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The use of sound effects can make or break a project, but sometimes finding that right, good-quality piece of audio can be difficult.

Flash Kit

Flash Kit’s Sound FX page is one of the best places to download free sound effects. The site has over 7,000 royalty-free tracks available for download You can search the collection manually or browse various categories, like nature or transportation, for the sound you’re looking for. If you come across a desirable sound effect, all of its information, including length, quality, and size, are available and you can easily preview the track before downloading. All tracks are downloadable as WAV, MP3, or Flashtrak files. Feel free to also contribute to the archive yourself by submitting your own original sounds.

Soungle

While Soungle may look and feel like just an audio search engine, it really isn’t. The website is touted as a mega online library and it only searches its impressive growing database of sound effects. Soungle keeps everything easy and straightforward. Search results simply include a preview, description, clip information, and if you like the sound effect, just download it. It’s as easy as that.

Soundboard

Soundboard has a massive supply of thousands of sound effects to choose from. You can either search the collection by keyword or explore the slew of soundboards, with everything from airplanes to circus animal sound effects. Once on a soundboard page, you can listen to the playlist and download whichever tracks you like. All sound effects are MP3 files.

SoundBible

Offering thousands of sound bites and effects, SoundBible is the encyclopedia of free sound clips. The site divides its content into free sound effects or royalty-free sounds. All the sounds are plainly listed with a preview listen button and what license each falls under. Royalty-free sounds consist of Creative Commons and public domain works.

Freesound Project

The Freesound Project is a repository of Creative Commons licensed audio samples. It’s a huge collaborative database of just sounds, so you’re bound to find what you need. You can search through all the content by keyword or browse the popular tags. Of course, you can always contribute to the database by adding your audio samples released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License.

This is a long HOW TO from MakeUseOf, but it’s a helpful one that takes you step by step as you create a calendar you can use month to month and even print.

Step #1 – Create The Header And Title

The first thing you’ll need to do is create the weekday header as well as the month title. This step will demonstrate the merge-and-fit feature as well as how to set the width of multiple columns at once.

First, type in the weekdays in a row across the top, but leave one row blank for your title.  Format the text around 12 point and bold. You’ll notice that some of the weekdays extend beyond the limit of the column.

To fix this, just highlight the weekdays that you’ve typed and then select Format -> Column -> Width – and set the width for around 15 to 20.

Now that you’ve got your weekday header nicely formatted, it’s time to add the current month at the top of your calendar sheet. While you could just manually type in the month at the top of the sheet, this wouldn’t be very efficient, as you’d have to change it every time you wanted to print a new calendar sheet. It makes more sense to create an Excel calendar template that knows what month it is and changes the month title for you.

You do this by choosing any cell above your weekdays, and typing in the formula, “=TODAY()” – which tells Excel that you want today’s date in that field. After you do this, you’ll notice that it looks nothing like the month and it’s formatted all wrong. First, format the title with a font of around 20 to 22 and bold. Then, go into the Format -> Cells -> Number tab, select date and choose the format that you’d like for the month title.

Once you’ve got your title formatted correctly, you’ll still notice that it’s not centered properly and exists only within one cell at the top of the spreadsheet. In other words, it looks odd. To fix this, highlight all of the cells above your weekday header (including the one where your month is displayed) and click on the “merge and center” button.

Clicking “merge and center” turns all of the highlighted cells into one collective cell, and then centers your title in the middle of the highlighted region. Now you’ve got yourself a nicely formatted, automated calendar header.

Step #2 – Create The Calendar Days

The next step to make your calendar template in Excel is to once again use the “merge and center” feature, but this time you’ll merge a few empty cells in order to create one larger cell that represents a single day.

This step is where you’ll build the body of your calendar template, but it’s also the easiest step. First, highlight about 5 or 6 cells, and click on the “merge and center” button. This will form one cell the perfect size for one day on the calendar. Then, while this large cell is highlighted, copy it (control-c or Edit->Copy) and paste it into the other days (or just drag the lower right corner of the box over to the right). This will duplicate your box for every day of the week. Do this for five rows. Your calendar should now look like this:

Highlight your entire calendar click on the borders tool, and select the “grid” so that every grid line shows – essentially “drawing” out your calendar for you. Finally, you can either leave your template as it is (so you can write in the days yourself) and move ahead to step 3, or you can add in the days using Excel. Instead of going through and manually typing in “1″ to “30″, you can save a lot of time by using Excel’s auto-fill feature.

Using this technique, you simply enter in a formula for the first Monday and the second Sunday of the month. For example, if the 1st of the month is on Sunday, you’d enter “1″ into the first Sunday box (and of course nicely format it at 14-point and bold). Then, for Monday you’d type “=” then click on the day before it (A1) and type “+1″.

When you’re finished, highlight the box where you’ve entered this formula, and drag it across the entire week – this will correctly fill in all of the days of the week. Then, do the same thing for the following Sunday, but click on Saturday and add 1.

When you’re done, drag this box down each week so that every Sunday has the same formula (adding 1 to the previous Saturday). Drag the formula from the previous Monday down through the month as well – and then drag from Monday across each week. While it may sound confusing, as you give it a try you’ll find that filling in the days only requires a few clicks and less than 5 minutes.

Step #3 – Printing Your Calendar Template

Finally, you’re ready to print out your calendar to a nice clean paper so you can pin it up on your wall. By this point, your calendar should look like this.

While this looks absolutely fantastic within the Excel sheet, it won’t print properly because the edge of the calendar template goes beyond the printable page, so you’ll end up with parts of it on two pages. To fix this, go to File -> Page Setup, click the Page tab, and make sure it’s configured as shown here.

Set the format for landscape, and fit the entire calendar to 1 page wide by 1 page high. Click OK, and when you do a print preview you’ll find that your calendar template is formatted on one sheet and ready to print!

The next month, just open up the same Excel file (the month will already be correct), renumber the days and click Print – it’s as simple as that!

How about an alternative to watching NCAA on TV? This is just in from MakeUseOf.

NCAA.com. That is the NCAA’s on demand site.

If you browse on over there you will see this:

So if you want to be emailed and have access to all the NCAA games starting from the first round all the way to the NCAA championships simply fill out the form above. Once you do that you will see this confirmation:

Here’s a quick look at what the service has looked like before:

You get the full action on your computer or mobile device and best of all you can hit that magic
boss button at the top right hand side of the screen to minimize your action and display a fake Excel-like spreadsheet.

Another advantage to watching online instead of regular television is that you can click around the web while you are doing it. You can look up facts or even save the video for another viewing.

ScrapBook is a Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web pages and easily manage collections. Basically, this tool acts as a filing cabinet for all of your digital research data. Whenever you find something interesting on the net, you could add it to your scrapbook, either by dragging and dropping, right clicking or using shortcut keys.Key features are lightness, speed, accuracy and multi-language support. Major features are:
* Save Web page
* Save snippet of Web page
* Save Web site
* Organize the collection in the same way as Bookmarks
* Full text search and quick filtering search of the collection
* Editing of the collected Web page
* Text/HTML edit feature resembling Opera’s Notes

The ability to edit PDFs has been on my wish list and that of others too. Thanks to Jinny Bartel for recommending this post and to MakeUseOf.com for the great info, here is a recommended tool for editing PDFs online without having to buy a program to do it. If you search in your browser “edit PDF” you will find more tools that work the same way.

PDFVue
www.pdfvue.com

Features:

* Edit and annotate PDF files online.
* Edit as many files as you want, no limit on size and number of pages.
* Upload and fill out PDF forms online.
* Browser add-on that automatically opens files on PDFVue.
* Open PDF files from your computer or any web address.
* Download and save edited PDF files to your computer.
* Share file with others by forwarding a link.
* Similar websites: PDFescape and PDFHammer.

For beginner and amateur musicians, there are many online websites offering free sheet music. But once you begin to visit these sites, you will find that many of them are thinly disguised search portals with broken links or front-ends to lure you into purchasing something related to music. We here at MakeUseOf are always happy to show you the truly free sites that you can make use of, so without further ado, here are the best sites where you can find free sheet music to print.

IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library

Listed by PC Magazine as one of the Top 100 Websites of 2009, this site is a treasure trove of free public domain sheet music, as well as a thriving community of music lovers. There are over 39,000 scores for 18,000+ works and thousands are being added every month. You will find multiple versions of sheets for popular works, all available for download as PDF files. While some PDFs are typeset using software and are clearer, some are scanned versions.

The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) or Petrucci Music Library has its own forum where you can participate in general music discussion, send score requests, etc. You can also follow the IMSLP on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook. Suffice it to say that if the sheet music of the classical work you’re looking for is not available here, you’re probably a professional musician who should not be looking for free websites to download sheet music!

The Choral Wiki (CPDL)

The Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL), specializes in choral music and has over 10,000 different works. Apart from scores, you can find lyrics, translations, and information about composers. Most scores are available as downloadable PDF files, some are also accompanied by MIDI files, while others are linked to clearly marked external websites.

CPDL supports advanced search so that you can search scores by title, composer, period, genre, voicing, and even lyrics. You can also browse in different ways such as alphabetically, by category, by composer, etc. CPDL is a community driven website, with over 500 contributors, so you can add your own scores and contribute to it.

Mutopia

Mutopia offers free sheet music to print for over 1600 classical works. You will find all the popular composers like Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Mozart and works for all types of instruments like Piano, Violin, Guitar, Cello and Organ. You can browse by Instrument, Composer, or Style. The Advanced Search is very impressive, allowing you to search using various filters.

Again, this is a volunteer-driven project, using the LilyPond software to create beautiful A4 or Legal sized sheets. For each work, you get PDF or PostScript files as well as MIDI files, along with a preview image and basic information about the musical work.

Free Sheet Music.Net

This site is a combination of free sheet music hosted within the site and a searchable directory of links to other websites for sheet music. I suggest you browse the sheet music downloads within that site here, rather than experimenting with the search or clicking the advertisements.

The number of sheet music downloads is quite limited. The reason this website was worth including in this list is because of the free articles available here. This assorted collection of articles ranges from beginner guides for different instruments to information about sheet music, instruments, etc.

Free Scores

Free Scores has almost 15,000 free sheet music scores available for download as PDF files. Their search is quite impressive, as you can search in many different ways: by instruments, composers, etc. For example, within works for Piano, you can search by style (genre), and instrumentation (piano solo, or with specific other instruments). Many music sheets have accompanying MIDI or MP3 files.

If you are a composer or musician, you can register for free on the site to distribute your own music. While most of the sheet music on the site is classical and in public domain, some contemporary composers have added their own music to this site for sharing.

ABC Music.Net

This is a rare website that offers free piano sheet music downloads for popular modern tunes. You will find 270+ tunes from the Beatles to Celine Dion and Justin Timberlake. You can browse alphabetically, or by search by artist or song name. The sheets are clear PDF files, downloaded as .ZIP archives. You can register to become a member and upload your contributions.

ABC Music has their own Twitter account and Facebook fan page as well, but unfortunately there don’t seem to be any updates to the site or these accounts since May ‘09. If you are interested in getting sheets for modern songs, grab it from here while it lasts.

This came from MakeUseOf.com. Visit them for great ideas. I get their daily RSS feed–what great tech ideas!

Last year, some of you were looking for a Photoshop clone that isn’t expensive. Well, here’s one recommended by the HowToGeek. Paint.net is a photo editing app for Windows machines that is similar to Photoshop. For instance, as in Photoshop, paint.net allows use of layers and other bells and whistles to create/edit images. Best of all, it is a free download.

Okay, I knew you’d ask, so here’s a pdf tutorial for paint.net. You may want to save this on your computer so you will have it as you work. Tutorial on Paint.Net

Self Control

If you’re addicted to the internet, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks; there’s nothing to stop you from constantly launching the browser and surfing. “Just 5 minutes,” that’s what you keep telling yourself. Before you know it, over an hour has passed and you still haven’t gotten any work done. In these situations, only Self Control can prevent you from straying.

Self Control is a Mac application (doesn’t that clear up a lot of confusion?) that will block the internet access to any sites in its blacklist for a preset period of time.

Once it has been started, nothing can circumvent the blocked access. Restarting your Mac will not help, neither will deleting the application. You will just have to wait for the timer to run out. I’ve painted a rather bleak picture with the last two sentences, Self Control is actually all for your benefit. It forces you to concentrate on work. Even if you wanted to stray, you can’t!

From Sara: This might be a good app for your children on their home computers doing “homework!”

From MakeUseOf.com

http://www.onlineocr.net

• This online program allows you to recognize text and characters from PDF scanned documents (including multipage files), photographs and digital camera captured images.
• You can convert OCR results directly to your favorite formats including Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Rtf, Html and Txt.
• Converted documents look exactly like the original – tables, columns, bullets and graphics.
• You can store OCRed files online in your secure workspace. Also you can download these files on your PC, edit text and print.

http://www.pocketmod.com/

Pocketmod is a handy application that can be used to convert plain A4-sized paper into all-purpose, wallet-sized, disposable booklets
(organizers). Just run the application, specify what you want on each booklet page, print it out, and fold it into a booklet.

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