Free Download A Day

Where has all the time gone? You know you've been working all day, 'cause you're just beat. But if you haven't kept notes through the day, you may not remember everything that you did. Sure the 4 hours you spent on the Johnson report is easy to remember, but what about the little ten- and twenty minute jobs you did? You got the work done, but you'll never be able to tell anyone about it. Until now.

manicTime is a tool that helps you log your time. It keeps track to when your computer was active (presumably you were working, or at least playing Minesweeper) or idle. It also keeps an eye on which applications you were running, helping you to focus in on what work you were doing. And finally, you can add your own tags to really capture what you were up to. All data is stored locally, so you don't have to worry about anybody else getting into it, and since it's on your machine, you don't have to be online to record your activities.

manicTime is a free Windows app. You can use it with systems running WinXP+.

Download manicTime

Whenever you turn on the news, education is always a big topic. Whether it's stories about why Johnny can't read, or about lack of funding forcing teachers to spend their own money on supplies, there's always something. While we can't help Johnny directly, we have found a way to give a hand to the teachers.

Teachers Printables offers several dozen printable items of use for teachers and classrooms. Whether it's attendance charts, to make sure everybody shows up, lesson planning forms to help Johnny with his reading, or classroom management items like hall passes there's a wealth of free stuff just for the taking. All the various forms, logs, and charts are available as PDF docs for printing, or as Word DOC files, ready to be customized to your specific needs.

Teachers Printables are all available for free download. They've also got an option to download everything from the site all at once for $27.00, or a site license to use the content for an entire school for $69.00

Download Teachers Printables

Life is complicated. With so many people trying to do so many things, it's a wonder we don't step all over each other in the process. One way to avoid problems is to spell out specifically what we want to accomplish, and what we need from others. One of the best ways to do this in a clear, concise manner is to use a contract. If you do "x", I'll give you "y". It's pretty straightforward. Or so it seems. Mix in some attorneys and a bit of legal gobbledygook and pretty soon you've only added to the complication.

Practitioners of the law do have their place, and the advice from Shakespeare that "the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" [Henry VI (Part 2)] may be reaching a bit. The fact is that many agreements can be made without the attention and cost of an attorney. Printable Contracts features a number of contract agreements that you can download and use for some of your more simple transactions. They feature templates for contracts for personal and professional services, real estate and rental contracts, and more. While they feature a prominent disclaimer that they are not themselves attorneys and their site does not dispense legal advice, these templates may serve as a good jumping-off point drafting an agreement for your own purposes.

Printable Contracts are free to download. They're all available in Word DOC format, so you can open them up, customize them for your needs, and print them out.

Download Printable Contracts

Health care is a topic that's on everybody's mind. Whether it's the pundits on TV or just the chatter around the water cooler, everybody's talking about it. Whether you've got health coverage, or are among the too many people without insurance, there's one thing everybody can agree on: you are your own best advocate when it comes to taking care of your health. And if you think about it, it makes sense; after all, who cares more about you than you?

One way that you can take control of this part of your life is to keep track of what's going on with you. Are you taking medications? Watching your weight? Working out? It would be helpful if you could track all this. Check out the downloads at Free Printable Medical Forms.

These guys have all kinds of forms, logs, and records to help keep you in the driver's seat, health-wise. Whether it's fertility information, tracking info on babies and children, food and nutrition, medical diaries, or more, you'll probably find something helpful here. There are even forms for use in medical offices.

Free Printable Medical Forms are available as free downloads in PDF format. You'll need a copy of Adobe's Acrobat Reader to open and print these files. Also available are paid versions of these forms, running $3.99 each. They come in Microsoft Word DOC format and can be edited.

Download Free Printable Medical Forms

If you have kids—or have ever been a kid—then you know that competition is one of the driving forces of the Universe. "I call shotgun!" "We always have to do what YOU want!" You've heard them all. If you want to maintain some sense of order, or at least keep your hearing intact, then from time to time you may need to step in to settle things. You might just decide arbitrarily who "wins", or you might choose another method, like picking names out of a hat.

The Hat is an electronic version of that tried and true decision making process. Enter a list of names, and The Hat will help you make your pick. In addition to the all important decisions about who gets to sit where and who picks the movie to go see, The Hat can be used for other types of drawings as well. Running a raffle? Enter names and let it you help pick the winner. You can also choose pairs of names for assigning teams and such.

The Hat is a Windows application.

Download The Hat

A long, long time ago, back before email, Twitter, cell phones, and all the other gadgets and goodies we've come to depend on, there used to be this thing called "the mail." People would communicate by sending letters back and forth to one another. Rumor has it that you can still do that. If you'd like to "go retro" and help revive that old practice, you can make it easier on yourself by grabbing some free printable mailing labels.

Printable Labels are available for use as address labels to get your mail where it's going, and as return address labels to let everybody know where it came from. Heck, you could even use one of each on a letter and blow everybody's mind. There are dozens and dozens of designs to choose from, including labels for business, holiday labels, labels for parties and weddings, and more. And the best part of it all is that they're all available for free. Labels are in Microsoft Word DOC format, so you can download them, personalize them with your name, or the name of your recipient, address, and all, and then print them out on plain paper or on adhesive label stock. Either way, you'll be the envy of the neighborhood when they see you heading off to the letter box again with your mail.

Printable Labels are available for free download. They're DOC files, so you'll need a copy of Microsoft Word to personalize and print them. If you want to grab all the labels at once, you can buy the whole collection for $9.00.

Download Printable Labels

There used to be a time, way back when, when we could keep track of everything we needed to stay on top of just in our heads. As our lives got more complicated, and our brains got less efficient, we needed to transition to non-volatile forms of memory. Thus was born the To Do list. After a while, that list isn't big enough, so maybe we tried using a calendar/organizer or even a spiral-bound notebook. That was okay as long as things were easily organized by time (for the calendar), or there still wasn't a lot to remember (the notebook). After a while, though, it became impossible to find anything (digging through dozens or hundreds of pages). So next we transitioned to a searchable tool to use on our computers. That's much better, but since many of these types of tools are text-based, it's impossible to annotate our notes with images, charts, and other non-textual content. KeepNote may be the next generation of note taking tool.

With an interface that looks not unlike Outlook, you can build a hierarchy of your ideas, notes, appointments, etc. in the sidebar. Within each of these divisions, you have a list of individual posts that shows at the top of your screen. Click on an individual item, and you get your specific notes—with illuminations—in the main pane of the application window. As you'd expect, your information is fully searchable, so you won't spend minutes (or hours or days) looking for info you know is in there, but maybe not in a location you remember.

KeepNote is a free application. It's written in Python and is available for Windows (with a regular installer) as well as installers for several flavors of Linux, and a platform independent distribution for Mac OS X and just about anybody else.

Download KeepNote

The virtues of archiving tools are well-known. You can save individual files, multiple files, or even folders or volumes full of files into a single storage archive, saving space in the process, and allowing you to move this single file around into storage or to transfer to another system. Creation of backups, packing away non-current source code, and many other uses are available to you. These tools also allow you to unpack these archives as well—after all, what good is a backup if you can't restore it when needed?

ArcThemAll is a tool that you can use to create and extract archives. As its name would suggest, it can handle archive files of several different formats. Along with the standard ZIP and 7z formats, it also supports UPX compression, which allows you to compress and decompress executable files. If space is at a premium, you can compress your program files, making those compressed files self-extracting. Now when you run your app, it will automatically extract itself into memory and run exactly as if it were a "normal" executable file.

ArcThemAll is a free Windows application.

Download ArcThemAll

Keeping track of Jewish dates, and especially holidays, can be complicated when you live in a world of Gregorian calendars. While most calendars include important days in the Jewish year—Rosh HaShanah, beginning of Passover—there's always the complication that a given holiday actually began on the day before at sunset. And what about days that aren't holidays? Maybe you ought to look at grabbing a Jewish calendar.

Printable Jewish Calendar has a bunch of calendars to choose from. You can grab Jewish calendars with Gregorian (civil) dates on them, or Gregorian calendars with Jewish dates on them. You can choose whether to display Jewish holidays or not. Or you can go nuts and create your own custom calendar. Pick the month and year—either Jewish or Gregorian—choose whether to display names of days of the week in English or Hebrew, add in holidays, and you're set.

Printable Jewish Calendars are available for free. You'll need a web browser to grab them and a copy of Acrobat Reader, or other program that can open PDF files to print them.

Download Jewish Calendar

If you're responsible for employee scheduling, you know what a challenge—and pain in the neck—it can be. You've got to cover all the shifts on all the days, keeping track of hours assigned, who can work when, and about a zillion other variables. Typically this is all done on something like a desk calendar (if you're lucky) or the back of an envelope (if you're not). It would be nice to clean this process up a bit, don't you think?

DRoster is a free employee scheduling tool. Along with being able to keep track of all the players, it lets you build the rules you need to make your business run smoothly. Need two supervisors on at all times? Susie can't work on Tuesday? Multiple locations? It handles them all. With a rich set of reports, you'll be able to keep track of what's really happening. And your employees will happier and more motivated, when they know what's going on.

DRoster is a free Windows application, compatible with systems running Win2k and later. With the free version, you're limited to 300 shifts at a time, but you can delete older ones to replace them with more current information. Or of course, you can upgrade to their paid version, which doesn't have this limitation.

Download DRoster