The Best Things In Life Are Free

I find myself sending out the same emails time after time so I figured I may as well as put a summary of those things in one place. So - here goes my list of the best free things out there.

Free Culture
Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons, Cory Doctorow, EFF. Very interesting stuff. It is all about sharing and promoting a culture where we can take each others knowledge and works and build on them. For quick introduction to what Larry Lessig and Cory Doctorow are all about, just search for their names on ITConversations and download a few of their presentations. The work these guys are doing is great and we will all benefit from it. They also practice what they preach. Both are authors and both have their books available as a free download.

Free Software
Ubuntu, Firefox, VMWare Player, SourceForge. It is unbelieveable that you can download an ISO image, burn the CD and then boot right into an OS without an install. The Ubuntu Live CD comes with OpenOffice to handle all MS Office document and FireFox for all your browsing needs. Pretty cool. Alternatively, if you want to still be able to run Windows but have Linux too, you can run Linux inside the free VMWare Player. Just download the preconfigured Browser Appliance. This is a Ubuntu Distribution already configured to run inside a VMWare Virtual Machine. When you start to look at some of this stuff and realize how powerful it is, it is hard to believe it is free. It is starting to make me thing that all general home use software should be free and in fact, when you look - a lot of it is.....

Free Books
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Free Culture. These are 2 books both available in bookstores but they are also online for free. All Cory Doctorow books are actually available as downloads and they are worth a read if you like SciFi. Free Culture is a book that highlights "How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity". Very interesting and thought provoking.

Free News
Google Reader, MyYahoo. I cannot imagine ever watching TV news again. 99% is what I don't want to hear so I waste 30 minutes for that 20 seconds of information I wanted? Newspapers are far better but then again, they might not even cover what you are most interested in. So - then next better is a web site - usually pretty good but you may have to go to several sites before you get what you want. So then what? RSS. Could anything be more beautiful? Strip out the banners, the adds, the stories you don't care about and give me only the news I want as a text feed. Beautiful. So - to get started, try Google Reader or MyYahoo. The great thing about Google Reader is that it is online so no matter what PC I use, my read and unread items are the same as well as it is the same feed list.

Free Emails
JDJ, Sohomail, JOHO, Word of the Day, WAG. SYS-CON is one of the best techie magazine publishers out there and all their stuff is free online. How cool is that. I cannot tell you the number of great useful things I have read from Java Developers Journal and I am not even a Java developer. SohoMail and WAG are quite similar to each other. They both have a very strong emphasis on morals and social responsibility - it is a very fresh perspective in a "Shareholder Value" driven mindset.

Free Education (Podcasts)
TWiT, ITConversations, Security Now, Inside the Net. Podcasting is amazing. I feel like I live 2 minutes from work now because I no longer dread my 75 minutes of commuting each day. I just download podcasts / keynotes / presentations and I get to be educated as I drive.

Free Information
Wikipedia, Answers.com, Thinkexist, snopes. Wikipedia is the most awesome encyclopedia out there. The whole concept of a Wiki is pretty amazing as well. Answers.com is a mashup of all sources of info for a given word. Thinkexist is a great Quotes site. Find out the real quote and who said it. Then for anyone who gets folklore emails - simply reply with the snopes site that debunks the email.