Free Download A Day

For whatever reason, not everybody has a broadband connection. Whether because of owning old equipment, being in a rural location without high-speed service, or some other reason, some folks still have to depend on the old reliable 56kbps modem. Not too bad, until somebody decides to email you full-size pictures of their recent vacation. At five minutes per megabyte, it could be a long night trying to download all those images. Wouldn't it be nice if there were an easy way to squish those pictures down into a more bandwidth-friendly form?

TinyPic is a helpful tool that takes images that are too large and whittles them down to size. Since it doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles, anybody can figure out how to use it. Presets allow you to take any image and make it supersmall (with some loss of quality), as well as small, medium, or full screen in size. Just drag the image onto the app, click on a radio button, and you're done. You can also convert images to .gif format, although of course this works best with black-and-white or images, or drawings with a limited number of colors. You've got flexibility in naming your new images, so they aren't just assigned random strings of characters.

TinyPic runs on systems with Win98 or later.

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The Invoice Machine is a free online service that allows you to create invoices. You enter the pertinent information: who you are, who your client is, detail regarding what you're billing, that sort of thing. Turn the crank, and out comes a nicely formatted invoice, in one of four styles. It's supplied as a .pdf file that you download from the site. Print it and mail it out, or send it as an electronic bill to your clients, and just sit back and wait for the checks to come rolling in. The service doesn't save any of your information, so you aren't going to have to worry about anybody getting into your data.

The site walks you through the steps, and there is some sanity checking included in the process–it makes sure that you have entered a client name and an invoice number, for example. You can bill for services, products, hours, and days, with an unlimited number of individual item lines on a given invoice. Add in tax and shipping, and you've pretty much covered all your bases.

The Invoice Machine is an online tool, so if you've got a modern browser, you can run it. JavaScript must be turned on for this tool to work.

Try The Invoice Machine

There are a lot of personal information manager (PIM) applications out there, each one with some benefit to differentiate it from all the others. Here's one that's designed specifically for students in middle school, high school, and beyond.

StudyMinder Homework System Lite will help you to organize your life, and help to protect you from the last-minute all-nighter when you realize that everything is due tomorrow and you aren't ready. Enter your assignments, tests, etc., and not only will StudyMinder help you remember that you need to work on them, and when they're due; it will also help you figure out how much time you need to work on this item or that one today, in order for you to complete everything on schedule.

StudyMinder Lite is a free download and will run on Windows systems from Win98 through XP.

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Some are gifted artistically. Others have a knack for mathematics. Those two disciplines intersect with Bezier Draw.

Bezier Draw is a slick little program that allows you to create some fairly complicated sunburst-like designs. Based on Bézier Curves, the shapes can be layered upon one another to interesting effect. The appearance of the resulting images is not unlike those drawn with a Spirograph, even though technically those are typically hypotrochoids instead.

The shapes that are created are all closed upon themselves, so you can then flood regions with color, making for some rather nice images. A zoom feature makes it easy to manipulate lines and colors to make them "just right".

Bezier Draw is a Windows app. It requires 24-bit color ("True Color") for best results.

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Do you like to go to sleep listing to the dulcet tones of iTunes, or while watching your favorite DVD? Do you hate it when your system runs all night? You can have you cake and eat it–or at least have your music and listen to it–with Counting Sheep.

Counting Sheep is a system timer that lets you shut down after a specified period of time. Just set the hours, minutes, and seconds, hit the start button, and when Counting Sheep gets to zero, it just shuts your system down. If you prefer, you can put your Mac to sleep instead of shutting down, so both you and your system can get that much-needed shut-eye. There's a cancel button as well, so if you decide you want to stay up late with the big kids, you aren't going to have your computer shut down on you.

Counting Sheep is a Mac app that requires Tiger (OS X 10.4).

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Setting up and maintaining a website isn't the hardest thing in the world, but it's not the easiest thing either. You can geek it out and hand-code everything in a text editor, or you can go to the opposite extreme and use a hard-core WYSIWYG editor, where you never see any actual HTML code at all. Then there is the middle way.

Alleycode is a free HTML editor. Along with the usual bells and whistles–syntax highlighting, table wizard, special character insertion–it provides extra help with stylesheet coding and embedding PHP code in your pages. One particularly handy feature is the "Synchro View". While not really a WYSIWYG editor, its split screen lets you look at your source code and the rendered page at the same time. Highlighting a passage of your page's code will show the corresponding passage on the rendered page at the same time–a real time saver when you're working several levels deep in a complicated table structure.

Alleycode will run on any 32-bit Windows platform, from Win95 on up.

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Are you an air guitar aficionado? Do you lust after that sunburst Strat hanging in the music store window? If you've got a computer keyboard, this may be your lucky day.

Frets On Fire is a keyboard-based guitar playing game. Using a combination of Function keys and the the Enter key, you play along with individual notes and chords to rack up a big score. You can start at Easy level to learn the moves; graduate to Medium as you gain confidence, and eventually you'll be at Amazing, shredding with the best of them. There are tons of songs available, or you can import from Guitar Hero, or even create your own songs.

It may not be time to quit your day job yet, but with Frets On Fire, you'll feel like that big recording contract is just around the corner.

Frets On Fire is available for Linux, Mac (x86 processors), and Windows.

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In the computer biz, a "sandbox" is a tool used to run programs on a system where there are tight controls on those apps, making it safe to run untested or potentially dangerous code on a computer. The stuff running in the sandbox is very limited in its interaction with the rest of the system, meaning that some nasty of malware isn't going to eat your computer's lunch while it's being run in the sandbox.

Sandboxie is a free sandbox app you can run on your machine. It stands between unknown, untested, and potentially unsafe applications and your hard drive, registry, and all. The "stuff" in Sandboxie is only alive as long as it is; once you quit, it all goes away. That means that you can visit unknown websites without having to fear that you will catch something nasty during your visit.

To start a Sandboxie session, you just right-click on its icon in the System Tray. At that point, you can choose to run a web browser or any other application in the sandbox.

Sandboxie is a Windows app and requires Win2k or later.

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TurboCASH is open source accounting software licensed under the GPL. It's aimed at small-to-medium sized businesses, roughly the same market segment as Quickbooks.

Supporting up to 999 companies, TurboCASH provides a wizard for adding new entities, collecting all the data and setting up the accounts for you. You'll be up and running in no time. If you prefer, you can add new companies manually, entering your chart of accounts and all other relevant data.

Once you're up and running, it's easy to enter transactions into the system. The Easy Bank Reconciliation feature makes fast work of balancing your checkbook, which can be a real time saver. With TurboCASH, you can generate trial balances, income statements, balance sheets, and all of the usual reports. A built-in report designer allows you to put your personal spin on things and output that special report that makes total sense of your financial info. And finally, a built-in backup facility makes it easy to protect your data.

TurboCASH is a Windows application.

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By default, Windows boxes have had a bunch of security vulnerabilities built-in. Many ports–endpoints for computer-to-computer communication–were left open out of the box. Unfortunately, it is these very open ports that can make Windows vulnerable to exploits by the bad guys. Many of these ports really don't need to be open, but it isn't always easy to figure out how to close them down.

Seconfig XP is a helpful application that can give you a hand in locking down those communications ports that don't need to be open. While it gives hardcore sysadmin folks the power to tweak the machines in their charge to exactly how they want them configured, it also has three preset configurations to allow the rest of us to better secure our systems. Whether you run on a Microsoft network a standalone machine, or access a Microsoft network through a VPN, there is a preset that will lock your system down and make your life a whole lot safer.

When you run Seconfig XP the first time, it saves your current configuration, so if you need to roll back to your original state, it's an easy restore.

Seconfig XP runs on Windows 2000 or later.

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