In need of a photo to polish off your website design? There are a lot of places you can go to get images – but most people either steal barrow them from other websites or they purchase them from some overpriced website.  What if you could get all the free stock images you need all for free?  Today, I will be sharing with you five resources where you can grab all the photos you need without feeling guilty or becoming broke.

Here are my five favorite free stock photo resources, right from my own collection of web development bookmarks:

Public-domain-photos.com – The domain name says it all with this one.  This resource offers 5,000 free stock photos that are public domain.

TurboPhoto.com – Browse and download 2,000 free stock images here from 10 different categories.

EveryStockPhoto.com – This is a fancy stock image search engine that has over 5,000,000 images to share. Just pay attention here to the license agreement listed if you want to use the images on the website for free.

Sxc.hu – This is another great resource that has over 394,409 photos and images online to use. You have to sign up for free to be able to download, and there are certain license agreements here too that you must agree to before using images from this place.

Studio7Designs.com – The free stock photography collection here is a little light, but is still fantastic.  You are asked to give credit back to them for the image use – but that isn’t too bad when you are getting something for free.

Hope these come in handy in your next big design project, blog article or anything else you might be working on.

I have tried all the alternatives when it comes to simple text editors and Notepad replacements on Windows.  For some reason though, I keep coming back to NoteTab as my simple text editor of choice.  It does everything I need it to do, and makes it simple to hide the features I don’t really need.

So how exactly do I use it?  Well, during the day – I often like to write myself notes or reminders of things I need to do or have done.  Keeping NoteTab open in the bottom left corner of my screen to do that across multiple NoteTab tabs is just  a really handy functionality.  Also, when I do most of my copy writing work, I like to keep it as basic as I can.  Give me NoteTab and the simple spellchecker and I am good to go.

Some of the other features included are:

• Tabs: Handles many documents at once through a lean tabbed interface.
• Performance: Fast document handling and text processing, feature rich, bloat free, and reliable.
• Portable: Runs off USB drives and does not require installation with a Setup program.
• Versatile: Appeals to a broad range of users – casual note takers, journalists, authors, webmasters, and programmers.
• Accessible: Offers comprehensive Accessibility Mode for sight-impaired users and people with other disabilities.
• International: Supports UTF-8 and Unicode files, as well as ANSI documents based on non-Western character sets.
• Businesses: Fully supports multi-user and networked environments. Works from Windows limited user accounts.
• Power-Search: Allows multi-line search-and-replace across open documents, or search any file on disk.

Now, there is a free version of the program you can use – but some of the functionality is cut out of the program.  Rather than going all the way up to NoteTab Pro, I would suggest trying NoteTab Std first.  It is only $20 – and after using it for five or more years I can tell you it is $20 well spent.

To download the free version or check out the premium version features, you can head over to notetab.com.

How would you like to have a resource in hand that would deliver to you over 2,000 classic games for free – with no strings attached?  My Abandonware is the resource you will want to bookmark and save for just that occasion.  While the legal line with abandonware is a little fuzzy, this resource has plenty of fun classics to try out – before they get slapped with some sort of lawsuit from somebody.

Now technically, abandonware is defined as software that has been discontinued, is no longer supported or is no longer copyrighted.  I don’t want to discuss the legal side of things though – I want to show you the fun that can be had.   My Abandonware is organized into 8 different genres of games to choose from.  You can check out action games, adventure games, educational games, racing games, roleplaying games, simulation games, sports games and strategy games.

Here are some of the most downloaded free games they offer.

• Oregon Trail Deluxe
• Wolfenstein 3D
• Doom
• SimCity 2000
• Commander Keen 5: The…
• The Amazon Trail
• Cobra Mission
• Super Munchers: The…
• Commander Keen 3: Keen Must…
• Populous 2
• The Incredible Machine 2
• Storybook Weaver Deluxe
• SimAnt: The Electronic Ant…
• 4D Prince of Persia
• Task Force 1942
• Lemmings
• Gunship 2000
• F-15 Strike Eagle III
• Air Bucks
• Battle Chess
• Ports of Call
• Balance of Power: The 1985…
• Mille Bornes
• Commander Keen 6: Aliens Ate…
• Wing Commander: The Secret…
• Castles II: Siege & Conquest
• Wing Commander: The Secret…
• The Incredible Machine
• Tracon II
• Simcity
• Sid Meier’s Civilization
• Tristan Pinball
• Fascination
• Crisis in The Kremlin
• Mario Teaches Typing
• Commander Keen 2: The Earth…
• Prince of Persia
• Quest for Glory I: So You…
• Sex Vixens from Space
• Curse of Enchantia

Some classic titles in there, and probably some titles you have never even heard of.  You can go check it out for yourself at myabandonware.com.

Over the past couple of years, I have created a lot of free custom video game inspired desktop icons for you all to download.  While keeping a running list of these on one page worked for a while, I figured it was about time I cleaned up and organized my free icon collections I have created for you to enjoy.

So with that said, I invite one and all to go check out the new Custom Icons page over at Mitchelaneous.com.  There you will see I have organized all the free icons I have created over the years into five smaller icon pages.

You can download free desktop icons about/on:

• Mega Man 9
• Mega Man 10
• Nintendo Icons
• More Nintendo Icons
• Misc Free Icons

This has been a highly suggested task from the many Mitchelaneous reader for some time now, so I am happy to finally getting around to getting this done for all of you.  As always, hope you enjoy them all – and thanks for bookmarking, visiting and subscribing to Mitchelaneous.com!

Alright, routing issues are fixed – and I think all my web sites are back in working order.  Now to get back to business, I have found a great music source for those of you who love all the tunes from the various Metroid games and lovers of heavy metal alike.  Feast your ears on Metroid Metal.

It is a celebration and interpretation of the Metroid soundtrack all done in a heavy metal mindset.  This goes together like peanut butter and space pirate jelly. Right now I am in the process of downloading the 25 mp3s they have done thus far.  All your favorite Metroid games are covered here too.  They have done music from Metroid (NES), Super Metroid (SNES), Metroid 2 (GB) Metroid Prime (Gamecube), Metroid Prime 2 (Gamecube) and Metroid Prime 3 (Wii).

Go rock out to some heavy metal Metroid music at MetroidMetal.com.

I really like it when any FTP program can give me better integration with my operating system, and WinSCP does do that and more.  You can create your standard shortcuts to it, add it to Window’s “Send To” context menu, and it can also be setup to be the default handler for SFTP and SCP URL addresses.

The WinSCP installer can also install drag&drop shell extension to improve WinSCP capability of downloading files using drag and drop.

Not sure where to start, after you downloaded it?  They have a plethora of guides and useful tutorials to help get you setup. So next time you are looking for a free FTP program, and you have tried the other popular names out there, give WinSCP a shot.  It might be the free FTP program experiance you’ve been looking for.

Bonus: Need more help? Check out the FTP FAQ from the Web Hosting Show!

Download the Super Mario Bros Icons (.zip)

These icons are compatible with the following sizes: 256 x 256, 128 x 128, 64 x 64, 48 x 48, 32 x 32, 24 x 24, 16 x 16. It is also in both .ico and .png formats.  For more video game based desktop icon decoration, be sure to check out the rest of my free desktop icons.

I don’t know!  No wait, that isn’t a very good answer so let me do this for you.  Based around the Super Smash Bros Brawl character designs, here are some free desktop icons for you to used based on some of the other Hyrule inhabitants.  Enjoy!

+ Download the Legend of Zelda Icon Pack! (.zip)

Included in this package are Princess Zelda, Toon Link, Ganondorf, and Sheik.  Hope you enjoy both of these very special icons.  The icons are compatible with the following sizes:  256 x 256, 128 x 128, 64 x 64, 48 x 48, 32 x 32, 24 x 24, 16 x 16.  It is also in both .ico and .png format.

Be sure to check out more of my desktop icon creations in the free desktop icons vault!

1. Screen grab to WordPress! – This addons ads to Screen Grab! by allowing screen captures to be uploaded to WordPress (2.5+) blogs
2. One-Click Installer for WP – Install plugins or themes on your self-hosted WordPress blogs with a single click (needs the related WP plugin to work; not intended for WordPress.com) .
3. WordPress.com Sidebar – Get quick access to your wordpress.com account from your browser sidebar.
4. MMD WordPress.com Extension – This extension adds a tiny statusbar panel that shows you your blog hit count for your WordPress.com blog.
5. Blog This in Windows Live Writer – Adds a button to Firefox which starts a new Windows Live Writer blog post prepopulated with content and title from the current web page. Blog the whole page, or just selected snippets.
6. WordPress Helper – The Firefox extension WordPress Helper helps you working with WordPress by providing useful help and tools.
7. WordPress Post – This extension lets you post the text you select in your browser directly to your WordPress blog.
8. easyComment-a-Blog – Filling out Blog Comment Forms automatically with ease.
9. Deepest Sender – Deepest Sender is a client that will allow you to post to blogs from directly within Firefox. It is primarily a LiveJournal client, although it supports Blogger (GData) and WordPress (metaWeblog) too.
10. DashBlog – lets you quickly collect videos, images, text/quotes, songs and screen-captures from any web page and publish them to your blog (word press, blogger/blogspot, tumblr) and/or twitter.

Know of another good one that didn’t make the list?  Let me know about it!

From their news page, I found this interesting quote:

The security of personal data is very important to us, especially in these times. That’s the reason why we will not spy out the files that our clients faithfully upload onto RapidShare, not now nor in future.

That sounds a little fishy, but in the name of privacy concerns, I’ll cut them some slack.

RapidShare, of course, is against the distribution of illegal files and as soon as we are informed about illegal distribution, we delete these files and put them on a filter.

Ahh, that is better – they investigate claim of illegal or copyrighted files.  So where do you go to report the abuse?  I had to do some hunting around the page, but finally found it under Support > Abuse Contact.  What do they require?

Please note that we only follow up messages that meet the following requirements: abuse@rapidshare.com.

• Please provide us with your name, address and telephone number.
• Explain which copyrighted material is affected.
• If it a case of files with illegal contents, please describe the contents briefly in two or three points.
• Please provide the exact and complete RapidShare download link of the file
• Give details of the address of the webpage that published the link.
• If there are several RapidShare links, please include all links with complete details in your message. Please do not send any attachments. Simply insert the details in text format into the message.
  (Example: http://rapidshare.com/files/123456/beispiel.jpg).
• Please ensure that you can receive further enquiries from us at the e-mail address you are writing from.
• Please only write to us in English or German.

That is insane!   Explain to me why they need your phone number, address and name?  Sure the rest of it is a little much too, but that kind of sounds silly.  What happens if you don’t give them this full essay of abuse?

Anonymous or incomplete messages will not be dealt with.

Shame on RapidShare for falling down on the job here.  I understand that investigating every claim might be a little hard, but heck – just search for “Rapidshare ‘insert name of media here’” and you will find all the proof you need.