If nothing else, the Internet is good for getting free stuff. Free services, free entertainment, free products.
Hey, free is good!
Folks on AskReddit offered their tips about the free stuff you shouldn’t miss out on…
Be sure to read all the way to the end. The last entry has a ton of good tips!
1. Always helpful.
“You can find a lot of cool stuff if you go to the free section of Craigslist. My friend recently got a fully functional dentist’s chair for his room that automatically adjusts to any position. Once there was a nice car for free but we were too late.
Mostly you’ll find sofas and stuff but sometimes you get really lucky.”
2. Get organized.
“Calibre. If you read a lot, it is marvelous at organizing your ebook library. And you can get the news delivered wirelessly to your ereader/tablet.”
3. Language lessons.
“Duolingo is a great site that teaches you foreign languages for free. No idea how they make a profit, but there yah go.”
4. For your peepers.
“Coastal.com= free pair of glasses for first time use.”
5. Give it a shot.
“http://ninite.com/
Super useful tool to load all your programs when setting up a new system/ after reinstalling.”
6. That’s good to know.
“Documentaryheaven.com.
Literally hundreds of streaming documentaries, all arranged by topic. All free.”
7. Okay, sports fans.
“Ror sports fans, http://www.thefirstrow.eu has live streaming of pretty much all sporting events.”
8. Get your finances in order.
“Mint.com – get your finances firmly under control. Downloads and categorizes transactions from your Debit and Credit accounts, and even tracks Mortgages and Car Loans. It allows you to set budgets for expenditures of certain types and then tracks those on a month-to-month basis and will nag you when you’re spending too much on something.”
9. That’s pretty cool.
“FreeRice.com
FreeRice is a website that is rather unique in what it does. The main concept behind FreeRice is pretty simple, you play a game where you need to guess the right answer. For each right answer, the site donates 20 grains of rice through the UN World Food Program to help end hunger.
You can choose Art, English, Chemistry, Geography, Language learning and Math. You can change your subject at any time and still keep your grains with you! All questions are multiple choice with only one correct answer. So by answering questions correctly you feed hungry people and at the same time improve your vocabulary.”
10. For the tech-savvy.
“Handbrake. Converts video files and you can also rip them from DVDs.”
11. Higher learning.
“Coursera. Tons of classes free online from big Universities. Not useless classes either.”
12. Time to fix it.
“iFixit has tons of free repair guides and troubleshooting tips for electronics (and other stuff as well). Best DIY repair source on the planet, if you ask me.”
13. Check your credit.
“Free Annual Credit Reports from all three major bureaus at AnnualCreditReport.com with no strings attached.
I know the site looks cheesy and like a potential scam. It isn’t. Federal Law mandates that all credit reporting agencies must supply consumers with a free copy of their credit report once a year upon request. You can read about it on the FTC site here.
I have used this service several times without any problems. The only downside is that if you want your actual credit score, the bureaus will charge you for it.”
14. Game on!
“Virtual NES.
Lots of Nintendo Entertainment System games organized alphabetically.
There is also virtual SNES, and GBX.”
15. Get smart!
Khan Academy – Educational organization and a website created by Bangladeshi-American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. The website supplies a free online collection of micro lectures stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics, microeconomics, and computer science.
Ted Talks – Talks that address a wide range of topics (“ideas worth spreading”) within the research and practice of science and culture, often through storytelling. Many famous academics have given talks, and they are usually short and easy to digest.
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.
Wolfram Alpha – Online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine might. Unbelievable what this thing can compute; you can ask it near anything and find an answer.
Udacity – Outgrowth of free computer science classes offered in 2011 through Stanford University. Plans to offer more, but concentrated on computer science for now.
MIT OpenCourseWare – 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.
Open Yale Courses – Provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.
Codecademy – Online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in programming languages like Python, JavaScript, and Ruby, as well as markup languages including HTML and CSS. Gives your points and “level ups” like a video game, which is why I enjoyed doing classes here. Not lecture-oriented either; usually just jump right into coding, which works best for those that have trouble paying attention.
Team Treehouse – Alternative to Codecademy which has video tutorials. EDIT: Been brought to my attention that Team Treehouse is not free, but I included it due to many comments. Nick Pettit, teaching team lead at Treehouse, created a 50% off discount code for redditors. Simply use ‘REDDIT50’. Karma goes to Mr. Pettit if you enjoyed or used this.
Think Tutorial – Database of simple, easy to follow tutorials covering all aspects of popular computing. Includes lots of easier, basic tasks for your every day questions or new users.
Duolingo – For all of your language learning needs.
Memrise – Online learning tool that uses flashcards augmented with mnemonics—partly gathered through crowdsourcing—and the spacing effect to boost the speed and ease of learning. Several languages available to learn.
Livemocha – Commercial online language learning community boasting 12 million members which provides instructional materials in 38 languages and a platform for speakers to interact with and help each other learn new languages.
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.
Education portal – Free courses which allow you to pass exams to earn real college credit.
uReddit – Made by Redditors for other Redditors. Tons of different topics, varying from things like science and art to Starcraft strategy.
iTunes U – Podcasts from a variety of places including universities and colleges on various subjects.
Stack Exchange – Group of question and answer websites on topics in many different fields, each website covering a specific topic, where questions, answers, and users are subject to a reputation award process. Stack Overflow is used for programming, probably their most famous topic. Self-moderated with reputation similar to Reddit.
Wikipedia – Collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia. Much better source than most people give it credit for, and great for random learning whenever you need it. For those looking for more legit sources for papers and such, it is usually easy to jump to a Wikipedia page and grab some sources at the bottom.”
Man…number 15 FTW! There are soooo many things!
Which one do you think you’ll do soon? Let us know in the comments