A library card and library resources such as Libby
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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Also kanopy.com lets you make a free account with a library card or university login, and you can watch movies for free.
Hoopla is similar option used by some library systems.
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If you're in the US, you can sign up for Informed Delivery with USPS so you know when to expect incoming important mail. This can help if mail theft is common in your area.
UPS and FedEx also allow you to sign up for similar alerts based on your address so you don't have to necessarily rely on tracking numbers for everything.
It also helps if you are too lazy to bundle up to go outside to check when it’s cold as nuts, but are waiting for something specific. 😁
And if you just never check your mail (I get almost exclusively junk mail, so I check it every week or two. All my bills are autopay, and all communications are paperless when possible).
You can always take advantage of me.
I'm free and online.
Open Library allows you to digitally borrow a ton of books for free. It's not the greatest experience since the books they own are scanned and not digital copies, but it's good enough, and their catalogue is not half bad.
Why would you need to borrow and return in this scenario?
Just legality. These are paid books that they can't give away for free, but acting as a library they can let you borrow them, read them, and "return" them.
In practice you'll rarely feel this system because you can just re-borrow it whenever you want to read it.
Just legality.
The legality was only ever a grey area. Their days may be numbered, however. During the lockdowns they removed the one physical copy per digital copy lent, and as a result of that they got sued. Instead of settling out of court they drummed up donations to a legal fund and lost hard, and during the trial a judge ruled that their practice was illegal. In my opinion, they should have done everything they could have to settle out of court, rather than try and build a frivilous defense that had no grounding in law.
Right now, they're appealing it, so I guess that's why it's still up. However it looks like their strategy isn't any better now than it was then.
But hey, their laywer's getting paid.
If piracy counts: Piracy.
In the words of Ubisoft we need to feel "comfortable with not owning your game". If buying is not owning then piracy is not stealing.
Got any recommended resources for piracy sites/lists?
Free Covid tests if you live in the US.
I just ran out and needed more. Thank you for reminding me of this!
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All the piracy and freemediaheckyeah subs
Archive.org
Free tier cloud services like AWS, GCP, Oracle Cloud, and Azure. I use free tier VMs to host random services like VPNs, Mastodon instance, etc.
Tailscale has a free tier to connect your devices, VMs, and home servers.
GitHub pages is great for hosting any simple website for free.
Free tier VMs are limited, so are you just signing up for new AWS accounts once a month?
GCP compute engine is completely free for the basic tier.
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Don't forget about cloudflare. With their free caching and cdn a well optimized site can run for barely anything. With GitHub actions and pages you can have a fully static site hosted completely for free.
Just shared this earlier but under certain conditions (in the US), you can actually file taxes for free.
Freetaxusa does this too, you only pay for state as far as I know.
It's completely free if you live in a state with no income tax
Internet Archive - Very useful for general usage internet but not for specific needs (check fmhy).
Have I Been Pwned? - Periodically use this to check whether your email/online presence is compromised or not.
Bitwarden (or if you want to self-host it use Vaultwarden) - Personally I used this password management so I can keep my pass and you can auto generate passwords with custom parameters if needed.
Curated OSINT resources - You want to ID someone online? this resources can help you to do so, though you also need to understand the basics. It may not work if person you're looking for does not have a much online presence.
For ebooks versions of books that are no longer under copyright: project gutenberg.
And similarly for audiobooks: Librivox. It's a website and is also available as an app.
Many of the ebooks available on Project Gutenberg are a little rough. I recommend Standard eBooks instead.
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MOOCs.
They're free unless you want a "certificate", which has no practical value and is mostly useful if you want to motivate yourself a bit more and want to support their business model.
Go browse Coursera and edX and learn to your heart's content.
Also, if you're coding, watch recordings of conferences about your programming language, e.g. CppCon/C++Now/CppNorth for C++, PyCon/PyData for Python etc...
https://baby-journal.app if you have kids and value privacy (disclaimer: I've written the app).
Edit: It's an app for tracking your baby activities, like feeding, sleeping, diaper changes etc. Fully end-to-end encrypted and fully open source and self-hostable, installable on both iOS and Android.
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If you’re not a fan of your current email provider, I’ve created one that automatically organizes your email and helps prevent spam and phishing:
Awhile ago, a user on r/casualuk posted a list of UK based stuff that was either free or cheap (food/entertainment/etc). They mirrored it in a few places and I bookmarked the github mirror. Doesn't look like it's been updated for a year or so though and I ain't prepared to head to reddit to check the original.
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yt-dlp for downloading video/audio from a number of sites, not just YouTube.
Screw YT Premium.
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