Need some light reading? Popular Science has put its entire 137-year catalog online for
free.
posted by backseatpilot
on Mar 4, 2010 -
36 comments
Shareese Renée Ballard, or
Res, put out an album in 2001 titled
How I Do. Santi White, a.k.a.
Santigold (formerly
Santogold) helped out with the lyrics. A mix of R&B and rock,
How I Do scored one hit single, "
They Say Vision". Label politics stalled the release of her second album, so Res was let go from her contract. After touring with Gnarls Barkley and forming Idle Warship with Talib Kweli, Res continued to write and record. Putting together new songs with material from her unreleased album, she posted
Black.Girls.Rock! on her website for free. (
MP3 ZIP,
PDF Booklet.)
[more inside]
posted by NemesisVex
on Dec 18, 2009 -
7 comments
Doug Rushkoff throws down the gauntlet in his “Radical Abundance” speech at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference. Some highlights of the speech: “The only real possible competition to Google and their economy of faux openness would be peer-to-peer exchange.”
“As a result of all this freedom the abundance of genuine creative output is declining. We are actually getting the scarce market place demanded by our currency legacy system. The same way the early Renaissance got a scarcity by killing off half the people with the plague.”
Some Alternatives:
1: The development of a digital culture that actually respects the labor of individuals.
2: The creation of new modes of currency based in abundance rather than scarcity.
posted by joetrip
on Nov 22, 2009 -
113 comments
The first four issues of Stray Bullets set the world on fire when they came out. Paper burns, you see, and a comic book as inflammatory as Stray Bullets just had to be burned. The religious right burned them. The Godless left burned them. The people in the middle felt left out and burned them too. Only a few copies survived and are probably worth millions by now. Inaccessible to the common man, the wonders of the digital universe have finally arrived to allow you—the average Joe—to see what the fuss was all about.
posted by Artw
on Nov 16, 2009 -
37 comments
The OER Commons exists to help educators "find free-to-use teaching and learning content from around the world." Thousands of primary, secondary and post-secondary activities, labs, lecture notes, assignments and other educational materials are available by searching or
browsing the OER site.
posted by cog_nate
on Oct 16, 2009 -
7 comments
Wow. I was going to say something witty and clever, and I got nothin, so: "The new Web-based
Sony Library Finder tool can be used to find e-books in the local library that can be checked out, downloaded onto a desktop computer and then loaded onto a Sony Reader device -- all without charge." [Note - Probably USian]
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posted by ZakDaddy
on Aug 26, 2009 -
62 comments
Saturday, September 26th, the Smithsonian museum family and their affiliates will be hosting a free admission event, if you go to
their MUSEUM DAY site and print out the admission coupon. One coupon = 1+ admission.
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posted by FunkyHelix
on Aug 20, 2009 -
20 comments
Building and flying free flight model airplanes is a pastime so obscure it doesn't even register on the geek heirarchy. But in the period between Lindberg's flight across the Atlantic until the start of the Second World War,
thousands of boys (and some girls)
around the
world succumbed to the allure of rubber,
lube, and
dope.
[more inside]
posted by gamera
on Aug 6, 2009 -
13 comments
FreeBaseballRadio.com is a site that was created to help find internet broadcasts of live baseball games. Specifically those that are available for free.
posted by acro
on Aug 6, 2009 -
18 comments
Audio archive from
Small's Jazz Club, searchable by instrument, then performer, then date, starting with September 27, 2007.
Hours and hours and hours and hours of the some of the best jazz from New York's downtown scene. Stream and snap your fingers, man.
posted by klangklangston
on Jul 15, 2009 -
19 comments
Are
times of
recession good or
bad for the
contemporary art market and
artists? "Affordable" is becoming a
leitmotif: there are
events,
international fairs, as well as
various galleries.
Some collectors and artists are sharing
survival tips and
tricks; and there are plenty of special offers to be had: Josh Poehlein - screenshot collages,
free ; Shepard Fairey - "Obey Eye" screen print, 18 x 24 inches, signed and numbered, at a random time on April 21st:
$45.00 ; Michel Gondry - your portrait, signed:
$19.95 (allow 6 to 8 weeks for delivery); 'Damien Hirst' - "For the love of Paris" postcard, 10.5 x 14.8 cm, signed and sent:
€ 1,80 ; Banksy - original, freely usable, high-quality jpg files:
free.
posted by progosk
on Apr 16, 2009 -
31 comments
Not all of us need, or want, $10,000 worth of Adobe and Microsoft software to be creative. So, here's some alternatives, each available on every major platform:
GIMP, for all your drawing and photo-editing needs. (
Windows and
OSX.)
Inkscape, for vector graphics creation.
Scribus, for incredibly powerful document creation.
FontForge, if you want to make your own fonts.
OpenOffice, the old standby for word processing, spreadsheets, and all those other office needs.
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posted by cthuljew
on Feb 20, 2009 -
189 comments
Five Dials is a free, downloadable literary magazine published by
Hamish Hamilton (UK publisher of McSweeney's) and featuring so far texts by writers and artists, old and new, including Noam Chomsky, Alain de Botton, Gustave Flaubert, Bob and Roberta Smith, Iain Sinclair, Jean Paul Sartre, Roger Deakin, Raymond Chandler and Jonathan Safran Foer.
posted by lucia__is__dada
on Feb 6, 2009 -
7 comments
Hippie Masala [masala is the Hindi word for spice mix] is a documentary which poignantly depicts the lives of a handful of old hippies from different countries, who not only remained in India but also remained in the caricature roles of a small few in those days. These are, in some ways, lost souls stuck in the amber of the 1960's and 70's and this movie offers glimpses into their lives now.
SnagFilms also has 510 other excellent documentaries to watch for free online.
[more inside]
posted by nickyskye
on Dec 27, 2008 -
24 comments
