Free Download A Day

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.

Download PDFTextOnline

Throwaway email addresses are an important tool in the fight against spam. You know the drill: you want to sign up for a free this or that—online subscription, access to some hidden information, or what have you. You have to supply a valid email address, but you know that the minute you hit the "send" button, you're going to be deluged in spam. You need a throwaway address, where it makes no difference what the spammers send your way.

Mailinator is a free service that gives you a throwaway email address. It has several advantages over similar offerings elsewhere. First, there is no sign up—just tell your contact to send mail to bigboy@mailinator.com or spoiledrotten@mailinator.com, and it will go there, without your having to create the account ahead of time. If you need to check that email—to send back a verification, for instance—you have several options. Go back to the Mailinator web site; subscribe to their RSS feed for that address; put a Mailinator widget on any web page; or access the mailbox directly at http://:<accountname>.mailinator.com.

Remember, of course, that there's no security here, so this is not the service you want to use to pass the launch codes along to your friends, for example.

Mailinator is a free service and should support most modern web browsers.

Download Mailinator

We've all used disposable email addresses, where you get a real address that you don't intend to ever use. Sign up for access to a website, but don't really want to have your address given to every spammer out there? Get a disposable address—a one-time address that you don't need to have hang around forever.

Here's a way to get a disposable web page. With disposableWebPage, you can create a web page that won't hang around forever. Just create your page, and you're up and running. All pages will go away after 90 days or less, so they're ideal for projects or other collaboration, where you need to get your info out there, but don't want to go through the hassle of the care and feeding of a "real" website. With an Editor Key, others can edit the page as well, making it an easy way for bunches of people to work together on your project. A revision history keeps track of who added what to the page. Upload up to five photos to help tell your story. The rich text editor means you don't have to be an HTML geek to get your page going.

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

Download disposableWebPage

Some blogs are designed to be money-makers for their owners. Others are just there to express a point of view or comment on the general state of things. If you're looking a getting a start in blogging of the second type, you may not need all the bells and whistles—and administrative overhead—of a full-on blog platform like WordPress. For you, life may be easier if you start off with "blog-light".

Chyrp is a lightweight blogging engine driven by PHP and MySQL. Built explicitly to support both "tumblelog" and plain-old text blogging, it lets you blog the way you want to. Installation is simple: just upload Chyrp to your server and run the installer through your web browser. Administration is so simple that there's no manual needed.

While Chyrp itself is simple in design, there are still a bunch of plug-ins you can install, allowing you to extend its capabilities far beyond its default "out of the box" configuration.

Chyrp requires that your server have (at least) a MySQL ver. 4.1 database, PHP ver. 4.4.7, and Apache 1.1.3.

Download Chyrp

We've all seen sites where you can grab forms: business forms, accounting stationery, and so forth. Here's a site that specializes in music manuscript paper.

BlankSheetMusic offers pages with regular five-line staves, but you get to customize them for the way you want to use them. You can choose your clef (treble, bass, alto, tenor), build systems for piano with both G- and F-clef, or customize systems to fit a whole orchestra. Add bar lines and brackets to clean things up, and you're golden.

It's easy to add tablature for 4, 5, 6, or 7-string instruments, as well as percussion. Insert time- and key signatures as well, so you've basically got everything but the notes on there.

If you'd rather, you can choose from a big assortment of canned formats as well. Choral, piano (keyboard), guitar, and more are available.

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

Download BlankSheetMusic

Sometimes it's just easier to show somebody how to something. Trying to describe in simple terms some complicated procedure on your computer may leave your audience more confused after the explanation than they were before. That's no way to pass information along. But show them what you did? Now they can see exactly what you're talking about. This is the philosophy behind Screencast-o-Matic.

Screencast-o-Matic is an easy way to record what you see on your screen and share it with others. Not just a screen capture utility, this service allows you to create a true video recording, so you can grab movement, mouse clicks, menus, and everything else that you see on your screen. The resulting movie, called a "screencast", is saved as a QuickTime (.mov) movie, and can be shared with anybody. Export your screencast to QuickTime, or upload it for sharing. Screencasts can be up to 15 minutes long, so you can do a lot of explaining.

Screencast-o-Matic is a free online service. It uses a Java applet that requires that Java 1.5 be installed on your system.

Download Screencast-o-Matic

How can you possibly keep track of all the "stuff" you've got to do? There are lots of organizers and calendaring tools out there, to be sure. Even then, it's not always easy to stay on top of things. Sure, if you're at your computer, an Outlook-generated reminder is fine, but what if you're using a different machine? An emailed reminder may suffice. Need more flexibility than that?

Remember The Milk is a free online service that allows you to easily create reminders, but it comes with more. Along with pop-up and emailed reminders, you can have it send reminders to your favorite IM client. Or even send SMS text messages to your phone. Now you'll be on top of your schedule no mater where you are or what you're doing.

Along with the basic functionality, Remember The Milk supports a bunch of plug-ins. Use the iGoogle Gadget to manage your life from your homepage, use the mobile version on your iPhone, or even do it all offline with the Google Gears browser plug-in.

Remember The Milk is an online service. You should be able to use it with most any modern web browser.

Download Remember The Milk

Way back when, you used to leave a "visiting card" with the servant of somebody you wanted to visit with, in essence announcing that you were out there standing in the street waiting for an invitation to enter. You don't see those too much any more. In the real world, they have more or less been replaced by business cards, serving as a reminder of somebody you've just met with. There really aren't any business cards on the Internet, but the need to introduce yourself and remind folks who you are is still just as real.

Hyplet lets you build a "hyplet", a little ID card or business card, suitable for placing on a web page or attaching to an email as a signature. With a bunch of templates to choose from, you can add your name, contact info, web page, and other pertinent information to get people to where you are. Personalize it with a photo, or add an avatar to present your alter ego to the world.

Hyplets can be used as "flyers" also. Need a quickie image to publicize your blog or announce you next big event? Build a hyplet with time and date; add contact info and you're good to go.

Hyplet is an online service. It should be compatible with most systems with a modern browser.

Download Hyplet

In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.
— Benjamin Franklin

While taxes are a certainty, there's nothing that says you have to suffer while you're preparing them. "Adjusted gross" this, and "Line 27" that could lead you to lose your mind.

There are many different automated solutions out there to help you do your taxes, but many of them are still pretty complicated, and most of them require that you pay for the privilege of using them. TaxAct is a totally free solution that allows you to prepare, print, and e-file your Federal taxes. Whether you prepare your taxes online, or download the software (or order the free CD-ROM, shipping charge added) and run the tool locally, you are in control. Using a simple interview technique, this tool walks you step-by-step through preparing your Federal tax return. E-file helps you get your refund sooner. Accuracy is not a problem, either: they guarantee that your return will be 100% accurate, or they will pay the penalty for you.

State tax computation is also available, for an added fee. Available paid versions of the Federal return give you telephone support.

TaxAct is available as an online service, and should support most modern browsers for Linux, Mac, or Windows. The download is compatible with 32-bit Windows systems, from Win95 up through Vista.

Download TaxAct