Free Download A Day

Tweaking pictures one at a time is a pain in the neck. A camera full of digital images takes up a ton of space, and would take forever to load if you were to put them on a website or blog. Shrinking them down into something more manageable will save space, and makes it easier for everybody who views your handiwork online to see it quicker and get on with their day.

Resizing images is easy with Shrink O'Matic. Just drag and drop your picture files onto the application, or browse for them on your hard drive. It works equally well with JPEG, GIF, and PNG images. Choose a maximum height or width for your tweaked pictures, and then save them in their original format, or convert them into one of the other supported image types.

Shrink O'Matic runs on the Adobe Air platform. That means that it's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux machines—any system that supports Air. That's handy, since you can use the same tool on all of your machines.

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There are lots of drawing programs out there. If your graphical needs run to something for the kids to play with, or the occasional sketch you need to run to the hardware store with, then your operating system's default image editor may be just fine. If you plan to appeal to a wider—and perhaps more professional—audience, you may want to upgrade from this. If your illustrations require more precision, you might use a tool like Visio to draw illustrations of process flow or the next revision of the corporate organization chart. You might also want to go take out a loan to afford it.

Dia is a tool which, like Visio, is used to draw structured diagrams. Network layouts, flowcharts, etc., are right up its alley. It's got all the standard shapes you might need, and they're fully customizable in terms of color, size, aspect ratio, and all. Draw connecting lines between shapes and anchor them, so that as you drag shapes around the workspace, your connections go with them. Add text to the workspace to help explain what's going on, you start to believe that is picture really is worth at least a thousand words.

Dia is a free download. It's available for Ubuntu and openSUSE Linux, as well as Windows (Win2k or later).

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Origami has always been intriguing to me. I could never make anything more complicated than the tried-and-true "cootie catcher" from the Third Grade, but that didn't stop me from admiring the work of others. I've never quite figured out what the problem is, since I've always enjoyed the "what will this shape look like when it is folded together?" tests. Maybe it's a lack of clear instructions on how to get from start to finish. Well now, here's a site with clear instructions.

HowPack features patterns for making various containers. Using their patterns, some heavy paper- or card stock, scissors, and maybe a bit of glue or tape, you can create all sorts of different containers. They run the gamut from a simple open-ended sleeve—think of a box with four sides but no top or bottom—up through milk cartons (pointed top), pyramids, little boxes, and more. Interestingly enough, the instructions are basically all nonverbal. The patterns and outlines for the various containers all show where to cut and where to fold to execute these containers.

HowPack patterns are all JPEG images, so all you'll need to grab them and start building your own containers is a web browser and a pair of scissors.

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It's a big, wide, wonderful world out there. How big? Big enough to fill a big expensive atlas with maps and maps. But you don't need to spend all that cash—not if you visit Printable Maps.

This site has a huge collection of maps—something like 150—for you to download. They've got maps of continents, and countries; regions and states. There are maps that are all labeled for you, and others that are left blank for you to label yourself. Get out the vacation brochures and plan your next trip. Teachers can use them in their classrooms. Students can use them for study and reports. And best of all, they're all free. Grab a map, grab two, or maybe download them all. Now you're giving Rand McNally a run for their money.

Printable Maps are free to download and use. They're all available in PDF format, so you'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files and print them out.

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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.

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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.

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Way back when, we all used to read books. That was before the rise of the World Wide Web, e-Books, and Kindle. You're reading along, but eventually came to the point where you needed to put that book down—maybe it was time for school, or dinner, or maybe it was lights-out and off to sleep. How do you keep track of where you were reading? You could always lay the book down face-first on a table, but that could crack the book's spine. Go ahead and dog-ear a page, but eventually all the pages will be dog-eared and that won't be much of a help. So they invented this neat technology called a bookmark. It's kind of like a PostIt, but without the adhesive.

If you actually read books still, maybe you'd like a nifty bookmark to go with it. Check out the selection offered by Free Printable Bookmarks. They've got a couple dozen different designs to choose from. Just grab one you like from such categories as Adventure Bookmarks, Mystery Bookmarks, Christian Bookmarks, and more. Each bookmark is available as a PDF file. All you need to do is download it, print it out, trim it to size, and let the reading begin.

The bookmarks at Printable Bookmarks are all available to download for free.

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Are you, or someone you know, expecting? Even though it feels like the pregnancy is going to last forever, the Blessed Event will be here before you know it. You're going to want to let everybody know about it: date, time, weight, and length—all the vital statistics. And the last thing you want to do after coming home with your new Bundle of Joy is to head off to the stationery store. So maybe you want to think about birth announcements that you can print yourself? That's probably a much better solution.

Printable Birth Announcements has over twenty different designs to choose from. They've got announcements for boys and for girls; announcements with room for photos and footprints; they've even got announcements for adoptions. And the best part, aside from the whole not-having-to-go-out-shopping thing is that they're available for free. Just pick the one, or ones, you like, download them, and print them out with your copy of Adobe Reader. Or if you want to customize your announcements, for a couple bucks you can grab Microsoft Word DOC-compatible versions that you can personalize.

Either way, congratulations on the new addition. And don't forget to start saving for college!

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While it's the birthday of the dear old U. S. of A., maybe it's time to give yourself the present, with some free 4th of July printables.

Add a holiday flair to your business or personal correspondence with flag-themed printable stationery. Matching business cards are also available.

Got a special holiday recipe? There's no better place to keep track of your picnic favorites, like fried chicken or potato salad, than some firecracker-themed holiday recipe cards.

Keep the kids entertained and busy before fireworks time with some free printable coloring pages. Choose from patriotic themes, fireworks, and more. And if they're in the mood to make a contest of it, you can award them a flag-emblazoned Certificate of Achievement.

Hooray for the Fourth of July!

While it may not be the biggest holiday on the calendar, who can deny that Dear Old Dad deserves his own day? Whether he sat up with you all night when you were sick, checked for monsters under the bed, taught you how to throw a ball, or helped you struggle through algebra, he's a heck of a guy. Help make his big day more special with some free printables.

Wish the old man the very best with a printable Father's Day greeting card or two. Add a special Father's Day gift tag to the goodies you've got in store for him. One of those gifts could be a special picture you've colored just for him—your own original work of art—that's sure to be posted prominently on the refrigerator. And you can always award him a World's Best Dad certificate.

All of us here at FreeDownloadADay.com wish your dad—and all the dads—the best Father's Day yet.