19. Find Even Folks Who Don't Want to Be Found

If your idea of finding someone is doing a simple Google search, you’ll never get your $200 a day plus expenses. Even though your best bet is to burn shoe leather, there are certainly better tools a mouse detective can use than a basic search engine. We always begin our searches at Zabasearch.com. Where the data comes from we don’t know, but we often don’t have to look much further than that site.

Phone listings are another reliable resource. We prefer Anywho.com, but there are a number of other white page directories online as well. The key is to search not only for the person’s full name but also just their last name.

20. Distribute Your Music Independently

You don’t need to sell your soul to get your music into the major digital music stores. TuneCore (www.tunecore.com) makes it possible for you to distribute an album through iTunes, eMusic, Rhapsody, Napster, and other sites with very little hassle and minimal expense. It’s the service Trent Reznor is using to distribute his album Ghosts. Here’s how it works: You pay $19.98 a year for TuneCore to store your uploaded album, plus a one-time fee of $.99 per song on the album and $.99 per store you want your tunes sold through. TuneCore passes along all the money from your music’s sales and you retain all the rights.

21. Claim Money That's Rightfully Yours

U.S. state treasuries are safeguarding $32.87 billion that comes from a variety of sources, including lost or forgotten tax rebates, insurance refunds, traveler’s checks, and bank accounts. And some of that cash might be yours. To find out if you are in for a payday, go to MissingMoney.com. Enter your name and the site will search a database of 41 states, as well as several Canadian provinces. MissingMoney also links to databases for states that are not yet part of the site.

22. Keep Your Pop-Up Notificatons under One Roof

You finish downloading a file, your computer pops up a little window. Your friend logs online, another message pops up. You’re at 20 percent battery life, another pop-up.

A free application called Snarl (www.fullphat.net) collects all of these notifications and spits them out under a single manageable interface. Plus, there are plugins available that let you add pop-up support for your favorite apps: See what song just loaded in iTunes, what friend just signed on in Pidgin, or what email just arrived in your Thunderbird inbox.

23. Inventory Your Belongings

The last thing you want to deal with after a devastating fire is wrangling with an insurance company. You can make the process less painful and recoup more of your losses if you have a thorough, up-to-date accounting of all your stuff. Enter the Insurance Information Institute’s free Home Inventory software (www.knowyourstuff.org). The app lets you create inventories for all of the rooms in your home. You can include information such as each item’s purchase date, serial number, and price, and even a digital picture if you’re really meticulous. Then make sure you save a copy of the inventory outside your home!

24. Find the Creeps in Your Neighborhood

CrimeReports.com lets you check out how safe a neighborhood is before you move in. Type in a zip code or intersection and a map pops up with color-coded icons showing what crimes have occurred over a day-, week-, or month-long period. Familywatchdog.us is a similar site that maps sex offenders by region or name.

25. Use Your Internet Savvy to Get Rich

Put your hours of web browsing and meme tracking to good use. Entrepreneurial Internet junkies should be able to spot trends just as they’re emerging and capitalize on their impending popularity to make some dough. An example: Buy up domains of hot branded properties before they hit the mainstream. If you stumble onto the next Harry Potter or Twilight, take a risk and buy domains related to those brands (e.g., harrypotterthegame.com or harrypottermovie.com). Claiming URLs for unannounced sequels (bioshock3.com) or common typos (microsuft.com) also works. And don’t just domain squat idly while waiting to be bought out—fill your site with Google ads to milk page views from unsuspecting visitors. We know a colleague who rakes in a $1,000 a month just from ads placed on his otherwise unpopulated Grand Theft Auto IV-related domain.

Don’t stop at domains, either. With a little more investment, you can turn budding Internet memes into lucrative T-shirt and decal enterprises. The first person to offer American Idol-washout William Hung-branded merchandise sold 15,000 shirts in a month.

26. Find Just the Right Recipe

The first step in making a killer home-cooked meal is having the right recipe. And for that you need look no further than Google Base (http://tinyurl.com/27hmql). The user-generated database is a source of hundreds of thousands of recipes that can be easily searched by keyword, course, ingredient, etc. If your tastes run more along the lines of corporate cuisine, you’ll want to dig into Topsecretrecipes.com: Whether you have a hankering for a 7-11 Cherry Slurpee, Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies, or KFC cole slaw, you’ll learn how to make it here.

27. Be Your Own Handyman

Forget about paying a week’s wages to have a leaky pipe fixed or a furnace maintained. You can get tutorials on these jobs and a host of other home projects at HGTV.com and DIYNetwork.com. Between the two sites, you can learn everything from basic plumbing techniques to the proper operation of woodworking tools to the steps required for a complete kitchen remodel, often with the aid of video.