As a Public Service . . .

I present what I consider to be a treasure trove of information that almost anybody can find something in that's useful.


What are the most productive ways to spend time on the Internet?

• Documentary Heaven- Literally hundreds of streaming documentaries, all arranged by topic. All free. (/u/drake_diablo)
• Foreign Service Institute - language courses developed by the Foreign Service Institute. These courses were developed by the United States government and are in the public domain. (/u/SourMilk)
• Free Section of Craigslist - You can find a lot of cool stuff if you go to the free section of craigslist. The original poster's friend recently got a fully functional dentist's chair for his room that automatically adjusts to any position. (/u/tornato7)
• Any Song You Want Not In A Torrent- I'll just link the comment, I'm not sure how to summarize this. (/u/pizzarox2)
• Project Gutenberg- Project Gutenberg's books are often taught in all shorts of literature classes, get em for free when you can (/u/atomicheartmother)
• Google Drive - you'd be surprised how many people don't know what it is (/u/ryantyrant)
• Retail Me Not - Search for coupon codes before buying anything online. (/u/etak1980 and/u/BigBad_BigBad)
• Duolingo - a great site that teaches you foreign languages for free. No idea how they make a profit, but there yah go. If Duolingo can't satisfy that need. LiveMocha looks like a promising site, though I haven't had a chance to try it out. (/u/iKickComputers)
• Project Free TV - Pretty much a project for free TV, I believe. 1channel is also pretty darn excellent. (/u/Boob_Inspector and /u/Giblet_McGravy) EDIT: DO NOT USE 1CHANNEL, USE LetMeWatchThis - Watch Movies Online Free - Just Added
• SNES Box or NES Box, two great emulators to play games from Super Nintendo and Classic Nintendo respectively online. (/u/shifty1032231)

All the below is by /u/Fletch71011-

• No Excuse List - Includes sources for everything you can want. I included some more popular ones with brief write-ups below. Credit to /u/lix2333.
• Reddit Resources - Reddit's List of the best online education sources
• 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.
• 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.

Back to sane mode.

• Ninite - Something I myself can personally recommend, its a safe download site with no toolbars and malware. Any software you need will be there, and I have discovered a lot of software there. (DELETED)
• Free Electronic Component Samples from Texas Instruments - OP just had a $15 voltage regulator delivered for free. You need to create a free account, and then you get something like four free samples a month. This is incredibly useful for some harder to find parts. Plus they're good quality, as far as I know, and they ship fast using FedEx. (/u/LXL15)
• The First Row - semi ILLEGAL site to watch sports events, proceed at your own risk. Many sports events are available there. (DELETED)
• Pixlr Editor - Basic picture editor that will irritate people using Photoshop, but its easy and free, and if I'm using a crappy computer without any software (like I am now) I'd go there. (/u/xCry0x)
• Mint- 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. (/u/icyliquid)