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I donate $5 quarterly to Wikipedia. It’s not much but I figure every bit helps
Your comment made me donate to them for the first time just now. Only $5 but it’s something, I guess.
Kagi.com - excellent search engine. Yes, it shouldn’t be needed, but in this day and age it clearly is. Excellent slop filter, and it let’s you downrank and uprank certain sites in your search results. And I just found out you can see the most popular sites for each category, so it’s fast and easy to see which sites probably are and aren’t worth having in your results at all. It makes internet search feel like it did 20 years ago.
Namecheap.com - It’s where I have my domain names. Mostly because they aren’t godaddy.
EDIT: Forgot to mention hetzner.
Same. Love Kagi. Tried going without for a while, and the difference was stark. Re-upped, and all is now right with my search world.
Names heap also offer to hide your domain owner details from the public for fred
The only streaming service I won’t pirate.
YouTube Premium. No ads and the creators I watch get paid more.
Yes, I’m aware of all the apps out there that give you the Premium perks without actually paying for it. Here’s the thing: the VAST majority of my watching is done on my TV via an Apple TV and I really CBA to go through all the hoops to make any of those apps work with my setup.
I don’t watch any other streaming services and I don’t watch cable / network TV. I’m okay paying for Premium to get the best experience.
I pay for that too but I wouldn’t say I’m HAPPY about paying for it. Because I remember when YouTube used to be free and had no ads.
It’s still free and with no ads if you use Firefox + uBlock Origin on desktop, ReVanced on Android, SmartTube on Android TV.
YouTube is a miserable clunky experience on desktop.
I don’t like it, but YouTube family is by far the most bang for buck for our family in hours watched vs price.
And not having to watch any shitty ass ads on any YouTube client wherever I log in is amazing.
PBS Passport for $5/month is so worth it.
I forgot about this! Admittedly I rarely watch TV so I don’t stream anything but PBS is awesome.
Privacy.com. I pay 10 bucks a month and never have to expose my debit or credit card numbers, I just use virtual ones. Plus, I get about $10 cash back each month, so really, it pays for itself.
My citi credit card used to do this free. Now I can’t find the option anywhere so I assume they killed it.
donations to soma.fm, listener supported free music streaming/internet radio out of San Francisco
My wife finally got me to give up my 20 year old tshirt I had from them. It was more hole than shirt. I should order another.
Ha i just commented SomaFM because Thistle Radio was on during a stressful part of a long drive and it was soon good.
I played Dragon Age:Origin with Symphaera in the background instead of the game music
Yeah most of the stations are pretty good even if it’s not my usual genres and I’ll skip around, but Groove salad and defcon are my usuals, i like beat blender for an alarm and mission control for background music while working.
Mission Control is so much fun
Kagi Search, it’s such a small thing but it radically de-sloppifies your browsing experience
Email.
As someone who has been self hosting some stuff and generally aspires to work in IT, it is simply unfeasible to expect services like this for free
Would it cost me less to host such a server divided by x users? Yes
Do I have x users I can sustainably service without burning out? No.
So its either a managed server for like 15€ per month + a bunch of work or a paid email provider, in my case fastmail.
What does paid email offer over all the free options?
Email addresses, masked email addresses, folders and email rules for where to put Them, storage, etc
Proton - the whole suite. I use it all.
crabshack.ai - an easier, better version of openclaw/ personal ai agent.
Hetzner VPS and their Storage Box, that is, managed Nextcloud instance.
Mailbox.org email service.
Ultimate Guitar. I got a lifetime membership for like 30 bucks over a decade ago and I use that shit all the time. Their pro-tabs are awesome.
Damn. Looks like they ended the lifetime sub in 2018. I just picked up my guitar for the first time in probably 15 years after retrieving it from my parents’ basement. I remembered U-G pro tabs but it seemed so much more pervasive than before. But kinda seemed worth it. Idk about 30/yr at this time. I quickly remembered why my interest faded: my go-to music doesn’t sound great on a single guitar.
Funny sequence, though. I was trying to find tabs for current interests. My recent stream has had more Slipknot than 2010. I’m used to lots of Drop-D tuning and don’t enjoy adjusting. Turns out, between either Duality or Before I Forget and then The Devil In I, I got to enjoy detuning to Drop C and then Drop B. Didn’t even know those existed. 5 strings 5 frets lower and 1 string down 7.
30 bucks a year seems a bit steep, I don’t know if it’d be worth it at that point over buying a tab book every now and then, or just using the free version. They still have a ton of great and accurate tabs and you can build your own library if you setup a free account.
I can see Slipknot sounding a bit incomplete on just guitar. Zoom makes some good multi effect processor pedals that can sample and do drum loops, but that gets a bit technical and sort of a whole thing in and of itself, I have a great time fucking around with mine, though. Not sure what your metal tastes are, but if you’re into any doom or sludge that stuff translates well to just guitar practice and playing, a lot of three piece bands with heavy guitar emphasis. Wizard Fight by Weedeater is a quick and fun song to learn, if you’re looking for something simple and heavy to get back into things with.
Also, C standard is king.
Thanks, that song has my attention. I think I’ve been somewhere in the doom or sludge genre with Heriot and Faetooth but the definitions are fuzzy around here. Some Mastodon songs seem to have persistent guitar so I was headed there next. Colony of Birchman, probably. I’ll have to see how long this interest phase. Metal is forever, but playing might be a phase.
Ooo, feel like selling me on it?
Whether you’re just starting or you’re a master shredder, there’s something for you. I haven’t used any of their lessons, as I found them after I’d been playing for a long time, so I can’t attest to the lessons themselves, but going through their options they have a lot of lessons for learning scales and practice exercises, and can build your own library of tabs and lessons so you don’t have to search for the same song over and over while learning or refreshing on it. A lot of the features are free, so even without the membership it’s still a great resource for any guitar player.
For me, the meat and potatoes is in the tabs library and the pro tabs option that you get with a membership. It lays out the full song in bar format and you can have it play a midi tone version of the song from what’s in the tabs so you can hear the notes and watch the tracker to know exactly where that tone is supposed to land with proper timing. It helps so much more than straight tabs, as you can see and hear where and how the sound structure comes together for things that are hard to translate when you’re just looking at numbers on a page trying to figure how to play those with proper timing and placement, especially for complex things where it’s a million notes in a cluster with nothing to translate timing.
Like any community tabs archive, not everything is always a correct tablature, but the selection is better than everything else I’ve dug into. I’m not sure what the monthly is, but I see the same lifetime deal I got pop up from time to time.
Hell yeah, thanks!
Happy shredding!
picks furiously at a Taylor GS Mini
I don’t think this is shredding :(
Haha nah I’m an ancient metalhead, put the ol axe down many years ago, but now the lil one suddenly wants to learn. Thing you shared is gonna do us a real treat, just the thing we needed!
(Sidenote, this little Taylor is exactly the thing for this, what a lovely little instrument)
That’s fuckin’ awesome! Tell them I think they’re rad.
START WITH SCALE LESSONS FIRST!!! I can’t stress that enough. I wish I had had someone to teach me when I was first learning that stressed the importance of learning scales, once you have a scale down, or even just a phrase of one, learning a song on it comes so much more easily and efficiently since you have the roadmap of it.
A seedbox
This. €6,95/mo and mine has rutorrent set so you can associate magnet links, so I click a magnet link in my browser and it gets sent to the box. It also has Emby on it, so I don’t have to download, I can stream right from the box.
Steam games/Valve.
I dont know if this counts/its a hot take.
It really depends on the game tbh(some regret some dont)
I appreciate their work on Proton.
And Steam is the only website I can really buy video games from.I give monthly to my Mastodon instance.
