• ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world
    941·
    26 days ago

    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.

    • Mist101@lemmy.world
      14·
      26 days ago

      The library of things is also something many public libraries have now. Not just media, but tools, power tools, cooking pans and equipment, pod casting equipment. Definitely worth a look.

    • Jtee@lemmy.world
      10·
      26 days ago

      Our library does audio books, 3d printer, sound recording (like a small studio), and passes to provincial parks. Some can offer a lot!

    • grasshopper_mouse@lemmy.worldOP
      10·
      26 days ago

      I moved to a new town in 2022 and I STILL haven’t been to the local library. I need to get on that. I went to libraries so much as a child and in my teens.

      • kassiopaea@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        16·
        26 days ago

        Jellyfin Is completely open source, fully self-hosted, and free. With Plex the software still has to phone home to a central server for authentication and some features are locked behind a paywall.

        No streaming software is going to find movies for you (without paying for content they’ve licensed) because that would be a sure fire way to get the project taken down for copyright violation.

      • BlackAura@lemmy.world
        6·
        25 days ago

        Since no one really answered you, there are generally two routes.

        If you use newsgroups you can run sabnzbd, which is a service that downloads from newsgroups. I’ve been out of the loop for a while but there used to be something like CouchPotato for movies or SickBeard for TV (which migrated to SickChill, though you shouldn’t use that anymore as it installed a crypto miner last I heard). Lastly you sign up with a news indexer (look up Nzb.su or nzbgeek.info). CouchPotato could be linked to your imdb watch list.

        Plug all of those together with API keys, and now movies on your imdb watch list just show up in your plex library as they become available.

        Now if you use Torrents instead of newsgroups, there are similar things that all exist, I’m just less familiar with them.

        • some_designer_dude@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          25 days ago

          Ah, interesting. I’m actually only (barely) familiar with torrents, insofar as I have downloaded qBitTorrent and enabled its embedded search. I search for thing, sort by most seeds, and choose first relevant one. Usually it all goes well. Plex on my Mac watches the downloads folder, and the TV has Plex installed.

          It works, but at least from my limited view of its search results, the seas seem to be drying up. I feel like there are better, non-default searches I could be adding. There was some kind of Jacket plugin that refused to load so it’s just disabled.

          Am a very inept pirate 🏴‍☠️

  • masterspace@lemmy.caEnglish
    473·
    25 days ago

    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

    • Libra00@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      26 days ago

      Good call on that one, calibre is one of my favorite pieces of software. I, uh, acquire ebooks through creative means and use calibre as both an ebook catalog and format converter to then load them onto my kindle.

      • mesamunefire@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        26 days ago

        I try to support publishers that give you the full ebooks like baen library.

        Calibre helped me back up my entire amazon library in a way my kobo can now read instead of just kindle. Both are excellent devices, but I wanted a backlight after 7+ years with the same ebook reader. And I’m not about to purchase all those books aain for the privilege of using the kobo bookstore. Plus Calibre makes it so no matter what you get (pdf/ebook/proprietary format) you can get a good old fashion ebook format for future preservation.

  • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    23·
    26 days ago

    Your neighbor’s trash. It’s stunning what I find and fix, refurbish, repurpose or sell. Had a friend that used to cruise her hood on trash day, her and her husband would load the truck, sell it back to 'em on a Saturday garage sale. 12-14 hours biweekly work, ~$400 every other weekend.

    My wife’s friends dumpster dive at Walmart, though I question how that’s possible. Most big box stores make that impossible. Dunno. In any case, it’s wild what these stores chunk out. If Lowe’s would let me, I’d haul home a pickup full every week.

    • Glitterbomb@lemmy.world
      9·
      26 days ago

      People think I’m some sort of TV repair wizard but it’s very easy to fix up dumpster TVs if you have a little patience and space. Broken TVs fall into two categories - broken screen or broken board (doesn’t turn on, error screens, flickering). Stick to more popular models and when you find a broken screen, take the board and note the model. When you find a broken board of the same model, just swap it. It usually really is that easy. You can work in the opposite direction too and collect good screens waiting for good boards, but that starts to take up a lot of space quick because you’re storing whole TVs at that point.

      You will also inexplicably find a fully working 55" TV sitting at the dumpster 10% of the time.

      • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        24 days ago

        My 55" was thrown out by a neighbor, power issues. $8 in eBay capacitors fixed it, but I did something wrong and shorted it while hanging, lost the magic smoke.

        Fine. For $60 I got a new board off eBay. Still have a unit in my bedroom waiting to fix.

    • mysticpickle@lemmy.ca
      4·
      24 days ago

      On that note, never bring back mattresses, anything upholstered, or anything else that has a lot of unsealed cracks/gaps. Way too big a risk of introducing bed bugs into your home.

      So many people just dump seemingly nice mattresses/sofas etc. out on the curb. They’re obviously not going to label these things as infested with bed bugs for a scavenger’s benefit and alert the whole neighborhood to their shame. Do not take these items. It is not worth the potential nightmare you’re setting yourself up for.

      • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        24 days ago

        I have a pro tip for mattresses! Thrown it down in your driveway, take a box knife and strip it to the bare metal springs. Boom! You now have a plant trellis. First try only took me 20 minutes.

        Saw a posh resale store that took twin mattress springs, sprayed ‘em black, hung vertically and spaced 2’ apart over a standing flower bed. Now sure what the plant was but it sure looked cool.

        Trying it for the first time this year on the ferns and blackberries on the side of the house. Already have a solid start!

  • traches@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    23·
    26 days ago

    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

    • ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world
      12·
      26 days ago

      Gonna take this as a jumping off point to mention some software.

      Wanna get into video editing? Shotcut’s pretty solid in my experience.
      Into mind-mapping stuff? You might give Freeplane a look.
      Have a drawing tablet & want to use it to take handwritten digital notes? Check out Xournal++.
      Cross-platform Notepad++ alternative? Might give CudaText a try.

      Could list off more but will leave it at a few for now.

      • Flagstaff@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        26 days ago

        Dang, I wish I knew about Freeplane years ago. Thanks!! I’m also entrenched in Kdenlive but I wonder if Shotcut has a better UI…

    • Flagstaff@programming.devEnglish
      1·
      26 days ago

      I don’t have a fave distro because I must back up my PC’s stuff first. I plan to try Bazzite, due to issues I’ve heard that my laptop has with Mint…

  • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
    231·
    26 days ago

    LMMS - free and open source garage band. It’s a little weird on how you do a song, but it’s pretty great.

    Tips: Look at Beats and Baselines Editor and Piano Roll Editor first to probably get you where you want to be.

      • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
        3·
        26 days ago

        Wow, this thread came to me with perfect timing. I love LMMS and I’ll try out this plugins on Monday, thanks.

        I’m currently going through this thread and found 3 other sites that are amazing and solved some project issues I was having.

        • anon6789@lemmy.world
          3·
          26 days ago

          Oh, glad to help! Any other music tools you’re looking for? I’m not good with any of them, but I like testing them out. I’m still just learning and experimenting.

          I get a little sad when I don’t see anything new for me on threads like this, but then I’m a bit grateful since that means I’ve already spent a long time enjoying all these things!

          • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
            3·
            26 days ago

            I’ve been playing with it since my last comment. I just installed 8 plugins. There are 3 that are so freaking good.

            My only wish is there was a way to make a song like in Garage band, where you can overlap the instruments and loops more easily. I think it’s there, but I’m just not good enough at it yet. When I play with the piano, I get a really good sounding melody, but then it’s gone.

            • anon6789@lemmy.world
              3·
              26 days ago

              Like in this video?

              I haven’t used LMMS in a long time, but he’s manually editing the piano roll (where the notes are stored) but I see a record button here where it should record what you play on the keyboard.

              • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
                3·
                26 days ago

                Sort of, I found that portion. Here is my workflow in Garage Band.

                • Pick loop and sound speed (has a ticker before it starts), and place on timeline
                • Add instruments and play with melodies from a keyboard plugged in and record them.
                • Use the melody.
                • Record some vocals
                • Add more layers of sounds or loops
                • Create file

                This takes about 4 hours to make an opening song that I usually love.

                In LMMS

                • I can find some loops, but they seem to really point towards making your own, or maybe there are some loop vaults somewhere I could use?
                • I found some amazing instruments on the plugins4free site, but recording them with a keyboard seems hard somehow.
                • I have the studio (paid) version of Davinci Resolve, I guess I could just switch over there once I’ve made my loops?

                The rest seems easy and I like the set up.

                • anon6789@lemmy.world
                  3·
                  25 days ago

                  Gotcha, now I have a better idea of what you’re trying to do.

                  Watching this video about looping in LMMS shows it can sorta be done, sometimes with some help from Audacity.

                  If you’re adding in more stuff like VST plugins and vocals, you may want to try out Waveform Free, which I checked is for iOS also, so you get a full modern DAW. It’s the same product as their paid full version, just like 2 updates behind.

                  For more premade loops, check out Looperman if you haven’t already.

                  It’s not free, but I think I under $20 for the program and all the upgrades, if looping and sampling is something you want to focus on, check out Koala Sampler. I downloaded it the other week and have been sampling vinyl recordings from YouTube, it has an AI stem extractor to separate the instrument tracks, and then chopping and looping that.

                  It has a built in simple synth now as well, and you can use a midi controller with it. Lots of videos are out there if you want to see how that works. You might be able to incorporate that into your setup.

  • rational_lib@lemmy.world
    21·
    25 days ago

    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

  • thermal_shock@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    26 days ago

    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.