Free Download A Day

One of the sure signs that Spring has Sprung is almost upon us: Mother's Day. Whether you're celebrating with your Mom, your Dad who was almost like a Mom, your grandmother, daughter, in-laws, or somebody else, be sure to take a moment and say "thanks" to all the Moms in your life. And, hey—if you want to make your celebration one of the best ever, maybe you should grab some free printables to include in the big day.

Grab a printable greeting card or two to wish Mom the very best. Is breakfast in bed in the cards this year—or maybe a big celebratory dinner? Grab some free Mom recipe cards to keep track of your favorites. You did remember to buy Mom a gift, didn't you? Make it extra special with a printable gift tag. After all, she needs to know who thought so highly of her, right? And speaking of gifts, children will enjoy coloring a special picture for Mom, with the help of the hundreds of free printable coloring pages to choose from. And finally, you can proudly hand her a World's Best Mom certificate to let her know just how important she is to you.

All of us here at FreeDownloadADay.com hope that your Mom has the best Mother's Day ever!

Can you ever get too much music? Back in the day, if you had a big collection, that meant that you had piles and piles of 12-inch vinyl disks. Even further back, I suppose there were all those wax cylinders to keep track of, but that may be a bit extreme. Now, of course, you can keep your entire collection on your computer's hard drive, or on your trusty iPod. So that covers recorded music.

There's a whole other world of music out there that involves actual musicians. Sure, they're the ones that record those MP3 files you're addicted to, but there's a rumor that there are still musicians out there who create music "on the fly" in things called "concerts." Generally the tunes you've got in your collection are a pretty good indicator of the type of music you're interested in listening to—otherwise why would you have them anyway? So now here's tool that helps you bridge the gap between recorded music and the live performance.

iConcertCal is a plugin for iTunes that takes a look at your music collection and then generates a list of upcoming concert events in your city. It's nice to listen to your records, but you add a whole new level of excitement to your musical life when you get to hear this stuff live in concert. iConcertCal keeps an eye on events in the US, Canada, and the UK, and even has links to purchase tickets.

iConcertCal is available for both Mac and Windows systems.

Download iConcertCal

Can you ever get enough video? Whether you get your fix from TV, YouTube, or the latest video podcast, you just can't get enough of that stuff. Maybe it's time to check out a video player that takes it all as seriously as you do.

Miro is a free high-definition video player. It can play just about any video format you want to throw at it. It's even got a built-in BitTorrent client that will keep an eye on your favorite shows for you, downloading the newest episode for you so you'll always be ready to watch. In addition, it gives you access to tons of content—over 6,000 TV shows and podcasts at last count.

Rather than relying on streaming video, Miro actually downloads files to your local drive. That means that you can watch your shows even when you're offline, like on a plane or in that really boring meeting.

Miro is free, open source software. It's available for Windows (XP or later), Mac (OS X 10.4 and higher), and many Linux systems.

Download Miro

It's almost time to break out the springtime bonnets and hard-boiled eggs: Easter is right around the corner. While Easter doesn't seem to get the same attention that Christmas does, it's still a big deal. One way to help add some fun to your celebration of this special day is with free printable Easter goodies. To start with, you can grab a free letter from the Easter Bunny, with many for kids, and a special naughty one for the grown-ups. Send your own Easter greetings with a funny Easter card. Make your Easter baskets extra special with free Easter gift tags. Your holiday meal will be even tastier when your table's set with Easter place cards and your favorite old family recipes are written out on Easter recipe cards. You can even add a whimsical touch of Easter to your business correspondence with an Easter-themed fax cover sheet. You can grab all the free Easter coloring pages that your little ones can handle from here and here and here.

Have a Happy Easter!

Have you ever downloaded a deck of cards? Neither have we, but that's all about to change. With SVG-cards, you can do just that. Well, almost at least.

SVG-cards is a huge image that, when you print it out and chop it up, will give you a deck of cards. As the name suggests, this image is in SVG—scalable vector graphics—format. Unlike bitmapped image files, SVG are vector graphics. This means that you can resize them without making them all nasty looking, with jagged pixelation and all. It includes the faces of all the cards of a standard deck of 52 playing cards, as well as a couple of Jokers, and a design for the back as well.

You can choose to print them out as they come onto paper or card stock, or you might scale them down, or up, to make them into a size that works better for you. If you like the designs, you can also do more exotic things like put them on T-shirts as well.

SVG-cards are free to download.

Download SVG-cards

Holidays are a wonderful time: friends, family, celebration, and traditions. Often we associate these primarily with Christmas. But what about the other big days in the year? There's a certain Jolly Fat Man in a red suit who gets all the publicity, but what about that Large Springtime Rodent*, The Easter Bunny? Easter's a big deal too, and it deserves its fair share of attention.

Free Easter Printables can help you get off to a good start with your Easter celebration. They've got an "in" with the Easter Bunny, you know. You can even download a letter from The Easter Bunny from their site. There's a whole collection of letters, ranging from your garden variety letter, to special ones for Easter morning, letters addressed specifically to a boy or girl, and even one specially written for the grown-ups.

Along with those holiday letters, Free Easter Printables has a whole collection of Easter Coloring Pages. You can grab more pictures of Easter Eggs here than you can shake an Easter Basket at–a great way to keep the little ones entertained until the big day.

FreeEasterPrintables.com is a free service.

* Yes, we know that rabbits are members of the order Lagomorpha and not Rodentia, but work with us here, OK?

Download Free Easter Printables

No matter how much the purveyors of shrink-wrapped software would have you believe it, there really is no reason to have to spend a small—or not so small—fortune on applications to run on your computer. That's not to say that the fine folks at Microsoft and all the other big name development shops don't put out some pretty cool tools, but an awful lot of what you want to do can be done with apps that don't cost you a dime.

Not so much an application, MacLibre is sort of a "greatest hits" collection of free software for your Macintosh. Now instead of running all over the place grabbing individual apps, you can download the whole pile all at once.

MacLibre includes productivity tools like NeoOffice (a Mac-ized version of OpenOffice), Internet tools and browsers, sound and graphics editors (Audacity and GIMP), and a bunch of utility apps as well. You could find yourself with a pretty well equipped system for the cost of only a few minutes worth of downloading.

MacLibre is distributed as a Universal Binary. That means that it'll run on both PowerPC and Intel Macs; you should be able to use it on systems that are running Panther (OS X 10.3) or later.

Download MacLibre

There are two types of people in the world: those who say that there are two types of people in the world, and those who don't. There are lots of things that seem to break down into two categories: paper or plastic? chocolate or vanilla? Heck, it even extends into the world of clocks: analog or digital?

Analogy is a screensaver app for your Windows or Mac computer that bridges the gap between these two poles. It's a digital clock that displays its information in an analog way. Rather than just putting a bunch of numbers up on your screen, it places those numbers in such a way that it behaves not unlike an analog clock. When it's 3:00 (three o'clock), it puts the "3" at the "three o'clock" position. This gives you the best of both worlds—the precision of a digital readout, but with the spacial component of an analog clock—which allows you to "know" what time it is without really reading the numbers, based on their positions, just like the position of the hands on your trusty old analog alarm clock or wristwatch.

Analogy is a free download.

Download Analogy

It's nearly St. Paddy's Day, the day when everybody's Irish. While some folks' first inclination is to head for all things green—green beer, green hair, green eggs and ham—we'd like to propose a slightly lower-key way to celebrate the day: Free St. Patrick's Day printables!

Send your holiday greetings with a free printable card, or fax them with a holiday-themed fax cover sheet. Decorate for your holiday get-together with a free holiday banner. And keep yourself and the kids busy with all the free St. Patrick's Day-themed coloring pages you can download—more leprechauns and shamrocks than you can shake a shillelagh at!

Have a Happy St. Patrick's Day. Erin Go Braugh!

Whether you're planning a fancy dinner party or just a casual get-together, it always adds a touch of elegance when you put out placecards on your table. Whether you're trying to enforce a more formal "boy-girl-boy-girl" seating scheme, or just trying to keep the conversation civil by keeping your conservative uncle away from your liberal cousin, placecards help you to direct traffic around the dining room.

Printable Placecards has dozens of different placecard designs to choose from. There are basic placecards for informal occasions, or fancy placecards for weddings and baby showers. Birthday placecards add to the festive feel of the occasion. There's even a Mardi Gras placecard—laissez les bon temps rouler!

Printable Placecards are available as a free download. You'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader, or another app that can print PDF files. Print them out, trim them—there are four placecards on each sheet—write your guests' names on them and it's time for dinner (or tea or whatever your occasion may be). There are also customizable versions of placecards available for just $5.

Download Printable Placecards