Father's Day is Sunday and if you are planning a party or celebration with Dad, we've got some great printables that might come in handy~ and the best part, of course? They're FREE!
Printable Father's Day Chalkboard Banner from Lia Griffith
Father's Day Printables from Love Party Printables
More free stuff for you this Friday the 13th! Hope you aren't superstitious and hiding out worrying about bad luck coming your way today...
Today I thought it'd be fun to share some really cool apps (sorry not really free appetizers, lol) for your smart phone and of course, since this is Thank God It's Free-day, they are all FREE!
The other day I mentioned an app that would be fun for kids to use on a road trip that might keep them occupied, at least for a little while, lol. It's a Compass from Catch.com, I love it! It actually moves just like a compass would, with the needle and all. Like many apps, you can find it in your Google Play store. It is essentially a GPS as well, allowing you to navigate to locations and save them also.
In the same genre, so to speak, another fun navigating app is Google Sky Map. You can stargaze with your smartphone just by pointing it towards the sky, or explore by search terms!
And one more travel app I fell in love with: Relax and Sleep. I'm thinking this would be a great one for traveling little ones~ imagine putting on some white noise, ocean sounds or gentle music to sleep by. They'd be out like a light~ you hope!
Since our team of Upcyclers and this blog is eco oriented, I couldn't resist looking for eco and environmental apps. I thought the grand prize winner of the Dept. of Energy's Apps for Energy Competition was pretty cool (so did they obviously!). It's called Leafully and brings energy usage into simple understandable terms of trees, basically the number of trees needed to offset your energy consumption. Like most energy apps, "it uses Green Button which is an open standard for sharing electricity data of utility customers."*1
Melon is along the same lines, but for a commercial building application. You can measure your Energy Star benchmark just by entering your building information, upload your Green Button data and then it converts to your Energy Star score. From there, it will make recommendations for improved energy usage. If you are a manager or owner of a large corporate building or facility you can help to bring your usage in line with the use of this free App~ or you can also suggest it to management if you work in such an environment!
You can even find the right light bulb with an app called, what else, Light Bulb Finder!
There are also some terrific eco game apps you can check out! Whirleo lets you clean up pollutants by the begrimed Guzzlers (ahem, I think they mean us...). Free from the iTunes appstore, you can try it out before purchasing the unlocked version.
My Water Diary lets you measure your daily water usage over a week's time and thereby regulate or reduce it.
You can find apps for anything these days, as most of you know~ so I'll wind this up with a few about my personal favorite: Food! Or should I say Fooducate? This app lets you scan the UPC's of over 200,000 products and tells you the nutritional info on each. Make healthier choices right in the grocery store!
Use Locavore to find "local, in-season food. Pinpoint nearby farmers' markets that sell the products you love"!
And last, if you love seafood like I do, you'll love Seafood Watch! This app lets you find ocean-friendly seafood at your favorite restaurants or stores. Along with the current recommendations for seafood, you can also get complete information about the best farming and fishing methods.
So there you go, lots of FREE APP-"etizers" for you to check out~ that's if you venture out from under your bed this Friday the 13th...bwahaha!!!
Do you Love 2 Read? Well, this week I went looking for a free read~ and I found some great resources for free eBooks and downloadable books! Not only do you save money, but you can save paper by reading online or on a reading device~ good for your wallet, your planet and your brain!
Freebooks.com calls themselves "the most popular website for Free Books"~ just ignore the annoying pop-up offer for a free gift card~ as much as I like free things, I don't like them with tricky strings attached! I didn't find very many choices but there were some all time favorites.
Pride and Prejudice from Freebooks.com
Grimm's Fairy Tales from Freebooks.com
I loved Kobo where they invite you to "Read Freely"...and offer about 180 titles including many classics.
Aesop's Fables from Kobo
Jane Eyre from Kobo
You can "go to the mall"~ the eBookMall, that is! They have about 125 free eBooks you can download to your "eReader, smartphone, tablet, PC or Mac. But they say their list is updated on a regular basis and that the same books are not always available, so grab them when you can!
Just Free Books is a search engine you can use to find free eBooks for you! I searched for one of my daughter's favorites: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and found 10 pages of results! Some better than others and a bit varied from the title, but it led me to a nice find called Storynory where you can download or just listen to audio books for children. They had a wonderful version of Alice in Wonderland that is illustrated and clearly read with lovely diction.
Available at Storynory.com
Just Free Books also listed another audio version from BooksShouldBeFree.com that is dramatically read and uses different readers voicing the different characters.
I hope you'll have fun browsing for your favorites like I did~ when you find a good one all you have to do is find a comfy spot and enjoy a good read for FREE!
