Free Download A Day

Your iPod is a favorite bring-along item no matter where you go. You can jam a lot of stuff into that little package, and be on your way. Music, podcasts, all kinds of stuff to keep you occupied. What about bringing something other than audio content along with you?

podLoadr is a neat little tool that allows you to easily add text to your iPod. Using the Notes feature that was introduced in third-gen iPods, you can jam text into your iPod and bring it along. Whether text documents, web pages, RSS feeds, or other content, it's easy to upload them to the iPod, and then you're off and running. To look at your additions, just choose Extras > Notes and then select the item you want to view.

Because of the iPod's architecture, there are certain limitations here. Large documents will be broken into 4k chunks, and you can't have more than about 2000 individual notes.

podLoadr is alpha-level software, so be sure you have a good backup of any data or media files on your iPod, in case the unthinkable happens and you have to reformat it.

podLoadr is cross-platform, being built in Java. That means you will need to have the Java developers' kit or runtime installed on your system to use it. After that, it should run on anything that supports Java.

Download podLoadr

YouTube is arguably the Next Biggest Thing. Unless you're not online. At that point, it's just another resource that's not available to you. Until now.

TubeTV is a slick app that allows you to convert YouTube videos into a format that's usable by your iPod, phone, or even AppleTV. YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, and others use a special Flash Video format for their movies. Those flv files aren't readily accessible by your run-of-the-mill media player, but TubeTV can take those files and convert them into other formats that are usable by your other apps.

To use it, just download your movie, convert it, and there you go. In addition to various video formats, you can also rip the audio track alone directly to MP3, so even your pre-video iPod can reap the rewards.

You will need to have QuickTime on your machine, and the Perian plugin (link available at the site) to complete your conversions.

TubeTV is a Mac app and requires OS X 10.4.

Download TubeTV

If you have a question about a Mac, you’re going to find the answer in MacTracker. Processor speed, original operating system version, expansion slots–it’s all here.

MacTracker is the ultimate resource for all things Macintosh. Starting with the Lisa (Macintosh XL), you can see every computer and Apple-branded Mac-compatible device, such as printers, displays, scanners, operating systems, and extras (remember the iPod, kids?) that came out of Cupertino: pictures, specs, and even room for your own notes, with links to relevant Web sites and documents. There’s even a section for Mac clones. You can create your own “Smart Categories” to search and group information based on your own criteria, including your notes.

Along with the nitty-gritty specs, there are some cool images included with MacTracker. The info page for each system has a picture of the system, and for the computers, you can play the “Startup Chime”, and for some of the older systems, there is also a recording of the “Death Chime”–not a happy sound, that. Interesting historical tidbits are included also.

MacTracker is available in versions for MacOS 8.5+, OS X, Win2k+, and even iPod.

Download MacTracker

Fish is an aquarium simulator for Macintosh systems. With Fish, you become the master of your underwater domain, adding fish of various tropical species and customizing the underwater environment to your liking. You can control the numbers and speed of your fish, as well as their sociability and even the speed of their metabolism. Feed your fish manually or automatically, and if the unthinkable happens–the inevitable “trip to the toilet” that befalls many a tropical fish–you have a Revive Fish button that will re-animate your piscine casualties.

Along with a normal human’s-eye-view of the onscreen action, you can choose from several other camera angles, including a fish cam, that allows you to view the world from the perspective of any of your fish. A full screen mode is available, making it easy to get totally caught up in your undersea world.

You can save your fish and aquariums from session-to-session, and there is even network capability, allowing you to share your fish with other users via Rendezvous.

Fish is compatible with all versions of OS X.

Download Fish

Did you sleep through all the astronomy lectures in college? Do you still have problems finding the Big Dipper? Stellarium may be the answer.

Stellarium is an open source planetarium application available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Set your observing position and see the sky as it appears. Did you ever wonder what it all would look like from the moon? You can choose any moon or planet from which to observe, as well as any terrestrial location. How about a different time? Set the time and date, and you can travel back, or ahead, in time.

Now about that Big Dipper: turn on labels to show you what you’re seeing. Fire up the constellation overlays and see if that really looks like a goat up there (Capricornus), or just a bunch of stars. You can dig deeper and look at deep sky objects among the constellations.

Stellarium features over 120,000 stars, as well as all the planets and their moons. There is a scripting feature that allows you to record and play back your own shows, and you can even use Stellarium to drive a telescope.

It’s too late to improve your grade, but you still have time to find Orion’s belt.

Download Stellarium

Created by the folks who brought you Winamp, and built on the Mozilla UI package (like Firefox and Thunderbird), Songbird is an open source media player in the iTunes and Windows Media Player vein. Like with Firefox, there are add-ons available that allow you to extend Songbird's capabilities, or you can even build your own extensions. While it can't play DRM'ed content (yet) that's on their "to do" list.

You can play all popular music formats, build custom mixes, and more. Along with importing your own media libraries, you can use Songbird as a music search tool, looking for MP3s and other audio files across the web, or it will recognize media files on your current page, and present them as a playlist for you.

Songbird is cross-platform, available for OS X, Linux, and Windows, and currently in 39 languages and counting. It's still in "pre-1.0″ versions, so it's bound to have a few hiccups, but why not give Songbird a spin?

Download Songbird

Valentine's Day is coming soon. Remember gradeschool, when you got to make Valentine's cards for everyone in your class (and even had to give one to the kid that you really didn't like?) Giving Valentine's cards isn't just for kids — just about everyone appreciates getting a silly, cute, fun card on Valentine's Day.

FreePrintableValentines.net makes giving Valentines easy. The site offers 50 Valentine's Day card designs in PDF format, which you can download and print for free. The site includes cards for sweethearts, friends, children, and even (who knew there was a need for this?) Valentines for robots.

So you can print out 40 copies of your favorite card and give one to everyone in your workplace. Even the folks that you don't like that much.

Get Free Printable Valentines

Encyclopodia is a freeware project which brings the power of Wikipedia to your iPod. Encyclopodia can be installed on iPod generations one to four, as well as on iPod Minis and Photo iPods. The program is really quite simple and takes just a few steps, and while it looks a bit daunting to the non-iPod user, those of you who easily download songs will have no trouble installing the file for Encyclopodia. Installation files are available for both Windows and Mac/Linux users.

Once Encyclopodia is on your iPod, you can use it to import and unpack different languages of Wikipedia from your ebook library. Keep (mostly reliable) knowledge at you fingertips, by having Wikipedia to consult wherever you go. Maybe you could even impress a teacher.

Download Encyclopodia

A new web site offers hundreds of Bible-themed coloring pages for kids (and for adults who like to color as well. There's nothing wrong with that.) You'll find angels, religious symbols and buildings, animals, etc. There are Jewish theme coloring pages, too.

Of particular interest for the holiday season: there are lots of Christmas coloring pages and Hanukkah coloring pages as well.

Go to Bible Coloring Pages

For the advanced techie and movie watcher, there are all sorts of interesting problems to be solved along with all sorts of programs to solve them. One such is HandBrake. It creates MPEG-4 files from any DVD or DVD-compatible source.

The program is a GPL application which runs on MacOS X and Linux; an experimental build for Windows is also available. Output is to the hard drive, but an option allows for iPod-compatible files for those who want to carry their movies around with them! There are a number of online manuals, developed by users, and there is a developer forum.

As noted, input from any DVD (including encrypted) or compatible source is supported; these include VIDEO_TS files and TV signals (PAL or NTSC formats). Options include chapter selection, basic subtitle insertion, picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling, and grayscale encoding. The developer did the smart thing in creating this program: he used all sorts of GPL libraries which were already available: they are all listed and the authors are thanked. As a result, it took only a few weeks to get the initial version going.

A heavy-duty program such as this is not for everyone — so an easier "Instant HandBrake" version is now available, dedicated to making iPod/PSP versions of your DVDs with less futzing around with technical stuff.

Get HandBrake