Can't go a week on any given tech site nowadays without seeing the "F" word. By that, of course, I'm referring to Facebook--and all the privacy implications for its users that have been arguing about on the Web for the past many weeks.

I'm not here to tell you that Facebook is good, evil, or a delicious chocolate-vanilla-strawberry mix. Make that decision yourself. What I can do, however, is point you to a wonderful tool for assessing your own privacy levels on the service. Trying to navigate Facebook's litany of settings and options for keeping this, that, and the other in (or out) of the public eye is indeed treacherous. Don't give up hope, though; salvation lies in the form of a tiny little bookmarklet that you can run on your profile at a moment's notice.

What's on your PC?  It's a fairly innocuous question, one that even the most tired of geeks should be answer without a moment's hesitation.  But let's face it -- you sometimes spend a decent amount of time between upgrades.  So much so, that you might have very well lost track of the exact names of the parts and pieces inside your system.  Do I personally remember the exact model name of my motherboard?  Nope!  I won't tell you the manufacturer, but I've definitely had to pop off the side of the case and scan around, flashlight in hand, just to find my motherboard's actual model number for a firmware update search.

Yuck.

Don't let that be you.  Furthermore, now's as good a time as any to get a solid inventory of not only the parts and pieces attached to your rig, but a full list of your installed software (and running services) as well.  Why's that?  Suppose your rig crashes tomorrow--I'm talking about the big one.  No hard drive.  All your data's wiped out.  Can you honestly tell me that you'll remember each little freeware app or utility you installed on your system when you go to rebuild your machine?  Wouldn't it be nice to have a little checklist to help you along?

And thus enters this week's download of the week--an application that goes above-and-beyond the call of duty to give you a full load-out of every little thing, hardware or software, that's in any way connected to your system.  But that's not all...

A few habits separate the average Web surfer from the hyper-obsessive or "geek" Web surfer. Average Web surfers browse from site to site in a spidery fashion, allowing the contents of one to link them to the landing page of another. These pages, in turn, become new gateways for successive clicks in a giant, unfolding map of activity. Average Web surfers might have a few sites they like to hit up from time to time, but their general browsing habits are more random voyage than predestined path.

Geeks are not that. A geeky Web surfer has a set list of sites that are nothing short of awesome. These sites are scoured as much as your average preteen checks Facebook on a daily basis, if not more. Every last drop of useful information is extracted from each browsing session, and every one of these sites contains a melting pot of useful hyperlinks for adding extra innings to the surfing experience. Geeks will settle for nothing less than a constant influx of news and information.

The Firefox add-on Update Scanner bridges these two extremes by delivering a useful tool for browsing sessions of all shapes and sizes. Click the jump to see what it does!