. When I'm not listening to podcasts, I'm usually on Pandora.

Pandora is Radio 2.0. It asks you to put it an artist or song you like-almost every artist is in their system-and Pandora selects songs from that artist along with similar artists and styles, giving you an endless stream of tunes you like, all for free.

There are occasional 15 or 30-second ads, but more often that not you're listening to something you like. By "Thumbs Up"-ing songs, you tell Pandora to pick more songs like the ones you enjoy. You can "Thumbs Down" songs you dislike, and they'll never play that song again. If you hear a song you've heard too often, there is an option for Pandora to not play that song for a month. You are constantly refining the songs played to be exactly what you like. I've got "stations" for rock (Black Keys, White Stripes, Strokes, Led Zeppelin), classic rock (Beatles, Rush, Yes, Bob Dylan, etc.), and when I feel like it, I've got my rap station going.

Tweetdeck - www.TweetDeck.com
Everyone's on Facebook now-a-days, and Twitter keeps growing as well. Instead of wasting time going to Facebook.com and Twitter.com to keep up with all of the status updates, I use TweetDeck to pull all of that information in one place.

With the TweetDeck desktop application, I can manage my Twitter account, ValpoLife's, PortageLife's, along with my Facebook feed, all in one place that also lets me send updates, auto-shorten URLs, and constantly search for topics of interest. Tweetdeck is an amazing tool that is as useful to me as any on the web.

Google Reader/iGoogle
I've touched on Why I Switched from Newspapers to Google Reader before, but RSS feeds changed how I use the internet. Look at my Links of the Week blogs, how do you think I can find so much crap, especially crap in different areas of the web?

I use services that let the internet come to me. Think of it this way: why go searching for a restaurant if they all deliver and the food is just as good/fresh, and its free?

Thunderbird - www.mozillamessaging.com/thunderbird/
I know, email clients seem like a no-brainer, right? Many folks are using Outlook- it seems integrated into everything from the iPhone to Blackberry to Google. I am separate my personal email from my work email though, so I use Thunderbird to manage my Google & Yahoo emails and Outlook for everything else.

Thunderbird, so far, has been really good at quickly and easily managing my G-mail, as it automatically detects settings so all I had to do to set up my account was type in my email and password. Will it ever replace my Outlook? Probably not, but its not hard to get used to either.

DownloadHelper - www.downloadhelper.net/
DownloadHelper is a Firefox addon (don't run away yet!) that is a super useful tool for grabbing multimedia files on the web that aren't generally available.

Take YouTube for example. Is there a video on there that you've watched a bazillion times that you just would rather have on your computer so you don't have to be online to access it? Is there a song that you don't want to pay for but you want on your iTunes? DownloadHelper makes available these files simply by clicking on the Helper tool and you've got your file. Simple as that.

Google Chrome - www.google.com/chrome
NERD ALERT: I've touched on the power of Google Chrome before (it's faster and it uses less memory), but one of the best aspects of Google Chrome is its web development tools.

When you are using Google Chrome, you can right click on something on the web and bring up its super-powerful "Inspect Element" tool. Firefox and IE have similar tools, but nothing breaks down a pages' code quite like Google Chrome. It compartmentalizes, and makes using the tool easy by highlighting on the page what you are looking at in the code. Good times.

VLC Media Player - www.videolan.org/vlc/
How many times have you tried to open a file and your iTunes, Windows Media Player, or whatever else and it gave you a codec error, some sort of extension error, or just wouldn't play the file?

VLC Media Player takes care of all of that. No matter the file type – Quicktime, mp3, flash – you name it VLC Media Player plays it. It's great just for the headache and gives you the piece of mind of having one less potential problem you'll ever have to worry about.

What did I miss? Are there tools out there I should know about? Let me know in the comments.