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The world's a complicated place. Things happening, people moving around, all that. It would be nice if Mom were always there to keep an eye on us and help tell us what to do, but she's not always available. Sometimes the next best thing can be a good sign. This house is for rent. You can't park there. There's wet paint on that bench. All the helpfulness of Mom, but without the funny hair style.

Printable Signs features over 75 signs that you can download and print for free. Formatted as PDF files, all you need is a copy of Adobe Reader or any other tool that can read those files, and you're in business. Put a "keep out" sign on the refrigerator; put a "biohazard" sign on your kid's room; hang a "beware of cat" sign on the fence. Knock yourself out—the sky's the limit here.

You can also grab editable versions of the signs for only $1.99 each. Available as Microsoft Word-compatible DOC files, you can post your business hours or fill-in a yard sale sign with all the particulars on the great bargains you're offering this weekend.

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ConvertIcon does one thing, but it does it pretty well. It takes a PNG image and converts it to an ICO-formatted icon. Or it takes an ICO-formatted icon and converts it into a PNG image. Maybe that's two things.

To use it, just point at the URL of an online image, or browse to the location of an image on your local machine, press the button, and sit back. You get your result right away, and since you don't have to download any software, there's no drain on your system and no concern about system compatibility.

ConvertIcon is a free online service. It should be compatible with most any system running a modern web browser.

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Whether you're reading the evening news, speaking before a crowd, or just want to be able to easily read text from a distance, you may have used a teleprompter. These clever devices allow you to look at your audience, or into the lens of a TV camera, and read text, making it look like you've memorized it. Better than cue cards that require you to focus your attention elsewhere, or a written script on your desktop, the teleprompter makes it look like you're much more connected to your audience.

CuePrompter is a free service that simulates the effect of a teleprompter. Paste your script into the textbox, select your text options (large or small screen and font, black-on-white or white-on-black), and give it a go. You can choose the scrolling speed so that you can read at the right pace for your audience. Set the display for normal or mirror mode, where the screen is reversed to read correctly in a mirror.

CuePrompter is an online service, available for both personal and commercial use. It should be compatible with all modern browsers. The publishers recommend that to take advantage of all its features, that you should be running Win2k or later and IE 5.0 or newer.

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Saving a web page to your local machine can be a bit of a pain. Typically you'll get the page itself, and then a directory full of supporting players, with all the pictures and so forth as well. If you need to move your download, you've got to remember to bring these extras along as well. Not so convenient.

htm2pdf is a free online service that converts web pages into PDF documents. It's easy to use: just enter the page's URL or even just paste its source code into the box, and click the button. You can decide whether to include Flash movies in your conversion, and you have the option of keeping your links active, so that clicking on them in the resulting document will still take you to the correct destination page. When the conversion is done—almost immediately, by the way—you get a link to click to download your new file. Like any other PDF file, you can do with it what you will—save it, email it, post it to your blog.

One word of warning, however, is that your document will be viewable by other folks who visit the site. That means that you may want to think twice before you PDF the Secret Decoder Ring page on your intranet.

htm2pdf is a free online service. It should work for anybody with a modern Web browser.

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Working together and collaborating on projects is vital to getting things done. With members of project groups often located in different offices, or different time zones, it can be a real challenge to make sure that everybody is current of the status of projects and schedules. Enterprise tools are available to keep track of this kind of stuff, but they don't come cheap and maintaining them can take a platoon of IT guys.

Sosius is an online workspace and collaboration platform. Accessible from any Internet-connected computer, it puts all the tools in one place needed to manage files, contacts, schedules, and more, with 200MB of secure storage space. Whether it's just a place to put files you're working on at home and the office, or you want to collaborate with co-workers, it's all there.

You can create and maintain a blog to get your thoughts out there. Threaded discussions allow folks to work together and make sure everybody's on the same page. You can set permissions to all of your content, so that you can make sure that only people who "need to know" can access selected information.

Sosius is a free online service. It should be available to most anyone with a modern web browser, regardless of the platform they're running on.

Download Sosius

Gliffy is a free online tool that lets you draw flowcharts, floorplans, network diagrams, and more. Since it's used online, you don't have to worry about system compatibility, and it'll run on just about any system that supports a modern web browser.

You create your drawings online. There are several palettes of shapes, so it's easy to drag-and-drop your way to completion. Several types of lines let you tie your elements together and indicate the direction that your process flows. You can save your creations online, or you can download them as JPEG, PNG, or even SVG files. You can share online images by publishing them and sticking their URL into another page, or by choosing other users with whom you want to collaborate. You are, however, limited to five public documents with a free account, and by definition, every document in the free version is public.

Even though this application is free, it's clear these folks would rather have you sign-up for the paid version. At $30, an annual subscription won't break the bank, but they're not at all subtle about urging you to upgrade to the premium edition.

Download Gliffy

You know you've gotten this email: "Oh my goodness, will you look at THAT?!?!" There's inevitably a URL attached, indicating that you've just GOT to look at that page. You dutifully click on the link, look at the page, and decide that your friend / coworker / spouse must be nuts, 'cause you don't see anything of note on that page. Sure, they could have given you a hint in the subject line of the message, but where's the excitement in that?

You don't need to return the favor. When you run across that web page that you've just got to share—will you look at the price they want for widgets?—it's easy to take pity on your reader and make sure they know just what's gotten your knickers all up in a knot.

Awesome Highlighter does one job, and it does it well. When you run across that all-important page, simply enter its address into the Awesome Highlighter address box. It'll take you to your page, and let you highlight the section you're interested in. What's more, it then gives you a special short URL. Send that to your intended audience, and when they click on it, the page you saw with your highlights intact, will display on their browser. No more guesswork. Neat.

Awesome Highlighter is a free online service, so it should run on any system with a modern web browser. You don't have to register, so it really is quick and easy to get going.

Download Awesome HIghlighter

Big deal image editors are nothing to sneeze at. Their power is awesome. Their price is breathtaking. How about a powerful tool that doesn't require that you refinance the kids to pay for it?

SplashUp is a full-featured image editor application with a difference. You can now do heavy-duty image editing in an online tool that doesn't require any installation—or cash outlay. Open this app in your web browser, and you'll see how much it looks like Photoshop. It's got the familiar tool palette with pencil, paintbrush, marquee tool, and more. It supports layers, so it's easy to make changes and add new content to your images. You can save your handiwork to your local drive, or you can easily share your pictures through Picasa, Flickr, and Facebook.

SplashUp is a free online service, that should be compatible with most modern web browsers. You can use it without signing-up, but if you create an account, you can take advantage of online storage of your images.

Download SplashUp

PDF files are a great way to make data available. Everybody can open them, and it's much easier to email an electronic file than to print out a big document, schlep over to the Post Office, and wait days or weeks for it to get to your intended audience.

Unfortunately, most PDFs are set up as letter-sized 8 1/2 x 11-inch pages. Great to read, but not so great to carry around with you, especially with a great big staple in the corner. Sometimes it would be handy to have a little booklet instead.

BookletCreator in an online tool that lets you convert your full-size PDF document into a booklet. Along with shrinking your letter-sized page down to a half-size 5 1/2 x 8 1/2-inch format, it does the heavy lifting of figuring out how to paginate things so that when you run the resulting file through your printer with a "print on both sides" instruction, it will lay the pages out correctly. For bigger documents, which are difficult to fold and staple on generally-available office equipment, you can break the booklet into multiple booklets, so that you don't have just a big wad of paper when you're done.

BookletCreator has a simple interface: browse to your document, choose whether you want to create a single- or multiple booklets, and click the button. Your document is processed and immediately fed back to your browser, downloading to your local drive. It doesn't get any simpler than that.

BookletCreator is a free online service. It should be compatible with most modern web browsers.

Download BookletCreator

PDF files are a great thing. They allow you to share content across platforms, since everybody understands that file format. You maintain formatting and layout in your documents. They support images, The list goes on and on: PDFs are really a de facto standard for documents on the Web.

What do you do when you're only really interested in the text of that PDF document? There's no easy way to extract just that content, divorced from any formatting, layout, or graphic elements. Sure, you can copy and paste from a document, or maybe you can come up with a better way to spend your day.

PDFTextOnline is a free service that will give you your day back. With no login or account required, you just browse to- and select your PDF file, click the magic button, and PDFTextOnline takes it from there. It extracts the text from your file, and also reveals any form data from the PDF. In addition, it also shows you document properties, revealing the document's author, the tools used, etc.

You can view the resulting text onscreen, or you can choose to download it. Your text-only download is placed in a ZIP archive for you.

PDFTextOnline is a free service. It should be compatible with most modern web browsers.

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