To save money on digital printing costs, I use Avery media resources for doing small or short run print jobs, such as business cards, name badges, CD labels, and binder materials. The card stock for Avery resources has greatly improved over the years, and while its Matte White business card stock for ink jet printers may not fully match the quality of professionally printed cards, these Avery cards work great for testing out new designs or for a project in which you need only a handful of cards to get started.

For a long while, you needed to use Microsoft Word to design and print media resources using one of hundreds of Avery templates. But Avery also now provides two free standalone applications, called DesignPro (one for Mac and one for PC users) that includes all its templates and the design features for putting together and printing media projects.

If you want, you can design your digital printing project in say Photoshop, save it as JPEG file and import it as an image file into DesignPro. In this article, however, I will give you an overview of designing a label project in DesignPro for Mac.

• Start a new project (File>New) in DesignPro. Select the type of media project you want. Search for the type of template you want to use. You’ll probably want to make sure your local office supply store carries the media stock for the template you’re using. Or you can order the stock online.

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Have you ever imagined what it would be like to pack up all of your hiking and camping gear and just take off for a few months to some obscure location in the Brazilian rain forests where there’s an alleged secret ancient city filled with treasures of gold? Or what about exploring the mysterious underground catacombs under the Island of Malta where legend has it there are strange creatures living deep under the earth?

As a person who spends a great deal of his spare time researching old and new conspiracy theories, folklore and legend, I find the prospect of traveling to a remote part of the world for such exploration one of my greatest dreams. However, with a small family to support and responsibilities to my employer and my writing clients, there is very little time left over to travel around the world. With that said, there are times when some claims or legends really require an examination of the land, buildings and civilization surrounding a specific area.

In this update I’d like to take readers on a few amazing adventures to explore some mysterious areas of the earth where local folklore and legend makes claim of strange creatures, scary encounters, secret military bases and countless other conspiracy theories. If you’ve got all of your gear ready and you’re ready to board the flight, let’s head out on our first adventure.

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Sometimes, there’s nothing better than to kick back, relax, and enjoy some of those classic cartoon TV shows from your childhood. It can really take you back to the good ol’ days of waking up early and just plopping yourself in front of the television on Saturdays for the morning cartoons.

Unfortunately, today’s programming just isn’t the same anymore and animated TV classics are sometimes hard to come by. Before you go out and buy expensive DVD box sets of your favorite toon series, you can still relive your childhood days free of charge thanks to the Web.

There are plenty of great resources available online for free streaming cartoons. Nothing beats the classics! Let’s find out how to watch them again online.

ToonJet — Merrie Melodies, Felix the Cat, & More

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Humans are, by nature, good visual learners. That’s why visual things are engraved easier in our brain. We will recognize faces in photos easier than listening to the description. That is also why the first thing that we will remember about a certain type of file or application is its icon.

In the computer world, icons are an app’s visual representative and personal identity. In terms of marketing, icons are the packaging and one of the selling points. I know some people who would try out (or even buy) applications just because of the beautiful icon. If you think I’m exaggerating, visit the iTunes Store and go to the iPhone applications department.

Mac is famous for its good looking icons. Apple has set its icon standard so high that third party developers have to match or surpass the quality if they want to survive in the demanding community of Mac users.

Giving Files & Folders Some Personalities

Even though Mac users can feast their eyes with tons of beautifully crafted Mac icons, some general items always use the same old icons. I’m sure that, just like me, sometimes most computer users would love to give their personal files and folders unique personalities.

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Do you BitTorrent? Do you download stuff from Kazza, Limewire or whatever you crazy kids are downloading from nowadays? We all know that it is illegal to download copyrighted works from the Internet. No matter if it is a movie, music, an application or even a textbook. You could be subject to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. We have heard horror stories of a college kid or a grandfather being sued by the RIAA or another company hell bent on you not downloading their proprietary materials. So what do you do? Do you stop downloading?

I know some people that have – but most of you are just downloading away without a care in the world. Would you like a little bit of extra downloading protection?

Companies set up fake peers and trackers that either send you malicious files or note your IP address. Now using Peer Block we can stop them from getting all of us! Once a IP range is detected as being malicious they are added to the Peer Block database. Peer Block will then prevent your machine from allowing them to connect. It is not foolproof by any means but for those of you who keep on downloading, this might be a little piece of mind.

Let’s take a look at how it works. You start your downloading protection by downloading the application from here.

Just unzip the contents and run the exe file. If you have show extensions turned off in your Windows Explorer it will be the icon shaped like a blue cube. It is the third one down in my screenshot below:

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Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For more cool websites and web app reviews subscribe to MakeUseOf Directory.

(1) KidsEatFor – If you eat out with your family often, KidsEatFor is definitely for you. It allows you to locate restaurants where kids get to eat for free. Just type in your address or zipcode (US only) and hit “search”, KidsEatFor will then give you a list of nearby restaurants that offer kids specials. Read more: KidsEatFor -Locate Restaurants Where Kids Eat Free

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The Flash FLV video format has become the default format for video on the web. Many popular video websites like YouTube, Google Videos, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, and Yahoo! Videos use the FLV video format. Meanwhile, most Windows desktop video programs used to play and edit videos use the Microsoft AVI file format. As a result, many users frequently need freware to convert FLV videos found on the web to AVI format on the desktop.

In this article, let us look at Free FLV Converter, a simple freeware application you can use to convert FLV videos to AVI.

Free FLV Converter is developed by Koyote Soft, and can also be downloaded from CNET Downloads. Free FLV converter can download embedded FLV (or SWF) videos directly from the Internet, and can convert FLV to AVI, iPod (MPEG4 or H.264), iPhone, 3GP, PSP, or MP3 audio only. Conversely, it can also convert videos from other formats (DivX, XviD, MpeG, DVD, and AVI) to FLV.

Installation

Download and run the setup program to install the software. It is a light-weight download at 6MB, compared to most other video converters, and does more than just convert videos as we shall see. The only thing you would want to take care of during installation, is to avoid installing the Dealio toolbar. This is a “bloatware” toolbar that is promoted to support this freeware application, but you can easily opt out of installation by deselecting the two checkboxes during setup. Select your preferred language the first time you launch the program.

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Another online movie and TV site? Hmmm, yes…but Clicker seems to stand apart from the crowd (and it’s a swarm!).

In their own words, Clicker positions itself as – one part directory, one part search engine, one part wiki, one part entertainment guide, and one part DVR.

In short, Clicker tries to be the sum of lots of parts. I guess it tries to take the best search experience and match it with an online viewing experience à la Hulu. The ultimate goal is to be the last stop (or at least a necessary one) for online TV entertainment where you can view TV shows online.

So let’s explore the parts and arrive at the sum.

Clicker As A Search Engine

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Last time I told you about the first 5 apps that I have found invaluable for my new Google Android phone and today I would like to talk about the other 5.

Looking through the Android Market, I have come to the conclusion that there is a lot of crap in there (busty bikini girls washing your Android screen with soap and water, while grinning insanely at you?) but there are also a lot of gems.   Finding those gems can be really difficult, unless you know exactly what you are looking for.  I have found things simply by thinking to myself “what would be useful to me?   What do I need on a phone?”.   Busty bikini girls are definately not on that list but the following items are.

So let’s start once again at looking at some of the things you should consider installing on your Droid.

PicSay

I have an excellent camera on my phone but nevertheless, some photos just don’t come out the way I want them to.   In the absence of an official Photoshop app for the Android, PicSay is a suitable alternative in the meantime.

As well as being able to alter the photo in terms of contrast, brightness and many more (see the screenshot to the left for examples), you can also add fun special effects such as word balloons, titles, graphics, color correction and highlighting.  Just increase or decrease the desired special effect by running your finger over the bar at the bottom of the screen and see the photo being updated in real time.

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There are a number of free programs out there that you can use to encrypt or protect your files. Some of them seem complicated and some of them are very simple to use. Conceal is a newer program that falls in the very-simple-to-use category.

Conceal is meant for use on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. What sets it apart from other encryption software is just how easy it is to use and how easy it is to choose the type of encryption that you want to use. Let’s take a look at the software, shall we?

There it is. That’s about as simple and intuitive an interface as one can have for an encrypting/decrypting program. If you have it open and just want to drag files over the lock to encrypt the files, you can do that! The same goes for dragging encrypted files to the key to decrypt them.

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