• edric
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    9 months ago
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    If you’re in the US, you can sign up for Informed Delivery with USPS so you know when to expect incoming important mail. This can help if mail theft is common in your area.

    • NaNEnglish
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      9 months ago
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      UPS and FedEx also allow you to sign up for similar alerts based on your address so you don’t have to necessarily rely on tracking numbers for everything.

    • Apathy TreeEnglish
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      9 months ago
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      It also helps if you are too lazy to bundle up to go outside to check when it’s cold as nuts, but are waiting for something specific. 😁

      And if you just never check your mail (I get almost exclusively junk mail, so I check it every week or two. All my bills are autopay, and all communications are paperless when possible).

  • simpleEnglish
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    9 months ago
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    Open Library allows you to digitally borrow a ton of books for free. It’s not the greatest experience since the books they own are scanned and not digital copies, but it’s good enough, and their catalogue is not half bad.

    • Lifecoach5000English
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      9 months ago
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      Why would you need to borrow and return in this scenario?

      • simpleEnglish
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        Just legality. These are paid books that they can’t give away for free, but acting as a library they can let you borrow them, read them, and “return” them.

        In practice you’ll rarely feel this system because you can just re-borrow it whenever you want to read it.

        • TWeaKEnglish
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          Just legality.

          The legality was only ever a grey area. Their days may be numbered, however. During the lockdowns they removed the one physical copy per digital copy lent, and as a result of that they got sued. Instead of settling out of court they drummed up donations to a legal fund and lost hard, and during the trial a judge ruled that their practice was illegal. In my opinion, they should have done everything they could have to settle out of court, rather than try and build a frivilous defense that had no grounding in law.

          Right now, they’re appealing it, so I guess that’s why it’s still up. However it looks like their strategy isn’t any better now than it was then.

          But hey, their laywer’s getting paid.

  • neidu2
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    9 months ago
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    If piracy counts: Piracy.

    • Duranie
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      9 months ago
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      I just ran out and needed more. Thank you for reminding me of this!

  • inlandempireFrançais
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    9 months ago
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    https://www.khanacademy.org/

    Anyone can learn anything. For free. Education is a human right. We are a nonprofit because we believe in a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Instead of ads or subscriptions, we are supported by individual contributions from people like you. Please join us today.

      • mako
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        9 months ago
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        The vertical line next to the text means it’s a quote

  • Greg ClarkeEnglish
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    9 months ago
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    Free tier cloud services like AWS, GCP, Oracle Cloud, and Azure. I use free tier VMs to host random services like VPNs, Mastodon instance, etc.

    Tailscale has a free tier to connect your devices, VMs, and home servers.

    GitHub pages is great for hosting any simple website for free.

    • NegativeLookBehind
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      Free tier VMs are limited, so are you just signing up for new AWS accounts once a month?

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        9 months ago
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        GCP compute engine is completely free for the basic tier.

      • Greg ClarkeEnglish
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        AWS & Azure don’t offer free VMs but they offer other always free cloud services. I use Oracle Cloud’s Always Free VMs which are great. You can get two AMD-based compute VMs and one Arm-based compute VM with 24GB of RAM. I’ve been using them for nearly 2 years now. GCP also has a more basic always free VM offering.

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          Ok, but, Oracle Cloud🤮

          Jokes aside, that’s pretty cool, thanks for the info

    • fidodoEnglish
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      Don’t forget about cloudflare. With their free caching and cdn a well optimized site can run for barely anything. With GitHub actions and pages you can have a fully static site hosted completely for free.

    • BallShapedMan
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      Freetaxusa does this too, you only pay for state as far as I know.

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        Been using that my entire adult life. Fuck turbo tax.

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        It’s completely free if you live in a state with no income tax

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    Internet Archive - Very useful for general usage internet but not for specific needs (check fmhy).

    Have I Been Pwned? - Periodically use this to check whether your email/online presence is compromised or not.

    Bitwarden (or if you want to self-host it use Vaultwarden) - Personally I used this password management so I can keep my pass and you can auto generate passwords with custom parameters if needed.

    Curated OSINT resources - You want to ID someone online? this resources can help you to do so, though you also need to understand the basics. It may not work if person you’re looking for does not have a much online presence.

      • TipponEnglish
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        That’s a nice find, thank you :)