Here is a useful list of free services on the internet everyone should know with links provided.
Knowledge
MOOCs (Massively Online Open Courses)
- Coursera – Coursera partners with various universities and makes a few of their courses available online free for a large audience. Founded by computer science professors, so again a heavy CS emphasis.
- edX – Massive open online course platform founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University to offer online university-level courses in a wide range of disciplines to a worldwide audience at no charge. Many other universities now take part in it, including Cal Berkeley. Differs from most of these by including “due dates” with assignments and grades.
- Udacity – Outgrowth of free computer science classes offered in 2011 through Stanford University. Plans to offer more, but concentrated on computer science for now.
Free Online Courses Offered by Universities
- Harvard Open Courseware
- MIT Open Courseware – Initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, partly free and openly available to anyone, anywhere.
- Yale Open Courseware – Provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.
- Stanford Open Courseware
Music
- MusicTheory.net, Teoria
- IMSLP
- Classical Guitar Tablature
- Practice Sight Reading
- MuseScore
- Justin Guitar – Over 850 lessons to learn guitar.
Languages
- BliuBliu
- Lang8
- Duolingo
- italki Not fully free, but free to find partners and natives to learn from.
- ielanguages
Other
- Khan Academy – Free learning tutorials on just about every subject.
- Codecademy
- HackerRank Challenges and contests with a leaderboard to test and develop your programming skills. Requires a solid programming knowledge base.
- Anki, Mnemosyne, Memrise
- Instructables
- INTERNET IS USEFUL
- PCGamingWiki
- Wolfram Alpha
E-Books
- Project Gutenberg – Primarily public domain.
- OpenLibrary – Download out-of-copyright books, borrow in-copyright books.
- Feedbooks
- SmashWords
Audiobooks
- LibriVox – Free audio books
- Podiobooks.com – Free audiobooks mostly from self-published authors.
Video games
Freeware
- The Free Bundle
- SCP – Containment: Breach Free survival horror game based on the works of the SCP Foundation community.
Multiplayer games you might’ve never heard of (all 100% free, without microtransactions):
More Freeware and F2P games
- Simutrans, Open TTD
- Armor Critical
- Supraball
- Black Mesa Source
- Cry of Fear
- Planetside 2
- Duelyst
- Town of Salem
Abandonware
Older games (not in the above sites)
- Marathon series
- Warzone 2100
- First 3 C&C games)
- Dune 2000
- All the Earthsiege and Tribes games (even the PS2 one).
- The Elder Scrolls Arena and Daggerfall
F2P (microtransactions)
- Steam F2P section – Some of these are completely freeware. Most of them are multiplayer.
- MMOBomb.com – They also have a list of F2P games.
MOBAs (other than LoL and Dota2):
Others
- Path of Exile (in my opinion, the best and fairest F2P MMORPG) – Action RPG, similar to Diablo
- Team Fortress 2 (in my opinion, the fairest F2P MMOFPS, and you can buy the premium account with Steam Trading Cards from 2 games)
- Quake Live (several people have told me this isn’t free anymore.)
- Card Hunter (for those who like board games)
- Pokemon TCG
- Hearthstone (for those who like collectible card games)
More Games:
- SMITE – A MOBA with a 3rd person view (behind the character), has a lot more game modes than pretty much all MOBAs, more newb-friendly (EDIT than some other MOBAs).
- Quake Live – Quake 3 remake, recently released on Steam (after 5 years or so). No longer free.
- Tribes: Ascend – A pretty good Tribes game from the makers of SMITE.
- Sauerbraten – Pretty good shooter for non-competitive uses or when I feel pissed off.
- SNESfun Online SNES emulation.
Sites
Freeware sites
- FileHippo – Freeware downloads
- Ninite – Package your favorite apps in a bundle and use it to install and update apps instantly.
- TechSupportAlert – Freeware recommendations
Other
- Guerilla Mail – Disposable and temporary e-mail adresses. Use these to create your accounts and no more spam in your private e-mail adress.
- PortableApps – Portable apps and PortableApps suite for USBs
- Pixlr – Online image editor (like Photoshop, but very lite). Also includes desktop version.
- LastPass, KeePass – 2 different password managers, LastPass works inside the browser, KeePass has its own program.
Programs
- 7zip – Compression utility with a somewhat minimalist interface, but plenty of features.
- MusicBee – A well-rounded music manager with a wealth of additional features like ripping, normalizing, converting…
- MiniLyrics – Synchronizes lyrics with the music.
- SumatraPDF – Ultra-light and all I need for reading PDFs (Foxit or PDF-XChange are good too and have more features)
- MPC-HC – Like VLC but more lightweight and with a similar set of features.
- Notepad++ Source code editor and Notepad replacement.
- Sublime Text – A sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose. Note that it is a never-ending free trial, but if you can you should consider paying for the service to support the developers.
- Brackets.io Source code editor by Adobe with some Illustrator integration and Live Preview in Chrome.
- EditPadLite – Notepad with just the text editing and not coding language options like Notepad++.
- MalwareBytes Anti-Malware – Pretty much my secondary, on-demand malware scanner alongside my primary, real-time scanner (which is currently Avast, but really any anti-virus program is good)
- F.lux – Utility that warms the colour of your screen and makes it easier to look at (and also has brightness control).
- LibreOffice – Open source MS Office alternative.
- MS Office Viewers – If LibreOffice fails to open MS Office files correctly, this steps in.
- CCleaner – Indispensible for cleaning your computer (just be wary when you delete registry files).
- RevoUninstaller – For clean and thorough uninstalls.
- GIMP – Picture editor similar to Photoshop in functionality.
- Inkscape – Free and open vector graphics editor.
- Blender – Open source, cross platform suite of tools for 3D creation.
- Rufus – Easily create bootable USBs [Windows], burning bootable OS ISOs.
- Google Drive – you’d be surprised how many people don’t know what it is.
Free Music
- Youtube – Of course.
- OCRemix – Video game music remixes and rearrangements.
- Archive.org – An archive for a lot of things, including music and live sets of Grateful Dead, Phish…
- Buckethead – Twisterlend (Pike #39) – Great speed metal 30-minute instrumental album.
- Zelda Reorchestrated
Self-Help/Advice
- 7 Cups of Tea – Free, anonymous, and confidential conversations with trained active listeners. Please don’t spam the site, they offer a great service
- Thrive On – Not completely free, but aims to bring affordable online mental health programs to those who would otherwise go without. Starting next month
- Blah Therapy – Online listening service. “Experience the rewards of venting to a stranger or lending an ear.”
- MoodGYM – Learn cognitive behavior therapy skills for preventing and coping with depression.
Miscellaneous
- Couch Surfing – Free version of AirBnB
Winrar not included? One of the most needed file program these days as more and more files are being compressed into .rar format. It’s completely free and ‘trial pop up’ doesn’t do anything.
Thanks a lot for this! Already started a course. Kickassfacts more and more becomes a unmissable part of my live.