Monday, July 12, 2010

Don't Swat Ten

I'm home, and at the moment trying to catch up on work stuff, but I should get back on schedule soon. Meanwhile, here are:

Ten Things You Can Have for Free

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

20 Tips* for Writers, a free e-book from author Doug Clegg that offers some tongue-in-cheek writing advice and probably explains why we writers are so wired all the time. Don't swat the fly.

7 Sticky Notes is "a good 100% free desktop notes software that creates Sticky Notes directly on your Desktop. It has a really good-looking realistic sticky note appearance for ultimate user experience and it offers amazing and cool features that makes 7 Sticky Notes at the same time powerful, simple to use, reliable, and light" (OS: Windows 7)

Desktop Fun from How-to Geek.com: Free Abstract Art, Castle and Dragon wallpapers.

Freebie Notes is "a great little program for users who just want sticky notes with an alarm timer. With Freebie Notes you can create notes displaying on your desktop. Your notes can be displayed immediately after creation or in the certain moments of time. You can create notes of custom sizes and colors and set different types for your notes" (OS: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7)

LettersFall 2.0 Beta is a freeware educational/fun words game that looks like something both kids and grownups would enjoy (OS: Windows XP/Vista/7)

Ever wanted to build your own online e-zine, but you aren't a whiz with HTML or JavaScript? Check out PLWorx's freeware NetEZine.

Also from PLWorx, NoteWeb allows you to organize your notes into notebooks, and "Add, edit, delete, search, sort and filter different types of data including plain or rich text notes, hyperforms, sketches and web pages. Notes are indexed and stored in "notebooks", so that it's easy to keep your information organized. You can also store keywords and links to other notes, URLs or external files with each note (OS: Unspecified but it looks like Windows.)

This one is a heads-up for my UK pals -- author Terry Pratchett is having a first novel contest (terms/conditions/rules may be found at his web site here) with a publishing contract grand prize that includes a ₤20K advance.

Jonathan Feinberg explains how my favorite online generator, Wordle, came into being in this free .pdf chapter excerpt from Beautiful Visualization by Julie Steele and Noah Iliinsky.

Yea Chess allows you to cross virtual knights with your computer, and has "a simple interface and powerful and quick artificial intelligence. You can adjust the skill of the computer and save games" (OS: Windows XP/Vista/7)

3 comments:

  1. So glad you're back. Hope everybody's coping and comforting each other at home. Off to read Clegg's advice!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the great links!

    I found a great open source program that is a lot like Photo-shop. It's called Gimp. I use it for some of my blog images and - if I ever choose to self publish - my book cover.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Welcome back, {{{{Lynn}}}}

    You were missed.

    Thanks for the ditty by Douglass Clegg. I've downloaded it and will move it to my phone so I can read on the run since I seem to be doing that more and more. Running, that is.

    *sigh*

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.