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!
CBC Gem, which is our country’s public news corporation’s streaming service which is a catalog of Canadian television. There’s also CBC Music which is the radio app, and you can even listen to the live streams of the Metropolitan Opera on Saturdays.
Syncthing.
Connect any two devices’ folders together wirelessly, from anywhere.
Don’t have a server? You don’t need one. Every device is an individual node.
Backup? If you do have a server, offload some of your content and keep on rolling, or set scripts to move files by age.
Libraries. Most even rent video games, power tools, audio/video hardware, baking utensils…SO MUCH STUFF. All free.
Even if you don’t go to the actual library the ebook apps are great.
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 …
Can you share the name of this non profit society, is it a part of your local public library or it’s own independent thing?.
I need a spanner for like single hex nut and I don’t want to buy one for it to collect dust in my drawer lol
Yeah mine was called the [City Name] Tool Library, and it was a non-profit that was independent of our local library. I imagine that they receive donated tools from contractors and companies around the city.
As an example, I googled a random city name (Calgary) and found one for them as well: https://calgarytoollibrary.org/
There are likely tons of similar organizations throughout Canada (and probably your country as well!)
Thanks I was able to find one in Chicago called The Chicago Tool Library
👍
Our library loans out state parks passes for a month so you can go to parks for free. It also loans out hiking gear, provides immigration resources, and oddly, a ukulele.
Ours lends them out for all the city museums! And my old local library had a seed library, the deal is that you saved seed from whatever you grew and gave some back.
This is amazing, I had no idea.
I have questions
Technically not free, but because so many people think it is it’s a great poster child for proper use of tax dollars and socialist programs. Libraries rock.
I once rented a whole reflector telescope.
That is…fucking crazy awesome.
Nope. 15 Euro a year (Freiburg, Germany), which doesn’t automatically renew and it’s a bloody pain.
Yeah, Germany is quite backwards in this aspect.
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.In the U.S. they may even offer things like State Park passes.
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!
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)
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).
Making sure to keep it legal, right?
Let’s stick with Project Gutenberg - Public domain ebooks and other media, spanning centuries. They’re incredibly important for keeping our literary past alive.
I might have more later.
There’s also LibriVox for audiobooks of public domain books read by volunteers. They vary in quality but some of my favourite audiobooks are from there.
some of my favourite audiobooks are from there.
Go on…
Public domain audiobooks, read by members of the community. It’s a beautiful thing - which is why AI scrapers seem currently determined to tear it down.
That’s not what I meant; I meant to go on with your specific favorites, what you listen to on there.
What @Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org said seems to be correct, they apparently have some problems right now, I can’t reach the website. It worked yesterday, when I posted the link. I’ll try again later to link some I like, I hope they are able to resolve the problems soon.
Having looked at the forum, they seem to be under attack by a swarm of AI scrapers. If anyone can help them defend against the attack, please do so.
Oh, that sucks. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Sadly, yeah. Unfortunately, I’m not really capable of sounding the alarm, and whoever runs the Xwitter page for Librivox have not posted anything in over a year. They should be crying out for aid, but there’s crickets in the public eye.
It was down at the moment I posted, I didn’t want to push more traffic until they were back online.
I mean, I’m down for illegal mentions too, but Lemmy might not be?
Not on your instance, no. The Canadians don’t care.
Don’t forget Hathi trust. No one outside of humanities knows if it but it has a ton of material
I kinda forgot Project Gutenberg is a thing. I read a bunch of stuff on there in the late 90s/early 2000s, Arabian Nights, Paradise Lost, etc.
I got a cooking book from the 1800s there, sadly the pricing is a bit off, I don’t think that recipe is 19 pence anymore.
Well, you have to account for decimalization at least.
I did convert it from Lsd
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.
It’s Russian software so yeah… 🤢
It’s also worse in that they hide the fact it’s made in Russia.
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!
I hear you. It’a almost as bad as Gimp vs Krita.
How so? I’ve been moving between the two for years.
I find it faster, more stable, and just generally FEELS better than LibreOffice. Which I’m sure is because it isn’t carrying 30 years of Java baggage with it from the Star office/OpenOffice.org days. And ive had better luck with document compatibility in some cases.
The only complaint ive heard about it is just a smaller feature set than LibreOffice. But it does everything I want it to do.
Both are great, though.
Awesome thanks!
Porn
People that pay for porn on the Internet are like people that pay for WinRAR
Holding the entire “product” together?
Perfect comparison 👌
Well, yeah, if you’re lucky enough to find an old magazine in the woods, but that doesn’t count, because it’s not usually free otherwise.
I know you’re trolling but the idea of someone not knowing about free internet porn and paying for it while somehow being on lemmy is so funny to me
You gents have convinced me to click around a bit more. I have my research cut out for me this evening.
How goes the research? I’m genuinely mind blown by this haha
That’s not the only thing that’s gonna blow this evening 🤭
How did you know my plans??
If you can’t find something to get off to for free you’re either incompetent or a degenerate
Where!? Are you peeping on folks?
gestures broadly at the internet
or, you know, isn’t a cis dude and wants some representation that isn’t disgustingly fetishized.
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?
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.
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While I don’t have much experience with Plex, I can say that it’s really not hard to set up Jellyfin for streaming across the internet.
I’m running a docker container using the linuxserver.io image and all I had to do was forward the HTTP/S ports. I will grant that when a third party has to make an easy-to-use container for a service, there’s a problem to address… but if I remember correctly, Jellyfin is easier to set up on bare metal where it can use uPnP.
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It’s a FOSS plex alternative… yes you will need to stock your own library Then install SonArr, RadArr, some other Arr 🏴☠️just learn Linux nub. Jk but not really
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 🏴☠️
It’s Plex but free and without a central login server handled by a third party
It’s also got a few fewer/not as functional features and no live TV (whoopty do?)
The Arr Suite are what you’re looking for to find content, works with either Plex or Jelly in (or others)
JF does support live TV (and radio now it seems)
Aside from the FOSS that people love.
I will add something real world. I have Plex and Jellyfin running. Now Plex works fine for the most part but certain codecs when I am watching on iOS just has issues and freezes a lot so I have to use Jellyfin, but the UI in Jellyfin is pretty sparse and not as polished.
Is Jellyfin good with remote access?
You can do that with VPN. I’m using Tailscale, just had to make an account and install it on the computer I mentioned and on my phone.
Can you ELI5 for me what this does? I don’t quite get it.
So when you use Spotify and Netflix, what your doing is streaming from their computers, which costs money hence why they charge you monthly.
They also add profit and licensing costs and all that to it so it adds up.
But what if, you used your own computer?
Very easy to do using just your wifi, some more complexity if you want to steam over the internet.
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What does that mean “use my own computer”? Do I need to have all the media files on my computer then? Where would I get those from?
Yes, this is all assuming you have a way to get all the media files you need.
Some of us have been collecting it for years.
I see, thanks.
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
thanks now i feel more relaxed on my toilet
" Come on in, take a breath, the oxygen is free! "
Nah. Intrusive thoughts are a bitch.
Let them come, then let them go
VLC Media Player
Even better, MPV Media Player. Vlc has bad color reproduction
I use mpv, but VLC has GUI config stuff that is a lot more approachable.
Interesting. Does it take you back to resume if you closed it halfway through a video?
It’s not enabled by default, but you can configure it to: https://mpv.io/manual/stable/#resuming-playback
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.
I love how chill and helpful everyone is here.
Not being a dick is free too.
Oh yeah?? That’s good to know.
Yeah, I found some cool stuff for audio/music production
It’s great, customizable, I sent a suggestion to the volunteer development team, and they made it happen.
Worth noting: Android only
Let me be perfectly honest: If you like AntennaPod, just stick with it, OK? You’ll save a lot of frustrations and headaches.
I used to use AntennaPod and listened to lots of podcasts.
Then one podcast host mentioned some other app, I tried it, and liked its Web interface, even when it didn’t have all of the AntennaPod features. I think it didn’t have “stop playing a podcast at the end of the episode, even if it’s queued”. (I like to queue stuff and listen to them at no particular order. I’m a whimsical girl like that.) Then I think this app got discontinued/went pay only, I can’t remember.
Went with Google Podcasts. It was a pretty limited and janky experience (also no ability to stop at the end of the queued episode), but it did its job and I hoped it’d get better over years. It didn’t. It got discontinued. Google sometimes can’t do a good thing.
I manually migrated my subscriptions to some other app. (As one last hurrah Google then implemented OPML takeout.) Wasn’t happy with this app. Couldn’t help but notice my podcast listening habits were drying up due to all these minor snags. ADHD thing I’m sure.
Then I remembered AntennaPod and how perfect it was and how happy I was using it. I wanted to export OPML from this other app. It had OPML import but no export of any kind. Shit.
So I imported my subs manually again. And screw me if I ever have to do that again. But I’m happy again and that’s what matters. I don’t think I’ll need to migrate again, I’m glad AntennaPod has nice backup features. (Which I already used to move the app from my tablet to my phone.)
I second this one. Only one I’ll use.
I tried so many other podcast apps, at least 3 of 4 others. The only thing I dislike is that about AntennaPod is that there is no comprehensive removal button that deletes, marks as played, and removes from queue—but all the other apps failed at even consistently downloading eps or playing them back. AntennaPod crushes all competition by light years.
I’ve been using Podcast Addict for years, and when I tried to switch to AntennaPod, I couldn’t figure out how to configure it in such a way that I can listen to the back catalogue of a podcast in chronological order and have the app automatically download a rolling buffer of a small number of episodes. When I looked around online for solutions, I found a forum thread of someone who had the same issue, and the maintainers of the project responded with confusion and dismissal as to why anyone would need that functionality lol. So I’m still on Podcast Addict.
Huh, incidentally, that’s one I haven’t tried! You may end up swaying me over…
Actually, is it closed-source? That’d be a deal-breaker for me, if so, since I’m not that desperate for such a feature as to lose open-source status.
Yeah, Podcast Addict is proprietary and ad driven, unless you pay. I grabbed a lifetime ad-free upgrade years ago when it was like two bucks.
On some level I agree with you, I generally love open source, and if AntennaPod had the feature I was looking for I would have switched, but I also don’t mind paying for software if it’s good and reasonably priced.
Pi hole
Does a pi hole combine with a VPN? I assume the pi hole can’t see what’s in the VPN traffic and therefore can’t block anything?
You could have the vpn daemon running on the pihole itself rather than on connected devices.
The cats and dogs out in the street are free. You can just bring a friend home. /hj
/hj = hand job?
I’ve like never seen this abbreviation used any other way 🧐
HUEHUEHUE please do NOT give stray cats and dogs handjobs.
But as the other poster said – It means “half joking”
I believe it’s “half joking”.
