Ask Lemmy

CBC Gem, which is our country's public news corporation's streaming service which is a catalog of Canadian television. There's also CBC Music which is the radio app, and you can even listen to the live streams of the Metropolitan Opera on Saturdays.

Syncthing.

Connect any two devices' folders together wirelessly, from anywhere.

Don't have a server? You don't need one. Every device is an individual node.

Backup? If you do have a server, offload some of your content and keep on rolling, or set scripts to move files by age.

Libraries. Most even rent video games, power tools, audio/video hardware, baking utensils...SO MUCH STUFF. All free.

In terms of fully free, obligatory mention:
Your library may offer more than books alone, depending on how well supported they are. Borrow music, movies, sometimes even video games. For music and movies they may also offer these to borrow digitally as well via online services they coordinate with.

Making sure to keep it legal, right?

Let's stick with Project Gutenberg - Public domain ebooks and other media, spanning centuries. They're incredibly important for keeping our literary past alive.

I might have more later.

LibreOffice

Free Office Suite which is excellent for personal use. If you are on mobile Collabora Office if you want an Android/iOS version

Porn

I’m surprised no one has mentioned it yet:

Jellyfin

With just a cheap computer you can have your own Netflix and Spotify.

Closing your eyes, slowly taking a deep breath, and calmly, breathing in, and breathing out, while focusing on the sensations in your body, and how much more relaxed you're feeling right now

i.e. meditation

VLC Media Player

https://www.videolan.org/

I love how chill and helpful everyone is here.

AntennaPod for podcasts

It's great, customizable, I sent a suggestion to the volunteer development team, and they made it happen.

https://fmhy.net/

freemediaheckyeah

The largest collection of free stuff on the internet!

The cats and dogs out in the street are free. You can just bring a friend home. /hj

Pi hole

https://pi-hole.net/

https://rentry.co/megathread

Pretty useful.. when one site fails the other usually work.

In most eu countries the law requires businesses that give out food to also allow you to order free tap water. If youre in a city and dont want to spend money on a bottle of water, walk into mcdonalds and ask for free tap water. A lot of european countries also have strict laws about tap water so for example in france unless otherwise indicated with a warning, tap water is always potable.

https://calibre-ebook.com/

Own your own ebooks. Make sure all devices work with whatever format you need.

A little late but OpenTaxSolver - free desktop tax software that gives you a printout of tax forms that you can mail in. And it includes a few states too. Way easier than the annoying corporate sites that constantly log you out and charge a fee for every little thing.

Edit: To my non-American friends, you don't need to worry about this

Learn a little docker and start self hosting stuff! Pihole is a great one to start with, but there are lots of other awesome projects out there:

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

Your local city college may or may not offer free classes (in San Francisco, you just need to show proof that you live in the city with some legal status).

Some public transportation is free for certain groups (youth and folks experiencing homelessness can get free passes here).

"First X of the month" at the zoo/a museum/whatever

lots of venues have free events.

A jog, bike ride, hike

lots of great stuff outside!

Hugs

lichess.org is a fantastic online chess platform for players of all skill levels. it's free and---what's more--it's ad-free (unlike the parasitic organisation that's squatting on the chess.com domain).

it has one-on-one on-demand match-ups, tournaments, puzzles, user-published training courses, multiple chess variants, and so much more.

it's one of only two online resources to which i deem donating regularly worthwhile (the other being wikipedia).

do check it out. chess is one really healthy mental habit to inculcate.

I know lemmy is social media for people with a favorite Linux distro so I’m preaching to the choir here, but so much software is free as in speech it is truly wonderful. It’s like the only thing I love about being a millennial

What3words.com and app

Basically the earth has been segragated into 10 foot x 10 foot squares that are easily identified by 3 words, super accurate, easy to tell emergency services. No more need to know lat/long to tell someone where you're at.