Free Stuff

Software

If you are still buying software, you are wasting money.

Now that Mozilla's Firefox browser has achieved more than 20% market share in most parts of the world, people are slowly cottoning on to the benefits of free software.

Equally good is Mozilla's e-mail application, Thunderbird.

Less well known than Mozilla's internet applications, but a real money saver, is the free and fully-featured office suite, Open Office. It is fully compatible with all major file formats and has just had an upgrade to version 3.0. Millions of people are now using it. You can download it here: http://www.openoffice.org/

According to this article in the Guardian on free and open source software, there are now 150 million people using Open Office:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/12/open-source-apps

The website www.osalt.com is good for finding other free and open source alternatives to commercial software.

Why not switch to Linux?

However, rather than just downloading a few free applications to your existing virus-prone PC, why not install a new, reliable and secure operating system? Computers running Linux don't suffer from viruses. Both Debian and Ubuntu Linux have over 18,000 applications which allow you to do almost anything you could ever want with your computer for free.

I prefer Debian, both for its reliability and rock solid guarantees that it will always remain free. If you get to know Linux a bit better, you will find out that Ubuntu is in fact largely based on Debian.

Debian has definitely had less marketing glitz sprinkled on it than Ubuntu though, so if you are not very technical and/or would like to start using Linux on your own without any guidance, you might possibly be better off starting with Ubuntu. Even Ubuntu requires some learning, but presumably everyone who now uses a computer with a different operating system had to learn how to do so at some point. Most people still haven't learned how to combat viruses properly and that's something you don't have to worry about at all with Linux.

For a good up to date comparison of Ubuntu 9.10 and Windows 7 for normal users, have a look at this article in the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/04/windows-7-ubuntu-910-battle

Installing Linux is now a lot simpler than you might think and there are very detailed instructions available, for example here. Essentially you download a copy of the installation disk and copy it onto a CD (which can be a little bit tricky if you've never done it before), then you put the CD into your computer's disk drive when you switch it on and follow the instructions. If you don't think you can manage to download and copy the CD, Ubuntu will send you a disk for free, though it can take quite a while to arrive:

https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

If you need to buy a new computer, you can buy a computer from the UK supplier Novatech with no operating system for about £50 cheaper, allowing you to install your preferred version of Linux.

You'll be surprised at how simple and secure Linux is to use and if you have been used to paying through the nose for software you'll be truly astonished at the wealth of free applications available.

A lot cheaper than buying a new computer of course, is extending the life of an existing computer by installing Linux on it. A friend of mine has been using Debian Linux very successfully for the last couple of years on a nine year old machine that had been struggling with Windows 98.

Here's a picture of Debian Linux on my laptop (£290 from Novatech). A lot more attractive in my opinion than some of the expensive alternatives:

If you're looking for advice on Linux you could get in touch with your local Linux user group, although there's more than enough information on the internet to get you going, as well as consumer magazines like Linux Format which you can find in all good newsagents (as they used to say):

http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/

All the Linux User Groups in the UK are listed here:

http://lug.org.uk/

Free online software

In addition to free software that you can install on your PC there is now also a wide range of free software that you can use on the web, such as Google docs which is especially good for sharing documents with friends and colleagues and Google Mail which provides a large amount of free e-mail storage space. Zoho also offers a wide range of free online applications: http://www.zoho.com/

FotoFlexer is a very good free, online photo editing application.

You can even sign up for a free "virtual" computer from eyeOS that lives entirely on the web: http://eyeos.info/?lang=en

Whilst online services are no doubt handy for certain things, it's worth considering data privacy and security issues when using them. If, as some people are now starting to suggest, you were to store all your information online and for whatever reason it went missing, you'd have a bit of a problem. Most user agreements for online services give the service provider rights to trawl everything for targeted advertising purposes - a bit like inviting ITV to take a seat in your living room, which might or might not be a good thing...

Streaming music

You can find pretty much any song or piece of music you want on YouTube:

http://uk.youtube.com/

Even some of the big record companies have now taken to posting music videos to YouTube to broaden their audience.

If you register with YouTube you can create playlists to play songs back in the order you want rather than having to search and click every time you play a new track.

Last.fm lets you stream a very wide variety of music and lets you build up a library of your favourite songs if you register and log on. It also recommends other music you might like based on what you have been listening to. You might want to ignore the blandishments to buy CDs and iTunes tracks though:

http://www.last.fm

This article from the Guardian compares various online music streaming services with digital downloads:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/11/digitalmusic-downloads

Free, legal music downloads

There have been some very widely publicised cases of bands releasing albums for free on the web - the best known probably being Radiohead's In Rainbows. Radiohead have said they won't be doing this again, but there are still some other very well known bands making their albums available for free on the web to promote themselves and their gigs, for example Nine Inch Nails:

http://dl.nin.com/theslip/signup

There are also well known classical musicians doing the same thing, for example the violinist Tasmin Little:

http://www.tasminlittle.org.uk/free_cd/index.html

Bandcamp is a site designed to help musicians promote their music on the web and offers free downloads:

http://bandcamp.mu/

Have a look also at:

http://www.last100.com/2007/08/17/10-sites-for-free-legal-music/

Films

Archive.org has over 140,000 films you can download for free. Quite a few of them you'd probably pay not to watch, but there are some watchable old classics in there as well:

http://www.archive.org/details/movies

Archive.org also has hundreds of thousands of audio recordings and texts available for download:

http://www.archive.org/index.php

Record music and video on your computer

Audacity is a free application for Mac, Linux and Windows which records whatever you are listening to on your computer. You can download it here:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Kaffeine (for Linux) will let you record digital TV and radio programs to your hard disk if you have a digital TV card for your computer. See our phone and TV page.

Free e-books

Project Gutenberg has over 100,000 e-books that you can download for free:

http://www.gutenberg.org

Quite a lot (though by no means all) of the e-books on lulu.com can be downloaded for free:

http://www.lulu.com

(Lulu is a company which allows authors to publish in small print runs rather than relying on large publishing houses)

A nice German company, GASL, has made its out of copyright publications available here:

http://www.gasl.org/wordpress/?page_id=67

Unfortunately the site is in German, but the link above is to the latest additions to its catalogue and it's quite clear which of the books are in English. Just click on a link to download a book.

If you click on Alphabetisch A-H, Alphabetisch I-P, Alphabetisch Q-Z you'll see their other titles.

For example, here's a PDF download of Alice in Wonderland from their site.

Newspapers and Feed Readers

Buying a paper newspaper is a non-thrifty habit I haven't given up, partly because I prefer the experience of reading the physical paper, and partly because I think it would be a big cultural loss if paper newspapers were to disappear, just as it would if paper books were to disappear. However, to get a broader range of opinions than from just one paper I enjoy flicking through a whole range of newspapers and blogs using a feed reader. Practically all national newspapers and lots of blogs publish RSS feeds, which allow you to browse through just the constantly updated headlines and only click on the articles which interest you. (Just type RSS and the names of the newspapers into Google and you will find the feed addresses). This is a lot quicker than having to go to a specific newspaper site and navigate to individual articles.

The feed reader I use is Liferea in Linux. There are lots of other feed readers for Linux and other operating systems, including Google Reader. See this Wikimedia comparison:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_feed_aggregators

If you find it a bit confusing, Google has produced a guide to help those who are new to RSS / web feeds:

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2009/01/google-reader-for-beginners.html

There is quite a lot of talk at the moment of newspapers jumping on a Murdoch-inspired bandwagon (as if he doesn't have enough in his piggy bank already...) and trying to charge for online content. I happen to agree with Arianna Huffington that trying to turn the clock back fifteen years, in the process un-inventing Tim Berners-Lee's invention of a free and open network is not a particularly good idea, and that newspapers need to figure out some new ways of making money rather than trying to turn the internet into an expensive patchwork of balkanized, walled gardens:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/11/newspapers-web-media-pay-wall

If my favourite newspaper starts trying to charge for online content, I shall seriously consider whether to carry on forking out every day for its paper edition.

Of course advertisers are spending less at the moment - it's called a recession. Everyone else has to deal with it so why should newspapers be any different.

If newspapers wanted to stop making their content available online for free, they could do just that. Le Canard enchaîné, a well known French satirical magazine has an entertaining and apologetic little message on its website pointing out that they are in the business of publishing a paper magazine and would like to stay that way.

The truth is the large media groups want it all ways. They want to charge for paper editions, attract new readers online, charge advertisers for online and offline advertising and now charge readers for online content too. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending which side of the paywall you're sitting on) that's not an equation that stacks up. If Wall Street Journal readers are willing to pay for online content, I suspect it's because they've got more money than sense, either that or (more likely) their companies are paying for the subscription at everyone else's expense.

Free course materials and educational games

Woodland's Junior School in Kent has links on its website to a huge range of educational resources and games for children, see:

http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/ichild.html

Sheppard Software has lots of free educational games on its website. The geography ones are particularly good fun:

http://www.sheppardsoftware.com

The BBC CBeebies site is probably the best place for games and stories for younger children:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/

The BBC also has an excellent typing tutor for children, Dance Mat Typing:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/typing/

Another excellent free educational site for children is:

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/

Singup is an educational site designed to get kids singing, and has a song bank with all sorts songs sung by school choirs (especially ones that five year olds like to sing over and over again...):

http://www.singup.org/songbank/index.php

Both MIT (one of the best technical universities in the world) and Yale University are making their course materials available for free on the web, see:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm

and

http://oyc.yale.edu/

If you're feeling really adventurous, you could learn Chinese here with free podcasts and Flash video courses:

http://chinesepod.com/

The BBC offers free language courses in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Portuguese and Chinese here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages