This week, I’ve found a website that lets you print paper for free. Now, you still need to put blank paper in your printer, it’s not magical… What I mean, however, is that it has over 500 different kinds of paper designs that you can print, from your basic lined paper, to graph paper, to musical staff paper, to sports score cards, to blank tic-tac-toe, hangman, and battleship games!

PrintablePaper.net has, again, over 500 different kinds of paper in PDF format for you to print off at no charge. EVERYONE should take a look at this website, PrintablePaper.net, it’s really very cool.

This week’s tip was about online music discovery services. Now, I love music: I create music, play music, and most importantly, listen to music. There are some times, though, when I get tired of my music collection, and nothing good is on the radio. Give up? NO! Last.fm is a website that looks at the artists and songs that you listen to, and makes recommendations on artists that you may like, as well as concerts, video, pictures, artist bios, and other cool stuff like that. It’s free to sign up for last.fm, and it is definitely worth it. Give it a try! Those who like last.fm should also take a look at Pandora.com, which I’m sure many of you have heard of.

Here’s a few of my most recently played songs on last.fm.

Computers can be a great friend to us, yes, but when they fail, they can be one of our most hated posessions. Why? Well, imagine you just finished typing up every single final essay for your senior year, save them, go to print them the next day, and the computer’s dead! You should have backed them up to iDrive. Idrive is a website that offers you 2 gigabytes of safe, online data storage for free. All you need to do is create a free account at their website, iDrive.com, download the application (for Windows or Mac) and start backing up your files. If you want more space, there is the option to upgrade to a paid account.

Also try:

Mozy Home Backup – also free, 2GB of storage, sign up here.

ADrive – free plan offers 50GB of space, supports FTP transfers…

This week’s tech tip was about reliable, online databases. Often, teachers tell us, “Don’t use Wikipedia for research, it’s not reliable” and sometimes… they can be very, very right. So, what should you use instead? Try Jurn.org. Jurn is a website that indexes and catalogs articles from over three thousand scholarly journals, so it should be fairly easy to find accurate information for your topic, research paper, or what have you. Google Scholar does basically the same thing, and you can find it at scholar.google.com. Both Jurn and Google Scholar are sort of like free versions of the databases that our wonderful librarians provide for us. Give them a try, or keep them in mind for when research paper time comes!

This week’s tech tip is about video conversion. I know a lot of people have MP3 players, iPods, PSPs, and other portable entertainment devices. However, a lot of the time, I hear of people asking questions like “How do I get the video I took with my videocamera onto my PSP” or “Why won’t this DVD go onto my iPod?” Chances are, you need to convert the file to the proper format. WinFF is a program for Windows or Linux that makes it super-easy to do just that. Just select the file you want to convert, and select the format you want it to end up in, for example, “Microsoft Zune” or “iPod fullscreen”, and hit convert. To get WinFF, simply go to www.winff.org, and look under Downloads for the Windows Installer.

For Mac users or as another option for windows users, try Handbrake. It has even more options, and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It is available at www.handbrake.fr.

This week’s tech tip was all about keyboard shortcuts.

Suppose you’re working on a really complex project in Photo, or typing up a really long essay in the library, and you need to leave the computer. There’s a simple solution. Hold down the “Windows” key, and hit L, and your computer will “lock”, which will require you to put in your password to unlock it. This way, nobody can mess with it! The “Windows” key can do lots of other things: pressing “Windows” and D will minimize everything and take you through the desktop, and Windows-F will open a file search window.

For more like these, take a look at http://www.seoconsultants.com/windows/key/… it’s where I found the ones I didn’t know!

This week’s tip is about an issue that’s been circulating in email chains and the internet, regarding cellphones and telemarketers. Rumor is, cell phone numbers are going to be released to telemarketers in the coming weeks, but I’ve done some research of my own and others say that cellphone numbers will only be released to create a cellphone phonebook of sorts, and that telemarketing calls are still illegal to cellphones. Anyhow, to be safe, you can register yourself on the National Do-Not-Call list by calling 1-888-382-1222, or by going to www.donotcall.gov. You can do this at any time, it will take 30 days to activate, and you can do this for your home phones as well!

Thanks to Mr. Grose for mentioning this in his classes, I just figured I’d spread the word!

This week’s tech tip was about online word processing. If you ever need to view a document, but you don’t have Word or Powerpoint on your computer and you don’t want to install anything, Thinkfree.com will let you view and print the document online. It also will allow you to convert documents to different formats, and if you wish to, you can upload your document to Thinkfree so you can access it from any other computer that can access the internet. Again, the web address is www.ThinkFree.com. Now, if you need to create Word documents online, there are services for that as well, such as below:

ZohoWriter.com – Is an online word processor that allows you to create and store documents online, post documents to a blog, or even import/export documents to and from ZohoWriter, to Microsoft Office or other formats. Allows the use of a Google or Yahoo account as a login.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets – A Google service that allows you to create, store, and organize documents and spreadsheets online, again, for free. You can use your Google account (like if you have a Gmail account already).

Adobe Buzzword – Requires you to make a free account for it, but lets you work with other people on documents collaboratively, like would be helpful for a school project.

This week’s tech tip was about a free alternative image editor. This tip is also directed more towards those of you who have taken, or are currently taking Photo classes here at Thomas, or those of you who are interested in using Adobe Photoshop. Instead of having to pay hundreds of dollars for the latest version of Photoshop, try the GIMP, which is a free alternative. You can download it at www.gimp.org/windows/. It acts a lot like Photoshop, and will even open Photoshop files, which means you can work on your Photo projects at home without having to buy the program. If you’ve used Adobe Illustrator, a vector image creation program, here at school and you want a copy for home, try Inkscape, a free alternative to it (the Titan Tech Tip logo was made in Inkscape…) You can download it at http://www.inkscape.org/download/, and make sure to click on “Windows – .exe installer”. Picnik is another free, online image editor, which is very user-friendly and makes it easy to add effects quickly and effectively to your photos… you can access it at www.picnik.com. Enjoy!

This week’s tech tip was about online calculators. If you’ve ever used the excuse “I left my graphing calculator at school” to explain how you didn’t have your homework done… well… I’m sorry, but I’m about to kill that excuse once and for all. CoolMath.com has an online graphing calculator which does most of what the TI graphing calculators do, but for about a hundred bucks cheaper. (Free!) Make sure you have Java installed (if you see a pink rectangle below with your Java version, you’re set to go. Otherwise, go to www.java.com/getjava ), and go to www.coolmath.com/graphit/, and give it a try. Also, some others to try are:

http://www.gcalc.net/ – Also uses Java, works great!

http://www.webgraphing.com/ – Various different levels of graphing calculators, from basic ones to advanced ones. Requires free registration, though.

http://my.hrw.com/math06_07/nsmedia/tools/Graph_Calculator/graphCalc.html – from Holt McDougal, a textbook author. Uses Flash, works nicely!