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If you lead group singing, you can be up for some real challenges. If you're interested in old favorites, where everybody knows the words, it's relatively easy, but if you're teaching your group something new, it gets a lot more complicated. Now you've got to distribute books or songsheets, or use some other mechanism to make sure that everybody is literally on the same page. It's complicated, it's messy, and it isn't necessarily too fast. The folks who created OpenSong had the same troubles.

OpenSong is a free app you can use to lead groups in all things musical, and more. Think of it as a specialized PowerPoint-like tool. Present verses, choruses, or mix them all up. In addition to being able to use OpenSong as a presentation tool, you can also use it for keep track of your music. Create song sheets and lead sheets; include chords, and transpose your piece up or down as needed. And of course you can keep track of the title, composer, copyright information, and all that.

You can download OpenSong for Windows (Win2k+), Mac (OS X 10.3 and later), as well as various flavors of Linux.

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"Virtual reality" is an interesting concept: reality that isn't real. That's a tough one to wrap your head around. Even if you aren't completely plugged into that, there are little pieces of unreal-reality we deal with all the time. Like TV. Or radio. Watching or listening to things that we think of as real, even through we're really only looking at a box with a window on the front of it, or listening to another box with a bunch of holes in it.

The world of things that are virtually real extends to musical instruments as well. Like synthesizers. These are instruments that aren't really instruments, but they sure do sound like them. Or at least some of them do. Your computer's got the smarts to play that game. There are all kinds of apps out there that let you play piano on your keyboard, or tap out a rhythm on your laptop's touchpad. But what about that most maligned musical instrument of all: the accordion?

Whether its reputation as the instrument that anybody who's cool loves to hate is earned or not, it is kind of the laughingstock of musical instruments. Whether it's some stodgy old polka or the latest Weird Al send-up, you can't help but laugh when somebody fires on of these up (although we did have the opportunity several years ago to hear a 50-instrument accordion band play The Beatles' I Want You (She's So Heavy) to impressive effect at the Cotati Accordion Festival.

Well, now you can have all the fun of the accordion in the privacy of your home or office with Accordion, a free accordion emulator app for Windows and Mac. You don't need any special hardware; you just turn your keyboard sideways and wail away on the keys to polka your brains out.

Accordion is a free download. It's available for both Windows and Mac.

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Did you ever get a file—probably an important one—in a format you couldn't open because you didn't have the right application? That FLAC audio file or RAR archive isn't going to do you any good if you can't open it. You need to be able to convert files from what you can't use into files you can use.

Dragoman is a Mac-based batch file conversion tool. It does the standard stuff—convert your images to PDFs or turn Word DOCs into text files—but also maybe some things you didn't expect, like converting between various archive formats. It's easy to use—the "drag" part of its name suggests the type of interface, although the Help file explains that the word is actually of Middle Eastern origin and means "translator".

Just drag your document or media file onto the app. It recognizes the type of file you've got and displays an appropriate list of file formats that you can choose from to do your conversion. It supports a pretty good sized list of archive, audio, image, and text file formats, and even though there are some popular formats it can't translate into, even some of those can serve as the source for translation into formats it can work with.

Dragoman is a free Mac application. It runs under OS X version 10.4 (Tiger) and later.

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Since the days of Gumby, there has been a fascination with stop-action animation. Whether it's the travails of Mr Bill on Saturday Night Live, or more recent outings like Fantastic Mr Fox, there's a lot that can be done with this form of animation.

If you'd like to join the likes of Tim Burton and Wes Anderson you might want to take FrameByFrame out for a spin. You can use any webcam or video camera to take your shots, and then use this tool to stitch them together and before you know it, you'll be getting a call from the Academy. Or at least you'll be having fun animating your Legos and wind-up tin toys.

FrameByFrame is a free download for your Mac. The latest version runs under OS X 10.5 and later, and there's an earlier version that's still compatible with Tiger (10.4). It's a Universal Binary, so it's equally home on PowerPC and Intel Macs.

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Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Does this apply to our personal history as well? In other words, will we each become our parents? That may be good—or bad—but either way, it's a good idea to know where we come from on a personal level. Thus is born the study of genealogy.

Once upon a time it may have been easy enough to keep track of who's related to whom, but any more with nuclear families, blended families, multigenerational families, adoptions, in-laws, out-laws, and every other possible combination, it can be challenging to try to keep track of it all on a legal pad or two. This is a place where software comes in handy, with its ability to do all the heavy lifting without getting a headache in the process.

Personal Ancestry Writer II (PAWriter II) is a tool that deserves some attention. It has a fairly straightforward editing interface, so entering family members is pretty easy. You can work your way up- or down the various lines, or you can jump to a specific individual. It's smart enough to deal with people who are related in multiple ways (e.g. brothers married sisters). It can spit out several reports, so you can get the "big picture" on where you came from as well.

PAWriter II is a free Mac application. It runs under OS X, as well as OS9.

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Do you remember when you lost your first tooth? Do you remember when you still had teeth? Either way, even though it was a little frightening—am I falling apart here?—there was consolation in knowing that evening a visitor would come by and convert your tooth to cash or some other little goodie. The Tooth Fairy was an idea that was almost too good for words.

Times have changed. Even though the amount she (he?) leaves has changed from a dime or quarter to five or ten bucks, the excitement is still there. And did you know that she's added another item to her bag of tricks? It turns out the Tooth Fairy can also leave a letter on her visits as well. If you're in charge of helping the Tooth Fairy out at your house, take a look at the offerings at Tooth Fairy Letter. They've got a dozen different letters from the Tooth Fairy to the little ones. There are general letters, notes specific to a boy or girl, and even letters for when the tooth is missing—can you imagine the heartbreak of the kid swallowing a tooth, leaving nothing to tuck under the pillow? In addition, they've also got a bunch of Tooth Fairy-themed coloring pages to keep the little ones entertained. And they feature a couple of pages of information about Tooth Fairy Family Traditions, as well as Tooth Fairy tips for parents.

Tooth Fairy Letters are available to download as free PDF files, or for a couple of bucks you can grab DOC versions formatted for Word, so you can personalize them. And don't forget to floss.

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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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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.

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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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