Free Download A Day

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, as the old song goes. The Big Day will be here before you know it, but will you get everything done? Shopping, cooking, cleaning—it's enough to get you all worn out even before you start working on it. If you've got little ones, you're going to be even busier. If it's going to be that busy for you, can you imagine how complicated it's going to be for Santa Claus? You may have a couple of kids to think about, but he's got zillions. Maybe this year you can give Jolly Old St. Nick a hand.

The folks at SantaPrintables.com have 16 free Letters from Santa Claus that you can download and print out. There are letters from Santa to boys and girls, and to pet cats and dogs. There's a letter for a child's first Christmas, and a letter from Mrs. Claus. There's even a letter to an older child who may have some questions about the whole "Santa" thing. Just think of the smile on your little one's face when they get a letter from the Right Jolly Old Elf. And imagine the smile on Santa's face when he sees how you're helping him.

Printable Letters from Santa Claus are available for free download. You'll need a copy of Adobe Reader to open and print them. They've also got paid versions of these letters for $5 each, where you can personalize the letter by adding your child's name, names of siblings, pets, and so forth.

And who knows—maybe Santa will leave a little something extra in your Christmas stocking this year just to say "thanks".

Download Printable Letters from Santa Claus

Thanksgiving is upon us again. Time to take a few moments to reflect on all that we have to be thankful for. And then it's time to eat turkey! While you're waiting for the old bird to cook, why not go take a peek at these free Thanksgiving printables? Keep the kids entertained with Thanksgiving theme printable coloring pages. Or maybe it's time to put your favorite holiday recipes on Thanksgiving recipe cards. Add some holiday spirit to your invitations and other holiday correspendence with printable Thanksgiving letterhead, or an amusing Thanksgiving-themed fax cover sheet. And finally, return thanks to your hosts with a printable Thank You Certificate.

Don't be a turkey–each of these is available for free, so you can download all you want. And have a Happy Turkey Day!

One of our favorite activities as a kid was working on dot-to-dot puzzles. These activities always seemed extra satisfying, because you were really contributing to the creative process. Some of us weren't gifted with extraordinary drawing talent, so it wasn't so easy to create a picture from scratch, but hey, anybody can draw a straight line (more or less). Dot to dot activities have something for everybody—you get to solve a puzzle, you get to color it in, and there's always the challenge of trying to visualize what all these dots will look like when they're connected. They even contribute to the general discourse: somebody who can figure out how to associate one idea with another is said to "connect the dots."

Free Dot To Dot Puzzles has 125 free downloadable dot to dot puzzles. You can choose puzzles that include animals, buildings, transportation, and more from nearly a dozen different categories. They're all available for free, and all you need is a copy of Adobe Acrobat or any other application that lets you open and print PDF files, and you're in business.

You can download individual puzzles and activities for free, or If you're hopelessly enthralled by dot to dots, you can download the entire collection all at once for $9.00.

Download Free Dot To Dot Puzzles

Hoping to be the next Mozart? It's one thing to be inspired and to imagine all the wonderful sounds to incorporate into your next concerto or symphony, but it's another thing entirely to get it all down in black and white. You can go through reams of expensive music paper, only to realize that you can't totally make out your own chicken scratchings against the staves on the paper. You gave up writing in longhand in favor of a computer keyboard long ago; there's no reason why you should keep writing your music the old fashioned way with pen on paper.

MuseScore is a free open source music notation program. Employing an easy-to-use virtual note sheet, it's easy to get all the notes just right, and to be able to read them when you're done. You can use a mouse, keyboard, or even MIDI files for data entry. It supports an unlimited number of musical staves on each page, with four voices on each staff. If you're writing music more complicated than that, you're probably not reading this post right now anyway.

MuseScore is available for both Windows and Linux users.

Download MuseScore

Did you sleep through high school physics class? Did you even show up? Physics isn't everybody's cup of tea, but that may be because it wasn't taught right. Unlike biology, where dissecting frogs is part of the drill, or chemistry, where evacuating the lab because of some foul smell is a regular occurrence, physics should be fun. After all, where else can you play with toy cars and watch springs for academic credit. But we digress.

Phun is a 2D physics sandbox that lets you create a virtual workspace to play with simple machines and forces applied to them. Build your own contraptions and see how they work. Make them go faster or slower. See what happens when you change the load on your machine. It's so much fun you might forget that you're doing real physics here. Oh yeah, you can let the kids work with it too. Who knows—maybe by the time they get to high school, they'll be eager to get into the lab.

Phun is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows systems.

Download Phun

It's almost here: Halloween, the spookiest day of the year! If you and your little ghosts and goblins are trying to get into the mood, you'll want to check out these free Halloween printables. If coloring is your thing, how about some Halloween Printable Coloring Pages and Halloween Free Coloring Sheets? Choose from scary witches, spooky bats, and more. Maybe it's time to write your annual letter to The Great Pumpkin? Nothing could be better than some Halloween Letterhead. Or how about some Halloween Gift Tags? A Jack-o'-Lantern or haunted house may add just the right touch to your spooky gift.

Don't be afraid, though—these are all available for free, so you can download all you want. It's kind of like Trick-or-Treat-ing from your computer.

Can't get enough YouTube? Whether it's the latest viral video, some slick "how-to" program, or any of a zillion other types of content, we've all grown addicted to YouTube. Here's a tool that helps you download YouTube videos to your machine, so that you can enjoy them again and again.

Free YouTube Downloader does exactly what the name suggests: it enables you to grab those videos and save them locally. Just copy and paste the URL of the content you want, and press the button. It couldn't be easier. It supports multiple downloads as well—just type several addresses into the box, each on a separate line.

Free YouTube Downloader is a Java application, which means that it will run on Linux, Macintosh, Windows, or just about any other platform that has Java Runtime Environment Standard Edition, with Java version 1.5 or better.

Download Free YouTube Downloader

Tired of Guitar Hero? Beat all the songs and looking for something more? How about playing a real guitar?

TuxGuitar is a multitrack tablature editor and player. You can write, edit, and play tracks and songs. With its graphical interface, it's easy to add notes, rearrange them, lengthen or shorten, and so forth. You can use multiple instruments, allowing you to write and arrange for the whole band at once. With its ability to use both regular five-line musical staves or tablature to represent the notes, it doesn't matter whether you can read music or not.

You can vary the speed of song playback, so that you can play along on your own Strat or ES-335. The "speed trainer" function allows you to practice by playing back a passage that you're learning ten times, gradually increasing speed as you become more confident.

TuxGuitar is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.

Download TuxGuitar

Juice Receiver is all about podcasts. Those little media-rich RSS feeds are a way of life for many of us. Juice plays the part of the aggregator of content.

You can set Juice to receive podcasts the way you want to collect them. Whether it's once or twice a day, or even every 30 minutes, you get to call the shots. You can also configure it to grab all back-episodes that you might have missed along the way.

Juice doesn't incorporate a media player, so you can use it in conjunction with your favorite player. It interfaces automatically with iTunes, Windows Media Player, and Winamp, or you can choose "No player" and have it use your default media player, or you can even handle the details yourself. Either way you will know that you have the latest and greatest and that you will get to listen and view the latest podcasts on your own terms.

Power users can even set Juice to run a command, batch file, or shell script after each download, making Juice even more useful as you get your fix.

Juice Receiver is available for Linux, Mac (OS X 10.3+) and Windows (Windows 2000+).

Download Juice Receiver

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.

Download Frets On Fire