a list of free stuff on the net

I ventured down to the farside of Brisbane yesterday, for another eye examination. I normally take public transport and look forward to spending the day reading and listening to music, talks, and audiobooks. However this time my wonderful sister, Sue, drove me there and back so I didn't need to worry about finding my way around unfamiliar transport services with dilated pupils and blurry, washed out vision on the return journey and I had fun chatting with her and my niece Sophie during the journey.

At the Visual Electro-Diagnostic Clinic my eyes were examined by a very cool guy. (Hi Tim.) We had a great conversation on wide-ranging topics and I found that he (like most people) was unaware of much of the range of superb stuff available on the net for free. I told him I'd email him some info, but realised this information would interest a lot of people so I decided to post it here instead. I'll only give sites that are within the hopelessly antiquated laws and won't mention the fantastic world of peer-to-peer sharing networks just yet... maybe later.

I've added the explicit links instead of linking the names in case some people still use paper.

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Books

Okay. Let's start with books. There are oodles of places that you can get free, open ebooks from the net. Some of my favorites are:

Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org

(I tend to skip the main page and go straight to the catalog at http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/ ). Project Gutenberg is an enormous online library of free books (30,000 so far). Most are old books that are out of copyright, laboriously scanned, converted to text by OCR (Optical Character Recognition), and proofread by thousands of volunteers, but new books are beginning to be added that use the CreativeCommons license or are even released into the public domain.

Gutenberg Australia http://gutenberg.net.au

the draconian laws spearheaded by Hollywood and the music industry in USA have severely limited the culture that can be made available in that country. Australia has similarly awful laws, but not quite as bad, so we have access to much more. If you like Science Fiction (I do) then check out the SF collection at http://gutenberg.net.au/sfproject.html

The Internet Archive http://www.archive.org

has two main aspects: their enormous library of texts, videos, and audio, all freely downloadable, and the WaybackMachine http://www.archive.org/web/web.php (which is also accessible from their front page). The WaybackMachine is a searchable archive of webpages stretching back to 1996. You know when you click a link and you get a message that the site or page no longer exists? Or you find a page that is not what used to be there? With the WaybackMachine you stand a good chance of being able to access the old, non-existent page. I used this a few years ago when the Queensland Government decided to lie about the economics of alternative energy by putting out bogus figures and pulling the results of their own expensive study that contradicted them. Using the WaybackMachine I found the original page and republished it here.

Librivox http://librivox.org

free audiobooks. Many (all?) are actually stored on the InternetArchive.

EscapePod http://escapepod.org

science fiction short stories as freely downloadable audio.

Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org

Everybody knows this one. It is a cooperative effort by hundreds of thousands of people creating the greatest encyclopedia that ever existed, and it is free. But not many people know about its sister projects:

• Wikibooks http://www.wikibooks.org
  which makes free books available. It differs from the Gutenberg Project in that these books are mostly recent non-fiction books, often written specifically for this project. Generally they concentrate on the sciences and technology, but there are some others, like cookbooks.
• Wikiversity http://www.wikiversity.org
  courseware (from junior to advanced adult) that can be used by anybody in the world for zero cost.
• Wikispecies http://species.wikimedia.org
  is a recently begun catalogue of the world's lifeforms.
• Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org
  is a searchable storehouse of mostly images, but also sounds and videos.
• Wikinews http://www.wikinews.org
  if you feel that you can't trust the TV, radio, and newspapers anymore. I am still wary of information at Wikinews, but feel it at least is able to present more viewpoints than the standard, heavily filtered and increasingly propaganda-laden news sources.
• Wiktionary http://www.wiktionary.org
  is a free, multi-lingual dictionary (I haven't used this as I prefer a tiny free program called dict that looks up a whole slew of online dictionaries for me).
• Wikiquote http://www.wikiquote.org
  is a gigantic collection of quotations.
• Wikisource http://www.wikisource.org
  is similar to Project Gutenberg in that it is basically a library of books, but it differs in that most are non-fiction (though the many political speeches there might qualify as fiction) and many (most?) are contemporary.

Baen Books http://www.baen.com

have learned that making available some free, unlocked ebooks helps sell books.

Cory Doctorow http://craphound.com

releases all his books online for free. He has found that doing so boosts sales of his paper books and has given him an enthusiastic and grateful following.

The Linux Documentation Project http://tldp.org

has an extensive collection of Linux documents, including books, manuals, HowTos, guides, and more. All freely downloadable of course.

Many books are not part of huge collections, but are made available by individuals. Here are some interesting ones I've encountered:

Philip and Alex's Guide To Web Publishing http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/

Philip Greenspun created this very sensible guide to writing for the web. I love the cover photo.

The Cell http://cellimages.ascb.org/cdm4/FawcettTheCell.html

cell microbiology

Free Culture http://free-culture.org/freecontent/

by Lawrence Lessig. An examination of the craziness surrounding copyright, its history, and the reversal of its original aims.

Open Sources http://oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html

The open source movement as described by some of its more notable proponents.

God's Debris http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/godsdebris/

This mischievous little book is not religious or atheist. It has a fictional storyline that poses a series of neat brainteasers that make you question much that people take for granted. Most of it is genuine thought-experiment, but some is intended as a bit of a joke, which is to be expected, considering it is written by the creator of the Dilbert comic strips, Scott Adams.

Why Won't God Heal Amputees? http://whydoesgodhateamputees.com

Why religion doesn't make sense.

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Scripts

I like to read good scripts -- movie scripts and TV scripts. There are a few sites out there that host scripts. My two favorites are:

Scripts For You http://sfy.ru

The Daily Script http://dailyscript.com

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Comics

There are thousands of online comics out there. Here are a few of the ones that interest me:

Girl Genius http://www.girlgeniusonline.com

an award-winning online comicbook series. Giving it away for free seems to boost its online sales.

Journals of Adelaide Pell http://www.glassgrapes.com/adpel.html

only available online for free as far as I know.

Questionable Content http://www.questionablecontent.net

another free online comicbook.

Fate's Bitch http://www.drunkduck.com/Fates_Bitch

began only recently.

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Interactive Fiction

Interactive fiction stories, or text adventures, are like those old "choose your own adventure" books. You can find thousands of them available for free download. This is far from a dead artform though, as new stories are still written by enthusiasts.

The Interactive Fiction Archive http://www.ifarchive.org

An enormous repository of files, with several mirrors around the world.

Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive http://wurb.com/if/

makes a search engine available for finding stories that you might enjoy

Gargoyle http://ccxvii.net/gargoyle/

to play the stories you need a program that will run them. As there are several formats, you could either use a different program for each type, or use Gargoyle which lets you run most of the common formats. Program and source for Linux and MSWindows can be downloaded from GoogleCode at http://code.google.com/p/garglk/

There is another variant of interactive fiction that uses pictures as well as words. My favorite form of this is called Ren'Ai (Japanese for "romance").

The Ren'Ai Archive http://renai.us

about 122 graphical stories for free download, and more coming all the time.

RenPy http://renpy.org

the free software used to play other people's stories and to create your own

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Talks

I listen to a lot of uplifting and informative talks. Everybody knows about YouTube, but some of the coolest sites are less well known:

TED Talks http://www.ted.com

truly inspirational talks. The only gripe I have with this site is that the videos start running as soon as you open a talk's page. I grab the download address as quickly as possible and close the page so I can use a more reliable program (wget) to download the video for me. Web browsers tend to get stuck when using a slow net connection.

IT Conversations http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org

these are mostly audio talks to do with the internet or computing, but not always. Moira Gunn's interviews, in particular, are very wide ranging in topic.

Social Innovations Conversations http://sic.conversationsnetwork.org

These are audio talks about making the world a better place. Wonderful stuff!

Radio National Australia http://www.abc.net.au/rn/programs.htm

pretty-much its entire program of radio broadcasts is available online for free download. Many only remain online for a month, but gradually more are being permanently archived for download. My favorites are The Science Show, All In The Mind, The Philosopher's Zone, Lingua Franca, Big Ideas, Background Briefing.

Silicon Valley Astronomy podcasts http://www.astrosociety.org/education/podcast

lots of amazing speakers talking on mind-boggling topics.

FORA.tv http://fora.tv

a very wide range of topics. You need to register, but it doesn't cost anything.

WGBH http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh

some very inspirational talks here. Unfortunately, their "tricky" webpage styles makes for unreliable pages, and their overuse of flash slows my computer to a crawl.

NASA http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting

makes a lot of amazing audio and video available for free download on the net.

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Software

You are using a computer so it would be nice to be able to get free software for it. The good news is that if you are running Linux then most software will be free. If you are running Microsoft Windows then less will be free but there will still be a sizeable amount of free programs out there. If you use a Mac, then it used to be the case that you nearly always had to pay through the nose for software, however with the advent of OSX (really a version of Unix) Macs can use a lot of stuff written for Linux.

There are many places to get free software. Two of my favorites are:

Sourceforge https://sourceforge.net

astonishing site. People are starting up more projects there all the time.

GoogleCode http://code.google.com/hosting/

I think the guys at Google looked at SourceForge and thought perhaps they could do better, but there are more than enough cool, free projects to go around.

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And you will want an operating system. What about a free one?

Puppy Linux http://www.puppylinux.com
A very nice, fast, small operating system. At around 100MB it is tiny compared to most modern operating systems, and it runs very fast. That speed coupled with its lightweight requirements makes it a great candidate for older, slower computers. But even if you own a fast, new machine, putting Puppy Linux on it means it will run much faster than one of the bigger operating systems that has everything including the kitchen sink. And, like other versions of Linux, Puppy is free.