Post: #1

In the spirit of contribution: There's a ton of great, free (to you) content online that you should take advantage of if you can. I used to be an internet pirate but since that has become more risky as of late this is what I do to get lots of great value for free.

App: Clip Grab
Website: Youtube

Good stuff doesn't last forever on the internet so if you find content you like-- it behooves you to download it and save it to a hard disk.

-Lil' G

Post: #2

I usually use that youtube to mp3 site to download YT videos, but I don't really like the bitrate of the downloaded video, it's not the best quality. But still, you gotta download what you can before it's too late.

Also, more in terms of a "library" for your personal computer, Calibre is a fantastic management application that lets you read e-books that you might get from Kindle (usually these are .epub files on your device, or .pdf files), on your computer. There's thousands of computer software and programming epub files of textbooks on IT Ebooks; any book published by O'Reilly, usually these books have drawings of animals on the covers, are definitely books you should have in your library.

This is what Calibre would look like on Linux (apologies for the resolution):

Post: #3

Give and ye shall receive! Thanks deus_ex.

Post: #4

Using a VPN will let you torrent and pirate as much as you like. You could check out https://airvpn.org/

They have a deal going right now where you get a 25% discount on their subscriptions, but normally, it's €5 per month. That's less than most books and movies anyway.

There's also https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ who seem to be very popular on Reddit.
https://mullvad.net/en/ accepts cash in the mail if you're VERY privacy conscious.

All these should give you a short free trial so you can see how it is to use it.

Post: #5

@littleG

Give http://www.clipconverter.cc/ a try.

It's WEB-BASED, FREE, and requires no registration/login to use. You choose the quality (1080, 720, etc) and and can also convert the YT video to MP3, M4A, AAC, MP4, 3GP, AVI, or MOV.

Make sure the file being delivered is the format you asked for. Sometimes clip converter automatically checks a box indicating you want a download manager, if you see that uncheck the box and click download.

http://convert2mp3.net is a clipconverter.cc alternative that has the same options except the ability to select the quality of the YT video you wish to download or convert and download.

BONUS: I capture web pages with printfriendly.com. It converts the page's body into a white background, black text document, that includes still images, and ignores the header, sidebars, comments, etc.

If I want the entire page as I see it on my screen I use a Firefox plugin called Fireshot. Fireshot creates an image that you can save as PNG or PDF. Again, it's an image so you can see the text but you can't search or highlight the text.

Post: #6

This thread is definitely going in the direction I was hoping for.