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Got a pile of pictures? Need to make them all the same size? Got all day? If the answer to the last question is "heck no!", then Resize! may be the tool you're looking for.

While there are lots of tools that will let you resize image files, you may have to spend all day converting those files one at a time. With Resize!, you can batch process an entire directory full. Choose your pictures, tweak the size/quality settings, and choose the resize parameters. You can select a proportional resize, box resizing where you can constrain maximum height and width, or resize with independent settings for width and height, if you need to fill a pre-defined rectangular space.

Resize! is a versatile as it is easy-to-use. It is available for Windows, OS X and if you want to go really old-school, you can get a version for Mac OS "classic", for the old OS 9 platform.

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freeCAD is a basic 3-D CAD application, that allows you to try your hand at computer aided design without having to pay a fortune for the privilege. If you're planning to take on General Motors or Boeing, this is probably not the tool for you, but if you want a basic introduction to the electronic version of the drafting board and T-square, you can't beat this price.

freeCAD allows you to execute mechanical drawings, as you would expect a CAD app to do. In addition, you can also animate your work. If you design a cam shaft, you can make it rotate, and actuate a cam follower or rocker arm. With a bunch of example assemblies included, you should be able to get started quickly in creating and animating your own inventions. The publisher's website has an extensive set of video tutorials that walk you through the process of creating, fine-tuning, and animating your drawings.

freeCAD is available for Linux, MacOS, OS X, Windows, and several flavors of UNIX.

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The next time you need clip art, turn to DailyClipArt.net: the site serves up free clip art for your personal and business projects. As the site's name implies, the collection grows daily: more beautiful, new clip art is added to the site each and every day. Categories include animal clip art, birthday and wedding clip art, images of sports, flowers, music, and more.

Users who want regular updates about additions to Daily Clip Art can keep up-to-date in two ways: with the site's newsletter or RSS feed. You can sign up for either here.

Get Free Clip Art at DailyClipArt.net

Scratch may be the ultimate object-oriented programming language. Developed by folks at the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is a programming language where you literally snap objects–blocks–together to build applications. Rather than procedures or functions, you drag graphic "blocks" around on screen and the order in which you hook them together determines how the resulting activity behaves.

Scratch includes blocks to move, turn, and bounce on-screen "sprites". You can speak and make sounds, draw, resize, and more. Control blocks allow you to loop and branch, test variables, and even follow your mouse.

With Scratch you can do interesting things without having to be a hard-core programmer. Designed for kids as young as 8 years, there is a large community for sharing activities. Scratch is designed to help users become familiar with the design process, while learning mathematical and computational ideas.

Scratch is available in both Windows and Mac versions, with work underway to release a Linux version by the end of 2007.

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For some people, a computer is just a tool to get a job done. For the hard-core, a computer is an extension of their very being. The icons on your desktop are arranged just so; you have the precise set of programs you need; your desktop wallpaper makes the exact statement you need it to make.

So now it's time to change your wallpaper. Where was that setting again: View? Edit? System Preferences?

DeskDecal is the easiest way going to change your desktop wallpaper fast. Just drag any image file and drop it on DeskDecal's icon, and voilà instant wallpaper change. You don’t have to dig through preferences, and you don't have to browse through your hard drive looking for the image–it's all on your desktop, and the change takes place now.

DeskDecal is a Mac app and requires OS X.

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Inkscape is a free, open-source vector graphics editor. Unlike with raster or “bitmapped” graphics, vector image elements can be resized with no loss in quality–no jagged edges. While apps like Photoshop are great with photos and bitmap images, tools like Inkscape or the commercially-available Illustrator or Corel Draw work better for more precise work, like technical drawings, especially where text is incorporated into images, and are vital in applications where images may be resized, as with logos.

Inkscape imports most bitmapped format files. It stores its images in files that conform to the W3C’s SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format, which is directly readable by many newer web browsers. Along with this native format, you can also save your work to .png files, guaranteeing access by all.

Along with the obvious price advantage, Inkscape has a much shallower learning curve than its shrink-wrapped peers. This means that you will be up and running, creating real work much sooner.

Inkscape is available for Linux, OS X, and Windows, as complied packages, as well as source code for the adventurous.

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Gawker allows you to create time-lapse movies from a webcam. Set Gawker to snap a picture every five or ten seconds to record relatively faster events, or set it to a longer interval to watch grass grow or paint dry without all that pesky sitting-there while it happens.

With Gawker, you can also capture images from up to four cameras simultaneously, giving you a binocular (quadocular?) view of your subject, as well as streaming your images so that others can view and record them.

An open source project hosted at sourceforge, Gawker is only available for Mac and requires Tiger (OS X 10.4).

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Resizing images while keeping their height- and width proportional can be a challenge. If you're creating a web page or posting to a blog and have a 350-pixel wide graphic and only a 200-pixel wide slot for it, how tall does the resized image need to be to maintain the proper aspect ratio? Enter Scaletron, the scaling calculator.

Scaletron will take the information you have–original height and width and desired new width, for example–and tell you what the new height needs to be, as well as reporting this increase- or decrease in size as a percentage. Or you can enter the original height and width values and enter a percentage to change, and get back the new height and width values. There is an option to get the effective resolution of your newly-resized image as well.

Scaletron runs on any version of OS X, and there is an older version available for users still running version 9 (or earlier) of MacOS.

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Scrapbooking has been all the rage for the last few years, and digital scrapbooking was the next logical step in the trend. Fujifilm is getting in on the action and offering a beautiful section of digital scrapbook kits, free for download from their website. The kits include backgrounds, borders, and embellishments which can be further edited in programs like Adobe Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro (or probably just about any photo editing software). You create a scrapbooking page by adding your photos and images to the layout, and then you print the page and add it to your scrapbook. It's a lot less fiddly than cutting and pasting with scissors and glue, and mistakes are much easier to correct.

The available kits are themed by season, and by holiday. Each is a .zip file containing a number of backgrounds, borders, and other add-ons like title tags and decorative photo corners. The papers even have a textured-look for authenticity. These are very attractive kits which you may even be able to modify for other purposes.

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Want to make animated GIFs? GiFfun makes composing web animations dead easy. Individual slides or images are dragged directly into the GiFfun window; then, simply saving it as an animation makes it into a an animated GIF. It can then be edited further by setting the delay between frames, varying the number of loops on each frame, and more.

The resulting animated GIFs will run under any standard web browser. GIFfun and the other programs by Stone Design all run on either any Mac (including the new Intel models) running MacOS X. GiFfun has a short but sufficient on-line manual.

Get GiFfun