Friday, November 28, 2014

2807 - Free stuff Internet sites

Free stuff on the internet. I've run across lists like this before and posted them. But It never hurts to do a refresher. Plus there may be some new stuff here. I haven't verified all these links.

  • Documentary Heaven- Literally hundreds of streaming documentaries, all arranged by topic. All free. 
  • Foreign Service Institute - language courses developed by the Foreign Service Institute. These courses were developed by the United States government and are in the public domain.
  • Project Gutenberg- Project Gutenberg's books are often taught in all shorts of literature classes, get em for free when you can 
  • Google Drive - you'd be surprised how many people don't know what it is 
  • Retail Me Not - Search for coupon codes before buying anything online. 
  • Duolingo - a great site that teaches you foreign languages for free. No idea how they make a profit, but there yah go. If Duolingo can't satisfy that need. LiveMocha looks like a promising site, though I haven't had a chance to try it out. 
  • Project Free TV - Pretty much a project for free TV, I believe. 1channel is also pretty darn excellent. 
  • SNES Box or NES Box, two great emulators to play games from Super Nintendo and Classic Nintendo respectively online. 

  • No Excuse List - Includes sources for everything you can want. I included some more popular ones with brief write-ups below. 
  • Reddit Resources - Reddit's List of the best online education sources.
  • Khan Academy - Educational organization and a website created by Bangladeshi-American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. The website supplies a free online collection of micro lectures stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics, microeconomics, and computer science.
  • Ted Talks - Talks that address a wide range of topics ("ideas worth spreading") within the research and practice of science and culture, often through storytelling. Many famous academics have given talks, and they are usually short and easy to digest.
  • Coursera - Coursera partners with various universities and makes a few of their courses available online free for a large audience. Founded by computer science professors, so again a heavy CS emphasis.
  • Wolfram Alpha - Online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might. Unbelievable what this thing can compute; you can ask it near anything and find an answer.
  • Udacity - Outgrowth of free computer science classes offered in 2011 through Stanford University. Plans to offer more, but concentrated on computer science for now.
  • MIT OpenCourseWare - Initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, partly free and openly available to anyone, anywhere.
  • Open Yale Courses - Provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.
  • Codecademy - Online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in programming languages like Python, JavaScript, and Ruby, as well as markup languages including HTML and CSS. Gives your points and "level ups" like a video game, which is why I enjoyed doing classes here. Not lecture-oriented either; usually just jump right into coding, which works best for those that have trouble paying attention.
  • Team Treehouse - Alternative to Codecademy which has video tutorials. EDIT: Been brought to my attention that Team Treehouse is not free, but I included it due to many comments. Nick Pettit, teaching team lead at Treehouse, created a 50% off discount code for redditors. Simply use 'REDDIT50'. Karma goes to Mr. Pettit if you enjoyed or used this.
  • Think Tutorial - Database of simple, easy to follow tutorials covering all aspects of popular computing. Includes lots of easier, basic tasks for your everyday questions or new users.
  • Memrise - Online learning tool that uses flashcards augmented with mnemonics—partly gathered through crowdsourcing—and the spacing effect to boost the speed and ease of learning. Several languages available to learn.
  • Livemocha - Commercial online language learning community boasting 12 million members which provides instructional materials in 38 languages and a platform for speakers to interact with and help each other learn new languages.
  • edX - Massive open online course platform founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University to offer online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide audience at no charge. Many other universities now take part in it, including Cal Berkeley. Differs from most of these by including "due dates" with assignments and grades.
  • Education portal - Free courses which allow you to pass exams to earn real college credit.
  • uReddit - Made by Redditors for other Redditors. Tons of different topics, varying from things like science and art to Starcraft strategy.
  • iTunes U - Podcasts from a variety of places including universities and colleges on various subjects.
  • Stack Exchange - Group of question and answer websites on topics in many different fields, each website covering a specific topic, where questions, answers, and users are subject to a reputation award process. Stack Overflow is used for programming, probably their most famous topic. Self-moderated with reputation similar to Reddit.
  • Wikipedia - Collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia. Much better source than most people give it credit for, and great for random learning whenever you need it. For those looking for more legit sources for papers and such, it is usually easy to jump to a Wikipedia page and grab some sources at the bottom.

  • Ninite - Something I myself can personally recommend, its a safe download site with no toolbars and malware. Any software you need will be there, and I have discovered a lot of software there. 
  • Free Electronic Component Samples from Texas Instruments - OP just had a $15 voltage regulator delivered for free. You need to create a free account, and then you get something like four free samples a month. This is incredibly useful for some harder to find parts. Plus they're good quality, as far as I know, and they ship fast using FedEx. 
  • The First Row - semi ILLEGAL site to watch sports events, proceed at your own risk. Many sports events are available there. 
  • Pixlr Editor - Basic picture editor that will irritate people using Photoshop, but its easy and free, and if I'm using a crappy computer without any software (like I am now) I'd go there. 
  • Mint- get your finances firmly under control. Downloads and categorizes transactions from your Debit and Credit accounts, and even tracks Mortgages and Car Loans. It allows you to set budgets for expenditures of certain types and then tracks those on a month-to-month basis and will nag you when you're spending too much on something. 
Ubuntu, a free linux disto packed with tools and runs on basically anything, you can install it on a 8gb USB Stick and it boots in seconds, can be used as a default operating system or to repair your bricked/virus infested main OS like Windows.
7zip: In case anybody doesn't know, the freeware compression/decompression utlity of choice for zip, rar, etc
Abyss Web Server: Host from home.
AutoHotkey: Very powerful open source tool can script+customize macros, hotkeys, everything input related within the Windows environment right down to mouse clicks.
Bulk File Changer: Batch utility for altering file attributes.
Cabos: file sharing client for the Gnutella network. Not as much customization as the shareware Limewire but it does the same job.
CDisplay: CBR/CBZ format sequential reader, which are rebranded zip/rar extensions popular for image archives such as comic books, guitar tablature, etc.
Cheat Engine: Extensive memory editor/manager. sort of like Game Genie/Codebreaker for PC.
ClassicShell: Restores many of the Windows features that were stripped for Win7 including disk free space on Explorer's status bar, restores toolbars, the classic file copy dialog, etc.
Crosshair: Replaces the mouse cursor with an origin point along x and y axis and is surprisingly more handy than you might realize.
CPU-Z: Simple utility for monitoring system components+performance
DC++: File sharing client for the Direct Connect network that was providing a superior experience over the official Neo Modus client for years.
DriverSweeper: I've been using this for some time to clear old drivers from systems.
EaseUS: Several great products like Partition Manager and Disk Copy, generously free for personal use.
EasyBCD: You would want this in order to manage boot loaders and restoring+repairing broken entries under Windows.
eMule:Yet another file sharing client, for the eDonkey and Kad networks. I believe eDonkey is shut down now but Kad seems fruitful.
FileTypesMan: All the features Microsoft stripped from file extension management in Vista and 7, and all the features they should have implemented in the first place.
Filezilla: Fully featured freeware FTP client.
Flare: Decompile Flash swf.
Foxit: Freeware PDF reader as the less annoying alternative to Adobe.
Go PlayAlong: Shareware guitar tablature player for Guitar Pro formats. Just recently got into it, but I love the mp3 sync feature for backing tracks.
HJSplit: Who could live without a handy file splitter-joiner?
HTTrack: Downloads web site resources to generate a mirror for offline browsing. Use responsibly.
inSSIDer: Seems to be the wifi scanning tool of choice now days.
JoyToKey: J2K can map controller input to keyboard keypresses, useful if a game fails to provide joypad support when they should have. Results may vary.
KeyTweak: Remap keyboard keys.
Less Msiérables: Extracting contents from a .msi file.
Microsoft GIF Animator: Classic, no frills tool for creating gifs.
Microsoft Power Toys: More from the "why isn't that built into XP by default" category, includes utilities like CmdHere that will add a directory context to Explorer for opening a command prompt at that target location.
Opera: Yeah, all those features people rave over Firefox? Opera was doing them years prior.
PeerBlock: Monitors connections and blocks many of them based upon lists of registered IP ranges belonging to various government, anti-p2p, etc. agencies.
PowerMenu: Adds 'always on top' and other functions to Windows. I think I got this for some emulators lacking it.

System
Communications
  • Mumble - Low-latency VoIP client
  • Teamspeak - Probably the most popular VoIP client out there
  • Ventrillo - Another popular VoIP client
  • Skype - Free internet calls
Statistics
  • WinDirStat - Visual representation of hard drive space
  • SpaceSniffer - Same as above
  • CPU-Z - Hardware monitoring software
  • Speccy - Hardware monitoring software
  • HWMon - Hardware monitoring software
  • CoreTemp - Hardware monitoring software
  • Prime95 - CPU Stress-testing software
Games
Security
Overdrive http://app.overdrive.com/ It is done in conjunction with local libraries. You can borrow audiobooks, ebooks, and even videos and music now depending on the library. You can listen/read them in browser or through mobile devices.

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4 comments:

eViL pOp TaRt said...

Mike, you've outdone yourself with a great list of wonderful sites! I've used Coursera already, but this will keep me busy through 2015.

Nov 28, 2014, 6:07:00 AM
Linda Kay said...

That is an amazing list of resources. I am always amazed when you type in something you are looking for and are bombarded with several pages of resources. This list is great!

Nov 28, 2014, 8:02:00 AM
Elvis Wearing a Bra on His Head said...

These are marvelous! I've only scratched the surface; but the language courses, Coursera, Propject Gutenberg all definitely winners.

Nov 28, 2014, 5:26:00 PM
Big Sky Heidi said...

Lots of great fun stuff!

Nov 28, 2014, 8:34:00 PM

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