Free Download A Day

We're always looking for a way to keep track of all the little bits and pieces of information that come into our lives each day. Piles of legal pads on the desk, handfuls of PostIt's on the monitor, an email in-box bursting at the seams—you know the drill. It would be nice to be able to stick all this stuff in one place, where you could store it, and then hopefully retrieve it as you need it.

ActionOutline Lite is a tool that you can use to do just that. Built around a tree outline form, you can now stick all your random musings, important phone numbers, and everything else in one place. There's no limit to the number of outline items you can create, although your ability to create sub-items is limited in this free tool. It's easy to drag-and-drop nodes as you organize and re-organize your thoughts. You can even flag important items for followup.

ActionOutline Lite is a Windows application. It will run under Windows 2000 and later, for both 32- and 64-bit versions.

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Did you ever have one of those days—or lifetimes—where you know you worked yourself half to death, but you can't for the life of you remember exactly what you spent your time doing? Sure, if you're writing the Great American Novel, it may be easy to remember how you spent your day (umm, writing?), but if you spend you time doing this and that and something else, it may be easy to let it all slip through the cracks. TimeSnapper may be what you've been looking for.

This tool will automatically take screen shots of your desktop on a schedule you dictate. What better way to know that you've been doing than to look at your computer's screen? It's smart enough to figure out when your system is idle, so you're not going to get a bunch of screenshots overnight when nothing interesting is happening. You can define how long you want to keep your images around, or limit the amount of storage space your screenshots take up, so your hard drive won't be filled with pictures of your desktop.,

TimeSnapper is a free download for your Windows system.

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There are lots of tools out there that can help you make PDF files out of your documents. Once they're PDF-ed, it's easy to share your files with others, even across platforms. Unfortunately, it's not always the case that these new files are set up in the most compact form possible.

Free PDF Compressor can give you a hand in compressing your PDF files. You can chose from Flate or RunLength compression algorithms to get your files as compact as possible. Smaller files can be downloaded faster, and don't take up as much storage space. And just for grins, this tool will also decompress PDFs as well, allowing you to expand them back to their normal size. This may come in handy if you need to perform additional file manipulations.

You can download the Free PDF Compressor application for free, of course, for your Windows system.

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There are two types of people in the world: those who think there are two types of people in the world, and those who don't. When all is said and done, there are a bunch of different ways that the world can be divided into two groups: paper or plastic? chocolate or vanilla? Red Sox or Yankees? Or one of the geekier indices: mouse or keyboard?

While use of the mouse has become ubiquitous with the almost universal use of GUI front ends for computer software, there are still some folks who can do things faster from the keyboard than from clicking buttons and links on the screen. For those folks, it's good to have a tool like Find and Run Robot.

Find and Run Robot (FARR) is an application launcher that lets you type your choices rather than click them. To invoke an app, just start typing its name, and you'll get a list of matches—it's like doing a search for programs on your system, with the added bonus that you can then start them up immediately. In addition, it supports all kinds of plugins and customizations, so you can tweak it to your heart's content.

Find and Run Robot is a free Windows application. You can use it on systems running any Win32 operating system, from Windows 9x on up through Vista.

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We all love countdown timers. Only 327 shopping days 'til Christmas! Only 187 days to graduation! The list goes on. If you want to do a countdown to Aunt Sophie's birthday, though, you're probably not going to find it ready-made out there.

TimeLeft lets you create your own countdown timer, or any of several different time-related functions. Along with counting down to a particular time or date, you can count up with a stopwatch, keep track of working days or hours until a deadline, or even replace the clock in the System Tray. You can display the time in any time zone, and even schedule pop-up reminders for stuff you've gotta' do. You can resize all these reminders and clocks to just the right size for your system.

TimeLeft is a free Windows application. You're limited to one of each type of clock or reminder, or you can get an unlimited number if you upgrade to their paid version.

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Everybody knows that their computer has a system clock. While this may be useful in reminding you when it's time to go eat lunch, it's got other less-mundane responsibilities as well. The timestamp you see on each file on your system, for example, comes from that same internal clock. Different applications rely on system clock functionality as well. If you run accounting software, it's important to know when the end of the month is and all that. System clock again. Sometimes, though, you may want things to happen at a different time.

You can always reset the clock on your computer, but that may complicate your life in unforeseen ways. If you've got things that happen at a particular time, like big-deal virus scans of your hard drive, you may not want to trigger that functionality. RunAsDate is a little utility that can give you a hand here.

Rather than having to reset your system clock, you use RunAsDate to change the time for just one specific application at a time. Need to double check some end-of-the-month process in Quicken, but don't want to mess-up the timestamps on all your email? This is your answer. (It would have been handy to have back when we were all excited about Y2K testing.)

RunAsDate is a free Windows app. It can run under Win2k and later.

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No matter how many pretty pictures our programs put up on the screen, what we humans are really interested in is the words. While images do a lot to help convey meaning, generally textual content is more specific, and less ambiguous. Reading all that text is important to getting things done. But it becomes a real challenge if the words go flashing by like the credits at the end of a TV show. How are you ever going to see what has flashed across the screen?

Textractor can help you to grab this text. Just tell it which application to monitor, and it'll keep track of all the text that the app writes to the screen, and log it. Now you can go back and peruse it at your leisure, including copy-and-paste into other apps if you like.

Textractor is a free Windows application. It's compatible with systems running WinNT, 2000, and XP.

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The hills are alive with the sound of measurement. Huh? We measure everything: time, distance, mass, volume, pressure, and more. That's all good, until we need to start converting measurements from one unit to another. How many meters are there in a mile? How many cups in a quart? How many dollars in a Euro? Now life has become complicated.

Unit Converter tries to help you make sense of it all. Supporting over 900 different types of units, it's not likely that you're going to need a conversion that it can't help you with. And it's smart enough to take what you want to hand it and not complain: ask it for the number of feet in 2/3 of a kilometer, and it'll do the math for you. That's handy. And since it's an app you install on your computer, you don't have to be online to use it. It's distributed as a single file, so you're not going to have bits and pieces of it strewn across your system; and if there comes a time when you want to uninstall it, you just delete the executable and it's gone.

Unit Converter is a free Windows application. It'll run on any system from Win98 through Vista.

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With computers, there's no reason for misspelled words. Sure, you've got the occasional "affect" vs. "effect", or "your" vs. "you're", but when it comes to real typos, there's just no excuse. Word processors, spreadsheet apps, presentation management tools—they've all got built-in spell check capability. Unfortunately, though, there are still some tools that don't provide that kind of help. When you type a quickie little note into Notepad, for example, you're on your own in terms of spelling, 'cause it won't check for you. Unless you add a tool like tinySpell.

tinySpell is a spellcheck tool for applications that don't include that functionality themselves. Tell tinySpell which apps to pay attention to and which to ignore. You can use it to check your spelling in real time as you type, or you can check in batches by copying your text to the clipboard. Either way, you can fix the error yourself, or choose from a list of suggested alternative—correct—spellings.

There are two free versions of tinySpell: one for Windows 98, and another for Win2k / XP / Vista.

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Portable Document Format (PDF) files are a wonderful thing. They're the ultimate in cross-platform flexibility, and allow you to use text, images, and more in telling your story. Sometimes, though, too much flexibility can get in the way of getting work done. Suppose you're the proud recipient of a great big PDF file just chock full of images, fancy fonts, and all kinds of good stuff. Now imagine that you want the text—and just the text—from that file. While all that other stuff is good, if you're building a web page, for example, then you're really only interested in the text. Yes, you could go through and copy-and-paste all the textual content from that PDF doc, but that may be the most tedious thing you do all day. You need a tool that will take care of that for you.

Zilla PDF to TXT Converter is a free tool that will extract the text from a PDF page. It's got an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface—just drag your file, or files, onto the application window, and it'll strip out all the extraneous stuff and give you just the text. Now you can use it to build your web page, re-purpose it into a word processing document, or whatever else you need to do with it.

Zilla PDF to TXT Converter is a free Windows application. If you're interested in moving beyond this basic functionality, they've also got a paid version, called PDFZilla.

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