FaxZero – Send faxes online for free

If someone asks you to fax him/her and you don’t have a fax machine, you can upload your file to faxzero.com and fax it to them! It’s free if it’s in the US or Canada and under 25 pages and you don’t mind having their name on the cover sheet; otherwise it’s $1.99 per fax (again, up to 25 pp.), payable via PayPal. (I don’t recommend PayPal, but here you have no choice, sadly). You can send international faxes, too. Those are $3.63 per fax, up to 15 pp. per fax. Disclaimer: I have not tried it myself.

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PDF Split & Merge

Split and merge PDFs using PDFSAM (PDF Split and Merge), a free and lightweight tool. Available at http://www.pdfsam.org.

Bedbug Registry

Did you know BED BUGS have been making a comeback, all over the world? This means they are very much in America, too. Want to check if the (American or Canadian) hotel you’re considering booking may have bed bug issues? Head over to the Bed Bug Registry!

Google Charts – Motion Chart

Google’s free Motion Charts maker was cool when it came out and is still cool, yet underused! While they would, of course, be overkill in some situations, in other situations these motion charts convey your data and the story your data tell like nothing else out there. Great for presentations.

See EXAMPLE of motion chart HERE, GALLERY of types of charts available HERE (Google does whatever kind of chart you need, not just the motion chart, though I stick with Excel, myself) and example of the motion chart being used in a well-known TED talk HERE.

Shrink PDFs (Online)

If you need to shrink a PDF (note: MSWord does appear to offer two size/quality options when you’re making a PDF, but still), compress.smallpdf.com offers a super-easy way to do this. There’s no download; it’s just a drag-and-drop website. If you have a paypal account, you might consider giving them the $3 donation.

MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English)

MICASE is a sizeable (“nearly 1.8 million words”) corpus of spoken, academic English. It may not be the biggest corpus around, and the website doesn’t offer fancy tools like COCA does, but what’s great about it is that you can be SO SPECIFIC about the speaker and context. When you run a search, you can choose the gender, age, academic position/role, native speaker status and first language of the speakers, and also the context: Speech Event Type, Academic Division, Academic Discipline,  and “Interactivity Rating” (e.g. monologic vs. highly interactive.” Also, for some of it, you can even LISTEN to the data. Thanks, alma mater!

Rotate PDFs permanently

Most PDF readers can rotate PDFs so we can read them, but it’s not permanent. Now you can rotate PDFs “permanently, online, for free” at rotatepdf.net. Nothing to download; just a super-simple website. You’re welcome.