Advice: Free Services on Internet Everyone Should Know

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):

• Renegade X
• America’s Army
• No More Room in Hell
• Alien Swarm
• 0 AD
• OpenRA
• Battle for Wesnoth

More Freeware and F2P games

• Simutrans, Open TTD
• Armor Critical
• Supraball
• Black Mesa Source
• Cry of Fear
• Planetside 2
• Duelyst
• Town of Salem

Abandonware

• Abandonia
• MyAbandonware
• Home of the Underdogs

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):

• SMITE
• AirMech
• Strife
• Heroes of the Storm

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