I’ll start by plugging Harvard’s free courses catalog as well as Udemy
Edit: Gonna add 2 more I remembered-
Blender - I wish I had more time to learn it, but I did start the infamous “Donut Tutorial” once!
Watch Cartoons Online - Lots of good older stuff!
Porn
Libraries. Most even rent video games, power tools, audio/video hardware, baking utensils…SO MUCH STUFF. All free.
On a whim I googled my city’s library and “tools” and I found a non-profit society that specializes in lending of hand and power tools! This is incredible and I wouldn’t have known about it without this prompt: thank you!
My local library loans dongles! Now if I can just manage to check one out without snickering …
👍
Free Office Suite which is excellent for personal use. If you are on mobile Collabora Office if you want an Android/iOS version
I’ve been using it for over a decade. Prior to that I used open office but it quickly became clear Openoffice couldn’t match the development of LibreOffice. There is no concrete reason to buy microsoft’s bloated ever changing garbage.
OnlyOffice is even better in several ways.
wow thanks! I haven’t been able to use LibreOffice as it is hands down one of the ugliest pieces of software I’ve looked at, and despite retrying for years, I genuinely could not tolerate it. OnlyOffice looks so great!
Your local city college may or may not offer free classes (in San Francisco, you just need to show proof that you live in the city with some legal status).
Some public transportation is free for certain groups (youth and folks experiencing homelessness can get free passes here).
“First X of the month” at the zoo/a museum/whatever — lots of venues have free events.
A jog, bike ride, hike — lots of great stuff outside!
I live in the Philly area. Senior citizens can use SEPTA (buses and commuter trains) for $1 a ride.
I second the biking … but that shit ain’t free. Even used bikes cost some money to buy and maintain, and brand new bicycles are solidly in the “insane” category these days.
Good point — it is “incrementally free,” although I guess if you count tire wear and tear that’s not even true.
In most eu countries the law requires businesses that give out food to also allow you to order free tap water. If youre in a city and dont want to spend money on a bottle of water, walk into mcdonalds and ask for free tap water. A lot of european countries also have strict laws about tap water so for example in france unless otherwise indicated with a warning, tap water is always potable.
Here in the US, this seems so normal that it didnt even occur to me that this may not be true everywhere else. And not need to be enforced by law.
A lot of places in the US will charge you for the cup or say they only offer bottled water for sale.
Ive definitely never, ever run into that. But I’m sure it happens.
Edit: I guess ive seen places that charged some nominal fee for the cup but it’s so rare
And even if they do give out free tap water … they might not mean lead-free.
Not true everywhere, actually never heard of it here (Germany and Austria).
But if you walk into a place and ask for a paper cup of tap water, a lot of workers are willing to give it to you, regardless of the laws.
Vienna has tap water straight from the mountains btw and it tastes amazing. Recommended.
I love how chill and helpful everyone is here.
Not being a dick is free too.
Yeah, I found some cool stuff for audio/music production
A little late but OpenTaxSolver - free desktop tax software that gives you a printout of tax forms that you can mail in. And it includes a few states too. Way easier than the annoying corporate sites that constantly log you out and charge a fee for every little thing.
Edit: To my non-American friends, you don’t need to worry about this
Thanks! I was pretty annoyed at having to pay TurboTax over $100 something to have my taxes filed. Opportunistic assholes.
In terms of fully free, obligatory mention:
Your library may offer more than books alone, depending on how well supported they are. Borrow music, movies, sometimes even video games. For music and movies they may also offer these to borrow digitally as well via online services they coordinate with.The library of things is also something many public libraries have now. Not just media, but tools, power tools, cooking pans and equipment, pod casting equipment. Definitely worth a look.
You can borrow fishing rods at ours.
Mine has trekking poles! (Colorado)
My library offers art! Like, original art pieces (paintings and sculptures) by local artists which you can borrow for up to three months.
That’s such a great idea!
Our library does audio books, 3d printer, sound recording (like a small studio), and passes to provincial parks. Some can offer a lot!
I moved to a new town in 2022 and I STILL haven’t been to the local library. I need to get on that. I went to libraries so much as a child and in my teens.
You might be able to apply for an account online and not have to go in, unless you just want to meander through their not-book- things available to check out.
My library has a lovely assortment of things. Anything from camping gear to ghost hunting “equipment” like a spirit box or emf meter. My city doesn’t have a fully outfitted maker lab tho, but I am eligible for an account at the neighboring city that does have a kickass maker lab (3d printers, laser engravers, sewing and embroidery machines, Cricuts, and even a professional recording studio).
Learn a little docker and start self hosting stuff! Pihole is a great one to start with, but there are lots of other awesome projects out there:
How do I “learn a little docker”? Where do I start?
YouTube. Duckduckgo.
Personally I’m running 13 containers for various things. Worth it.
But I googled docker, and only found apps that can be installed. Does it both require something to run the docker apps in?
I’m surprised no one has mentioned it yet:
With just a cheap computer you can have your own Netflix and Spotify.
How is it different than Plex?
Does it find the movies for me, or do I still need to figure out the Usenet or BitTorrent?
Since no one really answered you, there are generally two routes.
If you use newsgroups you can run sabnzbd, which is a service that downloads from newsgroups. I’ve been out of the loop for a while but there used to be something like CouchPotato for movies or SickBeard for TV (which migrated to SickChill, though you shouldn’t use that anymore as it installed a crypto miner last I heard). Lastly you sign up with a news indexer (look up Nzb.su or nzbgeek.info). CouchPotato could be linked to your imdb watch list.
Plug all of those together with API keys, and now movies on your imdb watch list just show up in your plex library as they become available.
Now if you use Torrents instead of newsgroups, there are similar things that all exist, I’m just less familiar with them.
Ah, interesting. I’m actually only (barely) familiar with torrents, insofar as I have downloaded qBitTorrent and enabled its embedded search. I search for thing, sort by most seeds, and choose first relevant one. Usually it all goes well. Plex on my Mac watches the downloads folder, and the TV has Plex installed.
It works, but at least from my limited view of its search results, the seas seem to be drying up. I feel like there are better, non-default searches I could be adding. There was some kind of Jacket plugin that refused to load so it’s just disabled.
Am a very inept pirate 🏴☠️
Jellyfin Is completely open source, fully self-hosted, and free. With Plex the software still has to phone home to a central server for authentication and some features are locked behind a paywall.
No streaming software is going to find movies for you (without paying for content they’ve licensed) because that would be a sure fire way to get the project taken down for copyright violation.
What3words.com and app
Basically the earth has been segragated into 10 foot x 10 foot squares that are easily identified by 3 words, super accurate, easy to tell emergency services. No more need to know lat/long to tell someone where you’re at.
Where on earth is “fuck shit piss”?
I learned about this from a can of ///Fear.Movie.Lions beer from Stone Brewing:
What 3 words pinpoint where this indelible beast was born? The location is printed on the can. There’s a 3m x 3m square in our Richmond, VA brewery with these three words painted on it. What three words? Exactly! For the uninitiated, that’s What3Words.
Closing your eyes, slowly taking a deep breath, and calmly, breathing in, and breathing out, while focusing on the sensations in your body, and how much more relaxed you’re feeling right now
i.e. meditation
VLC Media Player
Even better, MPV Media Player. Vlc has bad color reproduction
Interesting. Does it take you back to resume if you closed it halfway through a video?
No
Darn. That’s why I’m with SMPlayer; that time continuity is extremely helpful to the point of being a requirement for me. VLC also has it but it actually makes the jump-to-time prompt vanish if you take too long to click it (which is… a bizarre “feature”).
<3 VLC, been using it for decades at this point.
Your neighbor’s trash. It’s stunning what I find and fix, refurbish, repurpose or sell. Had a friend that used to cruise her hood on trash day, her and her husband would load the truck, sell it back to 'em on a Saturday garage sale. 12-14 hours biweekly work, ~$400 every other weekend.
My wife’s friends dumpster dive at Walmart, though I question how that’s possible. Most big box stores make that impossible. Dunno. In any case, it’s wild what these stores chunk out. If Lowe’s would let me, I’d haul home a pickup full every week.
People think I’m some sort of TV repair wizard but it’s very easy to fix up dumpster TVs if you have a little patience and space. Broken TVs fall into two categories - broken screen or broken board (doesn’t turn on, error screens, flickering). Stick to more popular models and when you find a broken screen, take the board and note the model. When you find a broken board of the same model, just swap it. It usually really is that easy. You can work in the opposite direction too and collect good screens waiting for good boards, but that starts to take up a lot of space quick because you’re storing whole TVs at that point.
You will also inexplicably find a fully working 55" TV sitting at the dumpster 10% of the time.
Pi hole
