Free Download A Day

As low-tech as it seems, sometimes there's nothing as efficient as flash cards when it comes to learning piles of facts. It worked for you in the third grade when it came time to learn the multiplication tables, and it can work again today whenever you need to master a list of facts. Things have been upgraded, however, since the days of the index card and Magic Marker.

Cerebral Imprint is an app that lets you build virtual flash cards. Rather than printing them out, these cards live on your computer, but other than that, they work the same way: on the front a question, on the back an answer. Well, not really on the back—you don't have to turn your monitor over to see the answer! Your cards will support regular flash card question-and-answer items, as well as multiple-choice, and even fill-in-the-blank questions.

To keep things interesting, you can choose to use your cards the regular way, with you getting the question and having to figure out the answer, or you can invert it Jeopardy-style, getting the answer and having to figure out what the question is. In addition, you can mix-up the order of your cards, so you don't get into a rut—the answer to the third question is "42", unless, or course, that question doesn't come third every time.

Cerebral Imprint is a free Mac application. It runs under OS X 10.5+.

Download Cerebral Imprint

Nobody likes to think about disaster. Whether it's storms, floods, or a hard drive crash, it's all bad news, and we don't like to dwell on it. Unfortunately, we can ignore potential problems like these, but that doesn't keep them from happening, or make them go away. You can see the storm coming, so you batten down the hatches, You see the flood coming, so you move to higher ground. You may see a computer failure coming at you, or more likely you may try to boot your machine some day and get nothing. It's a little late to think about how you could have prepared. What you need is a good backup.

Backing your system up isn't very exciting, and it's not a lot of fun, but if you are about to lose your music collection, all your photos, and last year's taxes, it may be one of the most important things you do.

Drive Backup Free Edition makes it easy to protect yourself against catastrophic data loss. You can backup your whole hard drive, or separate partitions. Decide where you want to stick your backups—chooose another drive on your system, a removable drive, or even across the network. It works with FAT and NTFS file systems, as well as Linux ext2 and ext3.

It also includes tools to verify that you've got good backups, as well as all the pieces you need to restore your system. After all, a backup is no good if you can't do anything with it.

Drive Backup Free Edition is free for non-commercial use. It's compatible with systems running Windows 2000 and later.

Download Drive Backup Free Edition

There are bad people out there, and they're doing bad things. Sometimes it's something as nefarious as some nasty virus that's just waiting to hit your system. Other times, it's just unresponsive online vendors who want your money, but aren't necessarily too concerned about giving you what you paid for in return. So how do you know who the bad guys are?

Web of Trust (WOT) is an add-on for your web browser. The guys behind this tool spend a lot of time looking around on the web, finding out who can be trusted and who you'd rather stay away from. With WOT installed, you're forewarned about sites before you visit them.

Run a query in your favorite search engine, and when you look at the results, you'll see little icons that report on the trustworthiness and reliability of the sites in your results. Sites with an excellent reputation will probably be your best bet for a successful online experience; sites given a very poor reputation rating may not be where you want to go. You'll want to remember, of course, that your mileage may vary. You may have no problem with a site that has a low rating, or you may have a terrible time with a site that's rated at the tippy-top. Just remember that these ratings can serve as a jumping off point, so you'll increase the likelihood of coming out a winner.

WOT is available for both Firefox (version 1.5 or later) on all platforms, as well as Internet Explorer (version 6 or later on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista).

Download WOT

If you need to move files from here to there, there are several ways to do that. Setting up an FTP server may be efficient, but it's certainly not the easiest way to get things going. Attaching files to an email message gets the job done, but once your attachments reach a size of around 1MB, it starts to get questionable about whether it's really going to get delivered to where you want it to go. There are several online solutions available as well. Add to that list GoAruna.

GoAruna touts itself as being the easiest way to share large files. You can use it directly from your web browser like many other services: enter the email address of your intended recipient, choose a file from your local machine, click the button, and it'll be uploaded to their servers and your target will get a unique URL that lets them download the file.

This service goes a step beyond that, in that it also allows your to upload files to be stored on their servers. Now instead of each file transfer being just a one-off transaction, you can put your files up there and share a password that lets them download directly. There's a Java-powered desktop app you can use to just drag-and-drop files to the server, as well as widgets and plugins for your Firefox web browser, your iGoogle homepage, and more. They claim to give you the ability to encrypt your files before you upload them, but frankly their site and app are pretty light on information, so we couldn't figure out just how to do that. Hopefully their documentation will improve over time.

GoAruna is a free service. The desktop app requires that your system have a recent Java installation. The browser interface works with most recent Web browsers.

Download GoAruna

Back in the day, Monopoly was my favorite board game. While it was always gratifying to get to choose the Scotty dog as a playing piece, and I always loved charging rent for Boardwalk (not so excited about paying it when I didn't own the property, however), probably the most exciting part was getting that pile of money to start with. All you had to do was to sit down at the table and you got a free $1500, by far the easiest money anybody ever made. Of course, you couldn't do much with that money, because it wasn't real, other than to the other players in the game. Nevertheless, play money can be oddly satisfying in its own way.

Printable Play Money lets you print all the money you could ever possibly need. Like the Monopoly money, you can't really spend it anywhere, but then maybe that's just a way to encourage saving, right? Use your play money to help teach kids how to work with money—count it, make change, that sort of thing. Or print a bunch of it and roll around on the floor in it, pretending you're Scrooge McDuck. Use it to light your cigars, proving to the world that you've literally got money to burn. (Don't really do that—fire's not safe, and goodness knows what type of nasty chemicals are in your printer's ink.)

Printable Play Money is free to download and print. You'll need a copy of the free Adobe Reader application to print out your fortune.

Download Printable Play Money

Whether you like up-tempo music or prefer the slower stuff, you need to know how many beats per minute that new–or old–song has. Want to build a playlist of fast stuff? iTunes and other digital music players will let you keep track of the tempo of your various songs, but at some point you have to sit down and figure out just what exactly that number is for each of your tracks. Can you imagine hanging out with a stopwatch for hours–or days–counting beats? Neither can I.

BPM Analyzer by MixMeister can give you a hand with this daunting task. Just fire it up, open your audio files, or just drag-and-drop them onto this app, and you'll generate accurate listings of the number of beats per minute of your collection. You can update the ID3 tags in your music files directly from the tool, so there's no need for tedious and error-prone transcribing of this data. You can also generate reports and export this data to any other apps that can make use of it.

BPM Analyzer is free for non-commercial use. It's available for both Windows and Mac systems.

Download BPM Analyzer

Back in the day, if you had a bunch of photos they probably stayed tucked away in a shoe box. If you were really motivated, you might go buy a photo album and stick some of them in there, but eventually you ran out of album–or money–even though you never ran out of pictures. With digital photography taking over the job formerly held by snapshots, you need to look for a different solution. I suppose you could burn all your photos to CDs and then stick them in a shoe box, but that wouldn't probably be the best use of technology. Electronic photo albums seem a much better solution.

Jalbum is both software and a service. You can download the Java-based application and build your own digital photo album. Once it's done, publish your handiwork directly to their site, or you can upload your album to just about any other site on the Web. The app is fully skinnable, which lets you change the look and feel of your published album.

Jalbum is a free application and service. The desktop app is built in Java, so it'll run on just about any machine with a Java runtime: Linux, Mac, Windows, and more. The online service is free as well. You should be able to access it with any recent browser.

Download Jalbum

Did you ever need to take a screenshot of what you were looking at on your system's display? Of course you have; whether it's to show somebody that cool new something you just discovered, or to try to figure out why your careful coding went so wrong, it's important to be able to grab what's showing on your monitor.

Sometimes you just need to to capture an image or a dialog box; other times you need to grab an entire web page. That's okay, as long as your page isn't any longer than your display. Once you add scroll bars, however, it gets dicey. Now you can't grab the whole page with standard screen capture tools. You could try PDF-ing the page, but then it's going to turn into a multiple-page PDF file, and that's not right either.

Paparazzi! is a tool that lets you take a picture of your page the right way. it actually grabs the entire web page as a single image file. The fact that that file is now hundreds—or thousands—of pixels long is not a problem. You can choose the file format that makes the most sense for your purposes as well.

A free Mac download, Paparazzi! runs under OS X 10.3 and later.

Download Paparazzi!

The Windows clipboard may be one of the most important features that this operating system offers. The ability to grab text out of one document and stuff it into another is something we take for granted today, but way-back-when, you couldn't do that. Sometimes, though, the clipboard does its job a little too well.

As you know, depending on the circumstances, when you stick text on the clipboard, you may bring a bunch of formatting along with it. That may be fine in some situations, but you also run the risk, when you then paste that text into a word processing document that you're going to screw-up your document's formatting, imposing the formatting of your little clipboard snippet on it instead. That's probably not what you wanted. If this has happened to you, you might want to check out HovText.

This clipboard-enhancement tool makes it easy to strip non-text data out of your copy-and-paste activities. Now instead for bringing a bunch of formatting along with it, you'll get the text, and only the text. Once you've pasted the content into your target document, you can go ahead and format your heart out.

HovText is a free Windows application. It runs on any Win32 platform from Windows 95 on up.

Download HovText

XML code lives in text-only files. Sometimes, though, that file can get pretty complicated. While you can write XML, or HTML, C++, or any other code in a plain old text editor, it may be easier to work with an IDE that lets you keep track of what you're really creating.

Cooktop is an editor and development environment for XML and related files. It uses color coding to help you keep track of where you are. It checks for validity and well-formedness, so you won't have to worry about whether your code will do what it's supposed to.

It comes with a warning, however. Because it's doing a bunch of different things all at the same time, it may save files—and overwrite earlier versions—with no advance warning, and without asking you for permission first. Because of this behavior, they advise that you be sure to work with a copy rather than your only existing version of a file.

Cooktop is a free Windows application. It comes in two flavors: one (version 2.2) for Win95 through XP, and another (2.5) form NT/2000/XP only.

Download Cooktop