Introduction
This year’s Edition I’ve got a new batch of websites to share with you all in various categories that you just might wish you knew about earlier none of which have ever been featured in this series let’s get started.
Plug Share
Plug Share is great for those of you that own an electric vehicle to find charging stations worldwide especially for those of you with range anxiety which is one of the reasons I won’t buy an EV yet. Let’s zoom into New Orleans when you hover your cursor it lets you know the location the rating for the EV station how many Chargers are available along with the plug type or types. In addition to the web Plug Share also has an app on the Google Play store along with an app available from the Apple App Store. Whether you use the app or the website Plug Share is invaluable especially when taking road trips.
Clark.com
Now for a useful website I should have mentioned years ago Clark.com is the website home of the former longtime syndicated radio show host and best-selling author Clark Howard whose mission is to serve you with knowledge that empowers you to make better financial decisions in your life. His team of writers cover various categories some of the more useful ones include cell phones which have some great articles about the various phone plans your credit which covers how to do a credit freeze find out what a good credit score is and other stuff. The articles in their credit card section are very helpful their insurance category has articles covering Auto home and life insurance that could be beneficial and their invest in retire category could be useful to some of you planning for retirement. I do want to point out just like our channel Clark.com does not accept Peola from sponsors to say nice things about their products or services so the advice is unbiased. Clark Howard now hosts a popular half-hour podcast Monday through Friday that I highly recommend for people to listen to It’s personally helped us out over the years in making better financial decisions in our life.
Wiki Books
Wiki Books is a new one I just learned about it’s from the same folks that make Wikipedia. On Wiki Books you’ll find a huge collection of open-source online textbooks that can be edited by anyone. It’s simple to use for example if you wanted to learn the Python programming language just do a search at the top for Python Programming select it with most of the books as you’ll see here on the right you can print them out and you can get an optimized pdf version for ebook readers.
Envato Elements
Envato Elements is an awesome site for creatives especially for those of you creating videos and presentations. On here you can get unlimited downloads of stock videos royalty-free music photos graphics and a whole lot more. A section on here many creators find to be helpful is their video templates category. It offers templates that can be edited for Premier Pro After Effects Da Vinci Resolve Apple’s Final Cut Pro and Apple Motion. While Envato Elements is not free many do find it to be a good value with plans starting at 650 per month which offers unlimited downloads of millions of creative assets.
Mix Kit
Real quickly Mix Kit is another site owned by Envato that might be worth your time to check out and bookmark if you’re a creative on a budget making videos for YouTube or some other service. It offers similar categories as Envato Elements the only difference on Mix Kit is that all of the assets are completely free all of which can be used in both commercial and non-commercial projects.
Class Central
I’ve mentioned more than a dozen sites to take online courses over the years Class Central is different. It’s more of an aggregator to help find the best free courses from more than a thousand of the world’s top universities. Some of those universities include MIT Stanford University of Michigan Duke University and many others. In an earlier segment I used Python as an example on here found more than 7,000 Python courses and certifications. After selecting a course you’ll get additional information this course is available from Harvard via edX it’s free to audit if there’s a cost to get a certificate it will let you know here along with the duration of the course.
GOG.com
Here’s an oldie but goodie GOG.com which stands for good old games is a great place to download classic and new games on Windows Mac and Linux. It’s a subsidiary of CD Projekt the makers of The Witcher series and Cyberpunk. The main reason I’ve downloaded tons of games off of here is that all of their games are DRM free. While Digital Rights Management in itself is not bad the way some publishers implement it can be awful. A couple examples are requiring an online connection to play and limiting installs on more than one machine. While GOG.com is a great place to find classic games you won’t find elsewhere they also have awesome sales on newer titles as well just like Steam but without the DRM limitations.
Abstract
Now this one is insane on the website Abstract that’s been around since 2002. They refer to their site as the mother of news aggregators with news from popular sources all on one page. Some examples of what sources you’ll find on here include Reddit Google and Yahoo News Reuters The New York Times Dig Vox ABC News News from CBS and so many others it would literally take me all day to tell you.
Hive Index
The Hive Index is a directory of online communities organized by topic platform and Community features. Some of the platforms represented on here include Reddit Facebook Discord X formerly known as Twitter and many others. After doing a search for example I just did a search for NFL it now shows communities available on the various platforms.
Antenna Web
Antenna Web is a fantastic site for those of you wanting to save money by getting rid of cable satellite or any other cable-like streaming service. The site will show you all of the free over-the-air broadcast channels in your area. After entering your location it will show you the number of channels that you can receive at your location. When you scroll down it will show you the channels that you can get over the air.
Tech Meme
If you’re looking for a news aggregator focused only on the breaking technology news nothing tops the Tech Meme website. You’ll find articles on here covering all of Tech from the most popular and reliable sources. Tech Meme also has one of the more popular Tech podcasts that I listen to Monday through Friday called the Tech Meme Ride Home. The host Brian McCullough does a great job of getting to the point without too much filler.
Consensus
Consensus is a cool search engine for those times you need a more concise answer than what you’d find on Google and the other search engines. Using AI it analyzes more than 200 million academic papers to give you answers based on research. I’ll now ask you a question does alcohol affect sleep? When it’s done you’ll see a summary at the top and you’ll see other answers below. Consensus is free with unlimited searches but will limit access to GPT-4 summaries for additional features plans start at around $9 per month.
Ultimate Book List
Ultimate Book List is a celebrity book recommendations website with a massive database. You’ll find books from these well-known people that help to influence who they are today on the site. There are book recommendations from celebrities and entrepreneurs like Taylor Swift Mark Zuckerberg Joe Rogan Bill Gates Mark Cuban and many others. At the top of their homepage you could do a search for a personality or a specific book to find out which personalities read that book. I’ll do a search here for Elon Musk and select it below a brief biography it will list categories with percentages of what that personality has read followed by the books they have recommended in the past.
Kolors
Here’s another website for creatives Kolors is a color palette generator that could come in handy for creating a website marketing material or anything else where you need design help or inspiration with color combinations. When you start the generator it will show you five colors. If you don’t like those colors hitting the space bar will show you a new set of five colors to keep a color click on the lock and it’ll lock it in. Then hitting the space bar after doing so will show you four colors that might go well with the one you have locked and so on and so on. While most people will be fine just using Coolers for free they do offer a pro version for three bucks per month that is ad-free with additional features.
Does The Dog Die
Does The Dog Die is somewhat of a morbid site that can be useful for those of you still traumatized by the ending of Old Yeller or other films and shows where the dog dies. The site also offers warnings about other topics as well. In this example doing a search for the 1983 film Cujo it lets us know that the dog did die and below that you can also get.
