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!
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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 🏴☠️
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.
Own your own ebooks. Make sure all devices work with whatever format you need.
Good call on that one, calibre is one of my favorite pieces of software. I, uh, acquire ebooks through creative means and use calibre as both an ebook catalog and format converter to then load them onto my kindle.
I try to support publishers that give you the full ebooks like baen library.
Calibre helped me back up my entire amazon library in a way my kobo can now read instead of just kindle. Both are excellent devices, but I wanted a backlight after 7+ years with the same ebook reader. And I’m not about to purchase all those books aain for the privilege of using the kobo bookstore. Plus Calibre makes it so no matter what you get (pdf/ebook/proprietary format) you can get a good old fashion ebook format for future preservation.
You should probably note, the functionality you’re describing now requires modding/plug-ins and not the “search and enable” kind, the download from third party sites and run random install scripts kind. It also since February requires you use your Kindle to download and copy every book you own (a chore if your family buys a lot of pulpy urban fantasy novels)
It’s great, customizable, I sent a suggestion to the volunteer development team, and they made it happen.
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.
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 know lemmy is social media for people with a favorite Linux distro so I’m preaching to the choir here, but so much software is free as in speech it is truly wonderful. It’s like the only thing I love about being a millennial
Gonna take this as a jumping off point to mention some software.
Wanna get into video editing? Shotcut’s pretty solid in my experience.
Into mind-mapping stuff? You might give Freeplane a look.
Have a drawing tablet & want to use it to take handwritten digital notes? Check out Xournal++.
Cross-platform Notepad++ alternative? Might give CudaText a try.Could list off more but will leave it at a few for now.
Dang, I wish I knew about Freeplane years ago. Thanks!! I’m also entrenched in Kdenlive but I wonder if Shotcut has a better UI…
I don’t have a fave distro because I must back up my PC’s stuff first. I plan to try Bazzite, due to issues I’ve heard that my laptop has with Mint…
lichess.org is a fantastic online chess platform for players of all skill levels. it’s free and—what’s more–it’s ad-free (unlike the parasitic organisation that’s squatting on the chess.com domain).
it has one-on-one on-demand match-ups, tournaments, puzzles, user-published training courses, multiple chess variants, and so much more.
it’s one of only two online resources to which i deem donating regularly worthwhile (the other being wikipedia).
do check it out. chess is one really healthy mental habit to inculcate.
Lichess may be the best board game software for any board game ever. It’s that good.
They should branch out!! Does it support anything other than chess?
It’s great! Also for anyone that happens to be in the overlap of people that enjoy chess and go, and want to play go online as well, there’s online-go.com.
I don’t know that it has all the features that Lichess does, but it does have puzzles, tournaments, custom games, and so on.
There’s also lishogi, if you want to learn that game.
I find the dynamics of lichess.org vs chess.com very interesting.
They are similar in terms of features. Both have decent interfaces, puzzles, matchmaking, live viewing boards and broadcasts for tournaments, training programs, etc. But chess.com has ads, and features locked behind subscription paywalls where lichess.org does not. (Everything is free on lichess, except for the little logo next to a user’s name to say they have supported the site with donations.)
But on the other hand, chess.com seems to have a higher number pro players; and probably a larger number of players overall.
I think its very interesting to think about why that is the case. Why would more people choose the version that is more expensive, but does not have more features?
I’ve thought of a few reasons, but I think probably the biggest effect is that chess.com has more money to splash around (because it sells ads, and asks for user subscriptions), and it uses big chunk of this money to advertise itself. eg. by sponsoring players and streamers, offering larger prizes for its own tournaments; etc.
And although I definitely think lichess is better, since it is generously supplying a high-quality product without trying to self-enrich, I do sometimes think maybe what chess.com is doing is ok too: in the sense that it is not only self-enriching, but also supporting the sport itself a bit by paying money to players, events, and commentators. Lichess does this too - but less of it, because they have less money.
(Note that chess.com also does some really crappy stuff, such as censoring any mention of lichess in the chat of their twitch broadcasts. That definitely does not help support the sport.)
Why would more people choose the version that is more expensive, but does not have more features?
It’s chess.com. We are the tech-savvy Lemmy weirdos who dig around for alternatives. I’d put my money on people just literally not knowing or thinking to check for an alt.
I didn’t know lichess existed until I found an extension that opens my chess.com match review into lichess, since the review is free there.
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.
earth has been segragated into 10 foot x 10 foot squares
I think you’re inadvertently advertising a cylindrical model of the earth 😁
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.
Not working.
///life.before.death doesn’t exist
///journey.before.destination took me a couple miles east of Pittsburgh.
I was expecting Urithiru :<
Where on earth is “fuck shit piss”?
unfortunately the people at What3Words excluded words people might find offensive from the word list, so that place does not exist
So I guess “musk impregnates influencers” would be OK? Even though that’s a lot more offensive IMHO …
I just looked it up, and apparently “impregnate” isn’t in the list either. Yes, the word isn’t offensive by itself, but I think they remove quite a lot of words that might cause problems in the what3words address. There is way more than enough words anyway.
This is from their FAQ:
How do you handle offensive words?
A what3words address is made up of 3 random words, and they are not intended to convey any meaning to a location. However, we know that the nature of using words means that unexpected interpretations can crop up.
For each new what3words language, our team consults a broad range of native speakers. We then work together to remove rude and offensive words from our word lists, navigating cultural sensitivities wherever we can.
Some users feel that certain words in our lists are unsuitable or inappropriate, so we always take feedback onboard. However, one of our key features – that our addresses are permanently fixed – means that it is not possible to update the word list. Instead, we can look for opportunities to adapt our approach when developing future languages.
Tip: if you’d rather avoid a certain what3words address because of a particular word or combination of words, we’d suggest you use the next square along.
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
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.
On that note, never bring back mattresses, anything upholstered, or anything else that has a lot of unsealed cracks/gaps. Way too big a risk of introducing bed bugs into your home.
So many people just dump seemingly nice mattresses/sofas etc. out on the curb. They’re obviously not going to label these things as infested with bed bugs for a scavenger’s benefit and alert the whole neighborhood to their shame. Do not take these items. It is not worth the potential nightmare you’re setting yourself up for.
I have a pro tip for mattresses! Thrown it down in your driveway, take a box knife and strip it to the bare metal springs. Boom! You now have a plant trellis. First try only took me 20 minutes.
Saw a posh resale store that took twin mattress springs, sprayed ‘em black, hung vertically and spaced 2’ apart over a standing flower bed. Now sure what the plant was but it sure looked cool.
Trying it for the first time this year on the ferns and blackberries on the side of the house. Already have a solid start!
Great resource for really well taught contents on an extensive variety of fields
LMMS - free and open source garage band. It’s a little weird on how you do a song, but it’s pretty great.
Tips: Look at Beats and Baselines Editor and Piano Roll Editor first to probably get you where you want to be.
And if you need some free virtual instruments, Plugins4Free and Vital.
Wow, this thread came to me with perfect timing. I love LMMS and I’ll try out this plugins on Monday, thanks.
I’m currently going through this thread and found 3 other sites that are amazing and solved some project issues I was having.
Oh, glad to help! Any other music tools you’re looking for? I’m not good with any of them, but I like testing them out. I’m still just learning and experimenting.
I get a little sad when I don’t see anything new for me on threads like this, but then I’m a bit grateful since that means I’ve already spent a long time enjoying all these things!
I’ve been playing with it since my last comment. I just installed 8 plugins. There are 3 that are so freaking good.
My only wish is there was a way to make a song like in Garage band, where you can overlap the instruments and loops more easily. I think it’s there, but I’m just not good enough at it yet. When I play with the piano, I get a really good sounding melody, but then it’s gone.
Like in this video?
I haven’t used LMMS in a long time, but he’s manually editing the piano roll (where the notes are stored) but I see a record button here where it should record what you play on the keyboard.
Sort of, I found that portion. Here is my workflow in Garage Band.
- Pick loop and sound speed (has a ticker before it starts), and place on timeline
- Add instruments and play with melodies from a keyboard plugged in and record them.
- Use the melody.
- Record some vocals
- Add more layers of sounds or loops
- Create file
This takes about 4 hours to make an opening song that I usually love.
In LMMS
- I can find some loops, but they seem to really point towards making your own, or maybe there are some loop vaults somewhere I could use?
- I found some amazing instruments on the plugins4free site, but recording them with a keyboard seems hard somehow.
- I have the studio (paid) version of Davinci Resolve, I guess I could just switch over there once I’ve made my loops?
The rest seems easy and I like the set up.
Gotcha, now I have a better idea of what you’re trying to do.
Watching this video about looping in LMMS shows it can sorta be done, sometimes with some help from Audacity.
If you’re adding in more stuff like VST plugins and vocals, you may want to try out Waveform Free, which I checked is for iOS also, so you get a full modern DAW. It’s the same product as their paid full version, just like 2 updates behind.
For more premade loops, check out Looperman if you haven’t already.
It’s not free, but I think I under $20 for the program and all the upgrades, if looping and sampling is something you want to focus on, check out Koala Sampler. I downloaded it the other week and have been sampling vinyl recordings from YouTube, it has an AI stem extractor to separate the instrument tracks, and then chopping and looping that.
It has a built in simple synth now as well, and you can use a midi controller with it. Lots of videos are out there if you want to see how that works. You might be able to incorporate that into your setup.
It looks I can use the same workflow, it’s just a little more complicated.
