雨の音

EDIT: THIS IS A CARRD NOW! it's updated and organized!!

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox or librewolf (open-source fork of firefox) instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega instead of google drive

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

get free stuff with the help of r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH, r/piracy and r/roms

use trakt (for shows and movies), letterboxd (just movies), or TMB instead of IMDB (owned by amazon).

use storygraph instead of goodreads (owned by amazon).

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause, ecosia, or ocean hero to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, or tuta instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use project gutenberg for free public domain books, and librivox for public domain books and audiobooks

use the seal app (android only) to download video and audio

use ellipsus instead of microsoft word or google docs

use mastodon instead of twitter

use peertube to create a network of small video hosting providers (disclaimer: not a 1:1 alternative to youtube)

use threema and signal for encrypted communication, on mobile and desktop

use qwant and startpage for secure internet browsers

use syncthing to securely transfer files between devices

learn how to jailbreak your kindle/ereader if you have one (wiki and video walkthrough)

use riseup’s email and VPN for secure communication (aimed towards activists)

use cryptpad and collabora instead of the microsoft office suite

use google takeout to export the data on your google account

use library extension to look for books on online stores and find them at your library

remove paywalls with removepaywalls

install the open-source adblocker ublock origin

install sponsorblock to skip sponsored segments on youtube videos

use bookfinder to look for the cheapest available listings of books, including textbooks

learn a language through mango (duolingo laid off some of its employees and now relies on AI translations) for free with a library card or through your school

edit photos with photopea

edit pdfs with foxit and sumatrapdf

download music with doubledouble

take notes offline and collaborate securely with obsidian

for android tv, use smarttube and cloudstream (ad-free, open-source)

change your OS to linux

This is from 1966 and you can see over a hundred photos on the NYPL digital collections website. It is absolutely gorgeous. These are just a few of my favourites.

Plus Puck's face here:

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

Doing a final project in my stats class, we have to pick a subject and collect data on it. We need at least 100 data points, and I figured this blog is big enough that a poll on here could get to that pretty easily!

Doing my project on if it’s more likely to be born in certain months :]