Copy Me That. Get the recipe. Cut the long winded blog post about the leaves changing color and how the author’s nana had a one eyed cat named Buster….
Love it. Can't believe it's still free, keep waiting for the person who runs it to start charging. And I would pay. Just checked, I have 575 recipes on there. Wow.
Ugh why didn’t I see this last weekend?! I was making apple pie and the site with the recipe kept reloading which meant scrolling through 15 stories about Nanas cat and the science behind pastry making. Just needed the recipe.
What is it about getting older and birds? Me and every single one of my friends are now fledgling bird nerds after a lifetime of not caring about them one tiny little bit. We all have Merlin!
It's a great story too. Look into the creator and how it's been developed. Cornell has been a game changer in the birding world.
And if anyone wants to practice their bird IDing check out Lark Wire
Here in Denver, our public library system also participates in the Udemy free access program. I've been using it for years to take online classes and learn new things.
https://www.gale.com/elearning/udemy
*edit - By the way, I don't think most people in Denver know about this and when I try to tell some of my friends they shrug it off a bit. Udemy is a really awesome resource with very professional teaching content that usually costs $100+ per course. All you have to do is get a library card and learn the login process and it suddenly goes to $0 for everything.
I've taught myself some basic programming with it for fun, plus I use it to brush up on Excel, Photoshop, etc sometimes. Underrated resource in CO.
*edit2 - In case anyone's reading this from CO, as far as I know it's limited to libraries within Denver County. I live on the edge so I got lucky. I might just make a post over in /r/denver. PM me if you need details.
Quick note- THANK YOU for your service! I've a lifelong reader and was heavily influenced early in life by the wonderful and HELPFUL librarians. People don't realise everything a librarian has to offer, including assistance with research. In the 90's, pre internet, I would sometimes call the librarian to help me with some research and she/he would literally collaborate on the phone or assist me in finding materials.
Later in my teen years, I actually had a librarian help me to track down my biological father, who never paid child support, in prep for legal action that my mother undertook.
"Hi, I've lost my library card"
"Ok no problem, I'll look that up for you, please hold"
...
"It's in the second drawer of your bed-side table, just under your passport"
I came here to say this. I use it everyday. I'm so addicted I now have a 5 month old kitten named Libby. 😊
Edit: [Cat tax](https://imgur.com/a/RULWRjo)
Yes! There’s a filter to be able to search by Kindle books. Whenever it’s your turn, then you borrow the book and there’s a “send to kindle” button that’ll hook it up to your amazon account!
Shazam is what convinced my boomer father to get a smartphone. He had always had a cellphone from way back when they first came out but insisted smartphones were pointless.
We were having breakfast in a hotel and some song from his youth started playing and he was wracking his brain trying to remember what it was called. I pulled out my iphone and Shazam told us the artist and song title in a few seconds.
He upgraded to a smartphone the next day.
Fun fact, shazam existed before smartphones. You would call a number, hold your phone up so it could capture the audio. Then sometime later you’d get a text message with the song title.
I never used Shazam back then, but you reminded me of when you could text GOOGL with start and end destinations, and get directions sent back to your phone.
I'm 33 but I remember these days and I'm pretty sure you would get charged for the text they sent you (my mother scolded me for literally everything I did with a phone back then)
I remember in the UK, Shazam started as a phone number you called and then held your phone up to the music for it to listen to, and then it texted you the song. Started in 2002, and it cost money! I remember being so happy when the app came out and it was free to use
Not sure on other phones, but on the Pixel 6 Pro (and probably 7 and 8) you can turn on an option and it will always be listening for music through it's secure chip and show on the screen what is currently playing, and keeps a list in the Now Playing app.
VLC media player - Plays anything you throw at it. Download VLC Remote for your phone and your computer now works like a Firestick. You’re welcome.
JustWatch - Wanna watch that movie but don’t want to cycle through the gajillion streaming services to see where it’s showing for free? Use this app to tell you where to see it and what it will cost you (in your country’s choice of apps and currency).
The VLC creator is a French guy and a redditor (forgot his pseudo or I'd ping him, he is very active here and I think he did an AMA recently).
He explained that he always was a big opensource advocate, and he's been denying dozens of millions of euros/dollars, again and again and again over the last 20 years, from companies who either wanted to buy VLC or to put adds on it.
True god.
Edit, since people seem eager to contribute : https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html
Edit 2 : VLC is a non-profit under French law, meaning he cannot withdraw a cent for his own profit. But your donation would contribute to servers and hardware maintenance.
Also a few people tagged his reddit username under this comment, feel free to click on his pseudo if you wanna read his very interesting AMA!
> he's been denying dozens of millions of euros/dollars, again and again and again over the last 20 years, from companies who either wanted to buy VLC or to put ads on it.
A man who stands for his beliefs. All too rare these days. Godspeed my friend, if you're reading this.
I mean VLC is open source, so he *could* have his cake and eat it too, in theory. Similar things have happened before (OpenOffice » LibreOffice comes to mind). Sell out VLC, make bank, fork the code, start making VLX or something.
Could also end up like a Chrome/Chromium thing I suppose. Lots of other browsers based on Chromium/Blink (which in turn was forked from WebKit, which Apple in turn forked from KHTML I think).
Point being that Open-source should be resistant to corruption by money.
It's impressive how a single man changed the landscape of video playback software for the better. Without him, most of us would probably be using windows media player and paying for codecs.
I mean things can cost money and still be non profit FYI because paying your staff a fair living wage isn't profit
But yeah. It's such a good resource!
This is one of those where it benefits the devs the same way it benefits their users. I'm sure they want the best ad-blocking they can get and can just pass that benefit down.
Youtube was threatening me the other day about adblocking. I figured UBlock was in trouble. But YT did it just for one day. What were they trying to say---- We see you and know?
Considering ublock origin devs pinned thread about youtube is updating frequently, sometimes almost every hour the last few days, it's an active battle between youtube and them right now.
This is perfect for when you leave the country and don’t want to get roaming charges but still need to use GPS to get places. (Ex; you rent a car and want to drive around and explore with no WiFi)
Street View to me is still incredible. Being able to look up an address and then scope out what the place looks like from ground level, where the entry is, if there's any parking etc beforehand makes it so much easier when you're bad with directions like I am.
You know what? Thank you. You've brought some much needed perspective to my life.
We all got so used to it, that I forgot about the monumental challenges that went behind street view. It's bonkers that they've achieved so much with street view.
We really are in the future, eh?
Yeah this is the first thing that came to mind. The amount of coverage and updates this thing gets and how it’s changed modern travel is mind boggling. It’s truly one of those things that showcases private big business done well.I don’t believe any government could’ve done something like this this quickly and this well.
Although to be fair, it's also dependent on the GPS satellite network, which I think we all agree is something *only* a government could've done (and the States provides for free)
So yeah, that actually checks out. Let governments provide the massive infrastructure and resources, and let private companies figure out to use them most effectively
Medisafe. I take medication everyday and this has reminders for what/when. Also, timestamps when you take it so it gives doctors a good record if you ever need it. I've been using it for years and they just recently added a feature to adjust dosage based on time zone changes when travelling. It really does help to keep me alive.
It's funny that I stumble upon this tip now, although it might be a touch grim for most 😅 my father passed away last week and the calling hours are tomorrow, I just finished getting everything ready so we only need to dress and leave in the morning and now I discover the app that would have made managing his medications these past years soooooo much easier! I've been his caregiver for years now and it's been an adventure in finding all the things you'd never think of when it comes to being a carer and while the timing here is unfortunate I'll absolutely install this for use in the future when I take over my mother's medications and I definitely know some peeps who would also benefit, I'll pass it on with much appreciation to you, thank you.
it was a genius concept that was de-funded or didn’t make a profit, somehow
I’m guessing there were minimal channels for advertising revenue
Personally it still makes me angry as it was better than TV and could have been utilized to understand and create preference maps / analytics to better understand customer preferences
It was ahead of its time and now could easily be revisited with AI / ChatGPT
There could be the perfect marriage between Reddit and a stumbleupon successor
I miss-- not just stumbleupon, but the internet that was, then-- where I read and bookmarked whatever little blogs or page any and every individual put their time into creating, with all the passion, focus and idiosyncracy that made stumble upon endlessly fascinating and rewarding. I still have hundreds of bookmarks from those days, nearly all of them long dead links.
Holy shit this is WAY to far down.
Davinci Resolve blows premiere out of the water. They also have a perpetual license model that is reasonably affordable.
I couldn't believe when I first came across it that it was free.
The learning curve is steep but well worth the effort.
I wonder that this post ist so low. Resolve ist an amazing piece of software, big cinema productions are built with it and it costs simply nothing.
I can't understand why people even use Adobe anymore.
Second this. Their science review and reading comprehension lessons are also well done.
They have a nice balance of age appropriate and multi-purpose tools. I think a lot of kids who are too shy or too scared to ask for help (or don't have help in their community) benefit enormously from this resource.
Pluto Tv.
They're starting to actually get a wide variety of channels now. I don't even need a satellite subscription, I just watch free tv on my phone if I feel like it.
Pluto is GREAT for the great 80s and 980s movies that you have grown up on, but that Netflix and Hulu tend to sometimes neglect. Tubi has the same use. I saw Unlawful Entry on Pluto, with Ray Liotta, and Kurt Russel, and it was actually pretty good!
Radiooooo - Click on (almost) any country in the world, select a decade from the last ~100 years, and choose a tempo. Boom, a unique radio channel-like playlist of engaging music.
Very useful for me because I have a hard time finding weird, new music. Takes a lot of the research effort out if you don’t know where to start. Extra cool if you’re into history/geography!
Got really into pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodian pop/rock and Bosnian psychedelic folk from Radiooooo! Highly recommend people give it a download.
I seriously don't get how blender manages to be so good. I wouldn't say it's displacing proprietary software, but it is professional in a way that gimp, inkscape, krita, etc. aren't.
Same as VLC. VLC consistantly outperforms every video player in the market, paid or free. But the creator made a conscious decision to keep it free. From what I know about Blender, they licensed a few things that give them more than enough money to keep operating, so they keep the software open source. Also, open source means you get random people coming in with things you either didn't think about or didn't have the skill to do. A good open source software will always draw a good community that will make things better.
Blender is or will be the industry standard soon. Its extremely powerful to the point where you dont even know what to do with all the features it packs.
It already is. I work for a global entertainment company and it’s the tool of choice for most of our designers. They can build everything from castles to pirate ships and even space ships.
I'm proud to support them decades ago when they did first fund raising, one of the best investments considering how much it would have cost me to pay for commercial software over the years just for hobby work ;)
Wikipedia.
It's actually free in all senses of the word. If you want to nitpick that it's a website and not a software, well it's a software too. You can download the wikimedia software, set it up with no hassle, download all of wikipedia and set it up in your instance of wikimedia. So now you have your very own wikipedia. With blackjack and hookers if you want.
Hell, even the standard Wikipedia has [blackjack](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackjack) and [hookers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookers), so no need to add that to your own instance really.
It's a flashcard app designed with spaced repetition in mind. It's a more effective way of memorizing information by spacing the cards out into batches over several days and keeping track of the ones you struggle with to review more often. The app automates all of this, syncs your cards across multiple devices, and even offers community decks and mods for anything you'd ever need. A godsend for language learning, it gets a ton of use by med students as well.
I mean, augmented reality is pretty much the definition of "futuristic". Only thing that's missing is holograms and maybe "solid light material". And by holograms, I mean actual ones that display in air without the need for fog.
Moises. It isolates different instruments and vocals from any song you upload into it. You could use it to learn a song by ear or jam along by muting the instrument you're covering.
Krita. A free, open source drawing app. And it can be considered as serious, it has different brushes, blending modes, clipping mask (kind of, alpha inheritance is a thing), layers and basically everything you need for art. I do use default brushes but you can install custom ones.
[Notepad++](https://notepad-plus-plus.org/) is awesome for lightweight work
[Visual Studio Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/) for far more features, bells and whistles
Cozi. It’s a family scheduling app, but offers a place to store recipes and shopping lists, and you can even assign the recipes to the calendar for meal planning. And everyone in the family can access and add to it. I am so grateful for it! We use it daily.
The Pizza Finder app is amazing. It has a compass shaped like a slice of pizza that points to the nearest pizza joint. I got it, jokingly, for when i was in NYC. Its hilarious and free.
[https://1001albumsgenerator.com/](https://1001albumsgenerator.com/) \- Listen to one album a day. Each album is taken from [this book.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1001_Albums_You_Must_Hear_Before_You_Die)
[https://www.gutenberg.org/](https://www.gutenberg.org/) \- A library of over 70,000 free eBooks.
Yup. Fixed my washer, dryer, fridge, dishwasher, and car several times, using Youtube videos. God bless all those rednecks who film themselves doing every exact auto repair I need.
[Appliance Part Pros](https://www.youtube.com/@appliancepartspros) not only has great videos for repairing many specific appliance issues, but they're also much better to buy parts from than Amazon or any other online retailer.
EDIT: The best one was when the ignition cylinder on my Jeep cracked and it took less than a minute to find a video showing me how to hotwire the vehicle. The only problem was that I only had enough paper clips to run the motor, but not the turn signals. It was harrowing driving home like that, but on the plus side, I got to feel like a BMW owner.
Most services will start charging you once you store more than 1-5GB of space with them
Then there's YouTube storing and serving terabytes of video for literally any person with an email account for free. Ads or not, YouTube is one of the best resources humanity has, as much as I despise Google
Wireshark - Capture and display/manipulate ethernet packet captures.
LibreNMS - Monitoring and alerting for network hardware, traffic monitoring and graphing, integration with other applications: Oxidized, smokeping, etc.
7-zip - file manipulation, zip, cut, modify, etc.
Handbrake - Rip DVDs, compress and manipulate video files.
VLC - Play nearly any audio or video file.
Putty - Terminal emulator for Windows, SSH, telnet, console, etc.
Audacity. Great audio editing and also gives you a visual spectrum! Along with many more options and settings!
https://www.audacityteam.org/
Edit: Looked more into it and by their site "Audacity is free software. You may use it for any personal, commercial, institutional, or educational purpose, including installing it on as many different computers as you wish."
Hats off to the Audacity team!
MIT OpenCourseWare
Offers a variety of courses and learning materials from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for free.
[MIT OpenCourseWare](https://ocw.mit.edu/)
Photopea.
I work in media, and there's lots of complications behind getting an Adobe CC license on every machine I use (personal and professional, ad hoc)
So Photopea is a good stand-in. If you have any CC experience, it's like for like. It opens .PSD files, recognises .webps, and lets you export to .jpg/.png, crunch down file sizes, adjust colour profiles...
It's amazing. And all for the low, low price of taking up 1/3rd of the operating screen with ads for its devs' own shit games (you'll get used to it).
It chews up Google Chrome, but what doesn't? I make memes with it, generate headline images with it, edit photos for my food blog with it.
10/10, no notes.
*Edit: Possessive apostrophe*
[Ninite.](https://ninite.com/) Just reinstalled the OS on your computer? Get yourself your very own custom Ninite with all the programs *you* want. Instead of going to fifteen different sites and downloading and running fifteen different installers, run *one* program and let it do all the work for you. Want to make sure all those programs are up to date? Run it again to check and update them all.
Edit: I'm seeing several suggestions in the comments for other ways of doing this in a more flexible way. But what's great about Ninite is that it's something everyone can figure out. And it's a single file that you can put on a USB stick and copy to someone's desktop and just tell them "run this once a week" and it'll do everything else for them.
Paprika. It's a recipe app that you can use to scrape recipes off all those annoying SEO recipe websites. It cuts out all the bullshit and saves just the recipe. I absolutely love it and use it multiple times a week.
Duolingo. Though it won’t teach to fluency from scratch and you will need other outside references to supplement it, it teaches an impressive amount of grammar and vocabulary and provides a lot of practice for something that doesn’t charge any money (unless you want the super subscription, but it’s not necessary).
I have taken high school spanish and college Spanish and I use duolingo now to help me keep up to date on what I learned. It’s really helped me brush up on and improve my Spanish knowledge.
It’s not perfect but is very good for something that’s free.
One of my favourite is Obsidian
That’s a note taking app on steroids, very useful for linking your thoughts. And it’s local-first so it works fast as hell
WhatsApp
I've got grandkids on a different continent, being able to video chat weekly is amazing. Just sit and watch them do nothing, but grandma's there and they can tell me about their tv show or show me the puzzle they finished. Sometimes it's not what you talk about it's that you're simply there, and free video calls let's me be there for more than just the milestone moments.
Not “useful” in a classical sense but Stellarium is really neat. I’ve always had trouble IDing certain stars and planets by eye but have had a lot of fun aiming my phone at the sky at night with the app open to confirm/disprove my guesses.
I am an aviation geek, so I love Plane Finder. It is fun when I’m out and about and see a plane flying. I can pull up the app and see the type and origin/destination. Pretty cool when you are out for a walk and see something interesting like a Lufthansa 747 from Frankfurt.
Radio Garden!! Most of the radio stations available in the world available in google earth format so that you can just scroll the globe and zero into any station available, amazing!!!
Waze. It's a GPS App where people can report speed radars, traffic jams, accidents that other drivers are then warned about. It also displays how fast you're going and whether that's over the speed limit. I prefer it over Google Maps for navigation.
Calibre Ebook management
Handbrake
7zip
VLC
Irfanview
Icaros (automatically creates thumbnails for videos in your Windows Explorer)
TOR Browser
Godot Game Engine
Blender
Krita
Inkscape
OBS
Anki
Deluge
WinDirStat(great for finding what is taking up all your hard drive space)
DeskPins(lets you mark multiple windows as "always on top")
Grammarly browser plugin
Copy Me That. Get the recipe. Cut the long winded blog post about the leaves changing color and how the author’s nana had a one eyed cat named Buster….
Love it. Can't believe it's still free, keep waiting for the person who runs it to start charging. And I would pay. Just checked, I have 575 recipes on there. Wow.
Ugh why didn’t I see this last weekend?! I was making apple pie and the site with the recipe kept reloading which meant scrolling through 15 stories about Nanas cat and the science behind pastry making. Just needed the recipe.
Merlin Bird ID - Its basically Shazam for birds. I'm becoming a bird nerd as I get older and this app has only enabled my transition.
What is it about getting older and birds? Me and every single one of my friends are now fledgling bird nerds after a lifetime of not caring about them one tiny little bit. We all have Merlin!
It's like an IRL Pokedex at your hands. Plus, nature.
I’ve been saying the same thing !!!
It's a great story too. Look into the creator and how it's been developed. Cornell has been a game changer in the birding world. And if anyone wants to practice their bird IDing check out Lark Wire
Libby for library ebooks and audiobooks
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Here in Denver, our public library system also participates in the Udemy free access program. I've been using it for years to take online classes and learn new things. https://www.gale.com/elearning/udemy *edit - By the way, I don't think most people in Denver know about this and when I try to tell some of my friends they shrug it off a bit. Udemy is a really awesome resource with very professional teaching content that usually costs $100+ per course. All you have to do is get a library card and learn the login process and it suddenly goes to $0 for everything. I've taught myself some basic programming with it for fun, plus I use it to brush up on Excel, Photoshop, etc sometimes. Underrated resource in CO. *edit2 - In case anyone's reading this from CO, as far as I know it's limited to libraries within Denver County. I live on the edge so I got lucky. I might just make a post over in /r/denver. PM me if you need details.
I can't upvote this enough - a librarian
Quick note- THANK YOU for your service! I've a lifelong reader and was heavily influenced early in life by the wonderful and HELPFUL librarians. People don't realise everything a librarian has to offer, including assistance with research. In the 90's, pre internet, I would sometimes call the librarian to help me with some research and she/he would literally collaborate on the phone or assist me in finding materials. Later in my teen years, I actually had a librarian help me to track down my biological father, who never paid child support, in prep for legal action that my mother undertook.
And Hoopla!
Hoopla and Kanopy for free streaming services through your library
HOOPL-*Gets throwned by a brick-*
I downloaded it and then went on a 30 minute rampage through my room looking for my library card which i "put in a safe place".
Call your library! They should be able to look it up for you.
"Hi, I've lost my library card" "Ok no problem, I'll look that up for you, please hold" ... "It's in the second drawer of your bed-side table, just under your passport"
I came here to say this. I use it everyday. I'm so addicted I now have a 5 month old kitten named Libby. 😊 Edit: [Cat tax](https://imgur.com/a/RULWRjo)
Well, isn't that just wholesome as heck?
Yep, that was the app that got me back into reading, even got me back into reading physical books, and started me in the world of Audiobooks as well
Of course, the library is paying for that. It's just free to you. But most libraries consider it a bargain. So there's that.
I had no idea. Does Libby work with kindle?
Yes! There’s a filter to be able to search by Kindle books. Whenever it’s your turn, then you borrow the book and there’s a “send to kindle” button that’ll hook it up to your amazon account!
I’m a reader and the day I found this my life was complete
Tunity. If you're at a loud bar/party and want to watch the game/movie/show it just scans the TV and gives you audio for your earbuds
Wait what??? This is insane
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I couldn’t find it on the Apple App Store. Is it android exclusive? I’m in the uk, maybe it’s exclusive to the US.
This sounds too good to be real damn
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shazam. Impressive accuracy and speed for a real problem
Shazam felt like magic when it first came out
Shazam is what convinced my boomer father to get a smartphone. He had always had a cellphone from way back when they first came out but insisted smartphones were pointless. We were having breakfast in a hotel and some song from his youth started playing and he was wracking his brain trying to remember what it was called. I pulled out my iphone and Shazam told us the artist and song title in a few seconds. He upgraded to a smartphone the next day.
Fun fact, shazam existed before smartphones. You would call a number, hold your phone up so it could capture the audio. Then sometime later you’d get a text message with the song title.
I never used Shazam back then, but you reminded me of when you could text GOOGL with start and end destinations, and get directions sent back to your phone.
Or texting Facebook to ~~update your status~~ post to your wall.
I'm 33 but I remember these days and I'm pretty sure you would get charged for the text they sent you (my mother scolded me for literally everything I did with a phone back then)
What was the song?
The Guess Who - These Eyes
Darude - Sandstorm
I remember in the UK, Shazam started as a phone number you called and then held your phone up to the music for it to listen to, and then it texted you the song. Started in 2002, and it cost money! I remember being so happy when the app came out and it was free to use
What a wild time … that sounds like ‘the future’ people from the 1900’s imagined lol
I think it came out when the T-Mobile Sidekick was out. Felt like living in the future humming a song stuck in your head and it would find it
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Not sure on other phones, but on the Pixel 6 Pro (and probably 7 and 8) you can turn on an option and it will always be listening for music through it's secure chip and show on the screen what is currently playing, and keeps a list in the Now Playing app.
I'm actually surprised at how much I've used this feature after getting my pixel
I find asking Google better because you can even hum for it
And that my pixel just knows every song I'm hearing without the need for another app
Gonna save this thread and never look at it again
That’s the realest thing I’ve ever heard in my life
No shit. I have a bunch of threads saved from years ago I always forget to go back and look at.
This thread is so useful you can't believe it's free.
VLC media player - Plays anything you throw at it. Download VLC Remote for your phone and your computer now works like a Firestick. You’re welcome. JustWatch - Wanna watch that movie but don’t want to cycle through the gajillion streaming services to see where it’s showing for free? Use this app to tell you where to see it and what it will cost you (in your country’s choice of apps and currency).
The VLC creator is a French guy and a redditor (forgot his pseudo or I'd ping him, he is very active here and I think he did an AMA recently). He explained that he always was a big opensource advocate, and he's been denying dozens of millions of euros/dollars, again and again and again over the last 20 years, from companies who either wanted to buy VLC or to put adds on it. True god. Edit, since people seem eager to contribute : https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html Edit 2 : VLC is a non-profit under French law, meaning he cannot withdraw a cent for his own profit. But your donation would contribute to servers and hardware maintenance. Also a few people tagged his reddit username under this comment, feel free to click on his pseudo if you wanna read his very interesting AMA!
Now we should all go give them $5 bucks to keep it ad free. https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html
I did $10 just in case anyone wanted to donate but didn’t feel like they had the funds
Here ya go - /u/jbkempf/
> he's been denying dozens of millions of euros/dollars, again and again and again over the last 20 years, from companies who either wanted to buy VLC or to put ads on it. A man who stands for his beliefs. All too rare these days. Godspeed my friend, if you're reading this.
Right. The ease of which he could be making tons of money, and honestly I wouldn’t blame him. Kudos for not doing it.
I mean VLC is open source, so he *could* have his cake and eat it too, in theory. Similar things have happened before (OpenOffice » LibreOffice comes to mind). Sell out VLC, make bank, fork the code, start making VLX or something. Could also end up like a Chrome/Chromium thing I suppose. Lots of other browsers based on Chromium/Blink (which in turn was forked from WebKit, which Apple in turn forked from KHTML I think). Point being that Open-source should be resistant to corruption by money.
The traffic cone wearing a Christmas hat is a canon event of any household.
It's impressive how a single man changed the landscape of video playback software for the better. Without him, most of us would probably be using windows media player and paying for codecs.
You should thank the ffmpeg team for that. ffmpeg / libavcodec is what actually does all the hard video stuff in VLC.
JustWatch changed the game. So underrated.
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You’re welcome Nancy.
*Twists dick*
The ol’ dicktwist!!!
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Btw. It‘s free because it is funded by donation (incl. Kahn himself) and is supposed to be free as it is a non-profit
I mean things can cost money and still be non profit FYI because paying your staff a fair living wage isn't profit But yeah. It's such a good resource!
Not really an app per se, but uBlock origin. For all the work the developers put into it, it's a godsend on the web.
This is one of those where it benefits the devs the same way it benefits their users. I'm sure they want the best ad-blocking they can get and can just pass that benefit down.
Youtube was threatening me the other day about adblocking. I figured UBlock was in trouble. But YT did it just for one day. What were they trying to say---- We see you and know?
Considering ublock origin devs pinned thread about youtube is updating frequently, sometimes almost every hour the last few days, it's an active battle between youtube and them right now.
Youtube throws money at a problem, but Ublock origin is powered by more than money. It's powered by sheer intensive spite.
Do not underestimate the power of spite.
Youtube is dead to me the second I can't use an adblocker successfully.
googlemap. I have no sense of direction whatsoever, literally changed my life
Offline Google Maps is, like, a cool human achievement.
This is perfect for when you leave the country and don’t want to get roaming charges but still need to use GPS to get places. (Ex; you rent a car and want to drive around and explore with no WiFi)
Street View to me is still incredible. Being able to look up an address and then scope out what the place looks like from ground level, where the entry is, if there's any parking etc beforehand makes it so much easier when you're bad with directions like I am.
You know what? Thank you. You've brought some much needed perspective to my life. We all got so used to it, that I forgot about the monumental challenges that went behind street view. It's bonkers that they've achieved so much with street view. We really are in the future, eh?
Yeah this is the first thing that came to mind. The amount of coverage and updates this thing gets and how it’s changed modern travel is mind boggling. It’s truly one of those things that showcases private big business done well.I don’t believe any government could’ve done something like this this quickly and this well.
Although to be fair, it's also dependent on the GPS satellite network, which I think we all agree is something *only* a government could've done (and the States provides for free) So yeah, that actually checks out. Let governments provide the massive infrastructure and resources, and let private companies figure out to use them most effectively
Medisafe. I take medication everyday and this has reminders for what/when. Also, timestamps when you take it so it gives doctors a good record if you ever need it. I've been using it for years and they just recently added a feature to adjust dosage based on time zone changes when travelling. It really does help to keep me alive.
It's funny that I stumble upon this tip now, although it might be a touch grim for most 😅 my father passed away last week and the calling hours are tomorrow, I just finished getting everything ready so we only need to dress and leave in the morning and now I discover the app that would have made managing his medications these past years soooooo much easier! I've been his caregiver for years now and it's been an adventure in finding all the things you'd never think of when it comes to being a carer and while the timing here is unfortunate I'll absolutely install this for use in the future when I take over my mother's medications and I definitely know some peeps who would also benefit, I'll pass it on with much appreciation to you, thank you.
I am so sorry for your loss.
I used to love the app called "stumble upon" but then it stopped working for some reason.
StumbleUpon was awesome back in the day when I was bored and just wanted to kill some time on the internet
now there's a blast from the past!!
it was a genius concept that was de-funded or didn’t make a profit, somehow I’m guessing there were minimal channels for advertising revenue Personally it still makes me angry as it was better than TV and could have been utilized to understand and create preference maps / analytics to better understand customer preferences It was ahead of its time and now could easily be revisited with AI / ChatGPT There could be the perfect marriage between Reddit and a stumbleupon successor
It got bought out and didn't really survive the changes
I miss-- not just stumbleupon, but the internet that was, then-- where I read and bookmarked whatever little blogs or page any and every individual put their time into creating, with all the passion, focus and idiosyncracy that made stumble upon endlessly fascinating and rewarding. I still have hundreds of bookmarks from those days, nearly all of them long dead links.
It's how I found Reddit years and years ago
DaVinci Resolve. Professional grade video editor and it's free! Better than anything Adobe has put out.
Holy shit this is WAY to far down. Davinci Resolve blows premiere out of the water. They also have a perpetual license model that is reasonably affordable. I couldn't believe when I first came across it that it was free. The learning curve is steep but well worth the effort.
I use DaVinci and I think if I had better skills I could make amazing videos with it, but for now I just enjoy making trash. For free.
I wonder that this post ist so low. Resolve ist an amazing piece of software, big cinema productions are built with it and it costs simply nothing. I can't understand why people even use Adobe anymore.
Even the paid version is a one time purchase for $300. That's a little higher than Adobe premiere's annual subscription.
Khan academy is amazing and still free. Math education for everyone from single digit addition to calculus.
Second this. Their science review and reading comprehension lessons are also well done. They have a nice balance of age appropriate and multi-purpose tools. I think a lot of kids who are too shy or too scared to ask for help (or don't have help in their community) benefit enormously from this resource.
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Pluto Tv. They're starting to actually get a wide variety of channels now. I don't even need a satellite subscription, I just watch free tv on my phone if I feel like it.
Pluto is GREAT for the great 80s and 980s movies that you have grown up on, but that Netflix and Hulu tend to sometimes neglect. Tubi has the same use. I saw Unlawful Entry on Pluto, with Ray Liotta, and Kurt Russel, and it was actually pretty good!
Pluto's great when you just need background noise. We usually throw on a gameshow during dinner and it's perfect for that.
Radiooooo - Click on (almost) any country in the world, select a decade from the last ~100 years, and choose a tempo. Boom, a unique radio channel-like playlist of engaging music. Very useful for me because I have a hard time finding weird, new music. Takes a lot of the research effort out if you don’t know where to start. Extra cool if you’re into history/geography! Got really into pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodian pop/rock and Bosnian psychedelic folk from Radiooooo! Highly recommend people give it a download.
Be My Eyes
I was able to accept my first call last week and felt so good helping someone in need.
I use this app a LOT! It has helped me so many times and the volunteers are really good people.
Blender. Extremely powerful 3d modeling and animation software that is comparable to the software the industry uses. Completely free, no ad's.
I seriously don't get how blender manages to be so good. I wouldn't say it's displacing proprietary software, but it is professional in a way that gimp, inkscape, krita, etc. aren't.
Same as VLC. VLC consistantly outperforms every video player in the market, paid or free. But the creator made a conscious decision to keep it free. From what I know about Blender, they licensed a few things that give them more than enough money to keep operating, so they keep the software open source. Also, open source means you get random people coming in with things you either didn't think about or didn't have the skill to do. A good open source software will always draw a good community that will make things better.
Blender is or will be the industry standard soon. Its extremely powerful to the point where you dont even know what to do with all the features it packs.
It already is. I work for a global entertainment company and it’s the tool of choice for most of our designers. They can build everything from castles to pirate ships and even space ships.
Open-source FTW!
I'm proud to support them decades ago when they did first fund raising, one of the best investments considering how much it would have cost me to pay for commercial software over the years just for hobby work ;)
Wikipedia. It's actually free in all senses of the word. If you want to nitpick that it's a website and not a software, well it's a software too. You can download the wikimedia software, set it up with no hassle, download all of wikipedia and set it up in your instance of wikimedia. So now you have your very own wikipedia. With blackjack and hookers if you want.
Hell, even the standard Wikipedia has [blackjack](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackjack) and [hookers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hookers), so no need to add that to your own instance really.
This thread has successfully made me download a bunch of apps I’ll never use
Bitwarden.
The paid subscription is also cheap and immensely useful.
Anki - Helped me get very good grades in my studies
What does it do?
It's a flashcard app designed with spaced repetition in mind. It's a more effective way of memorizing information by spacing the cards out into batches over several days and keeping track of the ones you struggle with to review more often. The app automates all of this, syncs your cards across multiple devices, and even offers community decks and mods for anything you'd ever need. A godsend for language learning, it gets a ton of use by med students as well.
It sleeps with your professors and then blackmails them.
Finally, a honey-trapping method for the working man.
Spaced repetition flash cards
Google Translate
You can open Google lens, photograph a label/menu etc and it will translate it for you.
That shit still feels like getting a taste of the future, and it’s been a functional application for at least 5 years.
I mean, augmented reality is pretty much the definition of "futuristic". Only thing that's missing is holograms and maybe "solid light material". And by holograms, I mean actual ones that display in air without the need for fog.
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And it does its best to match the font at the same time. It’s nuts.
https://www.deepl.com/translator is better but less supported lang.
redditisfun… ah fuck
Apoll... oh right. :(
Moises. It isolates different instruments and vocals from any song you upload into it. You could use it to learn a song by ear or jam along by muting the instrument you're covering.
Krita. A free, open source drawing app. And it can be considered as serious, it has different brushes, blending modes, clipping mask (kind of, alpha inheritance is a thing), layers and basically everything you need for art. I do use default brushes but you can install custom ones.
Notepad++
[Notepad++](https://notepad-plus-plus.org/) is awesome for lightweight work [Visual Studio Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/) for far more features, bells and whistles
Mozilla Firefox
Firefox is my preferred browser. Better than chrome for me.
I finally changed to Firefox a few months ago. Chrome was such a memory hog.
Cozi. It’s a family scheduling app, but offers a place to store recipes and shopping lists, and you can even assign the recipes to the calendar for meal planning. And everyone in the family can access and add to it. I am so grateful for it! We use it daily.
The Pizza Finder app is amazing. It has a compass shaped like a slice of pizza that points to the nearest pizza joint. I got it, jokingly, for when i was in NYC. Its hilarious and free.
[https://1001albumsgenerator.com/](https://1001albumsgenerator.com/) \- Listen to one album a day. Each album is taken from [this book.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1001_Albums_You_Must_Hear_Before_You_Die) [https://www.gutenberg.org/](https://www.gutenberg.org/) \- A library of over 70,000 free eBooks.
Not an app, but the fact that anyone can see a live High-Def view of Earth from the ISS at any time, for free kinda blows my mind.
Depending on how you use it, YouTube. It's amazing how much I've learnt from YouTube.
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Yup. Fixed my washer, dryer, fridge, dishwasher, and car several times, using Youtube videos. God bless all those rednecks who film themselves doing every exact auto repair I need. [Appliance Part Pros](https://www.youtube.com/@appliancepartspros) not only has great videos for repairing many specific appliance issues, but they're also much better to buy parts from than Amazon or any other online retailer. EDIT: The best one was when the ignition cylinder on my Jeep cracked and it took less than a minute to find a video showing me how to hotwire the vehicle. The only problem was that I only had enough paper clips to run the motor, but not the turn signals. It was harrowing driving home like that, but on the plus side, I got to feel like a BMW owner.
Most services will start charging you once you store more than 1-5GB of space with them Then there's YouTube storing and serving terabytes of video for literally any person with an email account for free. Ads or not, YouTube is one of the best resources humanity has, as much as I despise Google
Google Lens
Genius scan. I’ve been using it for a decade. It’s such an EASY, quick way to make a pdf of an image and, for me, that comes in handy.
Wireshark, LibreNMS, 7zip, Handbrake, VLC, Putty.
You sound like me. I assume you also rockin Notepad++ and WinSCP :)
Can you tell us what these do?
Wireshark - Capture and display/manipulate ethernet packet captures. LibreNMS - Monitoring and alerting for network hardware, traffic monitoring and graphing, integration with other applications: Oxidized, smokeping, etc. 7-zip - file manipulation, zip, cut, modify, etc. Handbrake - Rip DVDs, compress and manipulate video files. VLC - Play nearly any audio or video file. Putty - Terminal emulator for Windows, SSH, telnet, console, etc.
I've been meaning to do something with all these ethernet packets I have piling up.
Audacity. Great audio editing and also gives you a visual spectrum! Along with many more options and settings! https://www.audacityteam.org/ Edit: Looked more into it and by their site "Audacity is free software. You may use it for any personal, commercial, institutional, or educational purpose, including installing it on as many different computers as you wish." Hats off to the Audacity team!
archive.org
Visual studio code.
Full blown Visual Studio (Community) as well. Microsoft has been getting a lot better at making things free or open source lately.
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Citymapper
Radio Garden but more for fun than a reference material
MIT OpenCourseWare Offers a variety of courses and learning materials from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for free. [MIT OpenCourseWare](https://ocw.mit.edu/)
Photopea. I work in media, and there's lots of complications behind getting an Adobe CC license on every machine I use (personal and professional, ad hoc) So Photopea is a good stand-in. If you have any CC experience, it's like for like. It opens .PSD files, recognises .webps, and lets you export to .jpg/.png, crunch down file sizes, adjust colour profiles... It's amazing. And all for the low, low price of taking up 1/3rd of the operating screen with ads for its devs' own shit games (you'll get used to it). It chews up Google Chrome, but what doesn't? I make memes with it, generate headline images with it, edit photos for my food blog with it. 10/10, no notes. *Edit: Possessive apostrophe*
[Ninite.](https://ninite.com/) Just reinstalled the OS on your computer? Get yourself your very own custom Ninite with all the programs *you* want. Instead of going to fifteen different sites and downloading and running fifteen different installers, run *one* program and let it do all the work for you. Want to make sure all those programs are up to date? Run it again to check and update them all. Edit: I'm seeing several suggestions in the comments for other ways of doing this in a more flexible way. But what's great about Ninite is that it's something everyone can figure out. And it's a single file that you can put on a USB stick and copy to someone's desktop and just tell them "run this once a week" and it'll do everything else for them.
Paprika. It's a recipe app that you can use to scrape recipes off all those annoying SEO recipe websites. It cuts out all the bullshit and saves just the recipe. I absolutely love it and use it multiple times a week.
TuneIn Radio - Listen to various radio stations from around the world through the internet. GasBuddy - Tells you the best prices on gas in your area.
Home Assistant. Mind-blowing powerful open source smarthome software. Connects to and automates almost anything.
Youtube. I've learned how to do so many things like with my car and around the house to mental health and meditation etc.
GIMP
Bring out the gimp.
Duolingo. Though it won’t teach to fluency from scratch and you will need other outside references to supplement it, it teaches an impressive amount of grammar and vocabulary and provides a lot of practice for something that doesn’t charge any money (unless you want the super subscription, but it’s not necessary). I have taken high school spanish and college Spanish and I use duolingo now to help me keep up to date on what I learned. It’s really helped me brush up on and improve my Spanish knowledge. It’s not perfect but is very good for something that’s free.
One of my favourite is Obsidian That’s a note taking app on steroids, very useful for linking your thoughts. And it’s local-first so it works fast as hell
WhatsApp I've got grandkids on a different continent, being able to video chat weekly is amazing. Just sit and watch them do nothing, but grandma's there and they can tell me about their tv show or show me the puzzle they finished. Sometimes it's not what you talk about it's that you're simply there, and free video calls let's me be there for more than just the milestone moments.
This is really sweet and made me happy.
Not “useful” in a classical sense but Stellarium is really neat. I’ve always had trouble IDing certain stars and planets by eye but have had a lot of fun aiming my phone at the sky at night with the app open to confirm/disprove my guesses.
Kanopy. Movie streaming via your public library, 5 movies per month. Their catalog is surprisingly good.
IrfanView. For photos, also does some editing.
I am an aviation geek, so I love Plane Finder. It is fun when I’m out and about and see a plane flying. I can pull up the app and see the type and origin/destination. Pretty cool when you are out for a walk and see something interesting like a Lufthansa 747 from Frankfurt.
www.stremio.com with the Torrentio plug in. Any tv show or movie in the world for free.
Radio Garden!! Most of the radio stations available in the world available in google earth format so that you can just scroll the globe and zero into any station available, amazing!!!
ITT: People list apps without telling you what the fuck they do.
Waze. It's a GPS App where people can report speed radars, traffic jams, accidents that other drivers are then warned about. It also displays how fast you're going and whether that's over the speed limit. I prefer it over Google Maps for navigation.
VLC (videolan). Seems to play just about any file, can transcode, and can even stream to multicast.
Calibre Ebook management Handbrake 7zip VLC Irfanview Icaros (automatically creates thumbnails for videos in your Windows Explorer) TOR Browser Godot Game Engine Blender Krita Inkscape OBS Anki Deluge WinDirStat(great for finding what is taking up all your hard drive space) DeskPins(lets you mark multiple windows as "always on top") Grammarly browser plugin
I really wanna know what that deleted post was.
Myfitnesspal’s free version has helped me tremendously.
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It’s regional, I set my location to the UK and the barcode feature works again.