Need Entertainment? Go To The Internet Archive

Now that winter has come you are going to be spending a lot of time indoors. Need some free and legal music and movies? Well, here's the place to get them.

The Internet Archive is a treasure trove of collected media, everything from live music, podcasts, music videos, old feature length films, serials, cartoons, amateur films, and of course "The Internet Wayback Machine" that let's you search and look at websites of the past. And it's all free and legal.

Yes, that's right. Now that they've clamped down on piracy, even in Sweden, you can shed your immense feeling of guilt (and criminality) by getting your stuff legally.

So, what all is on the Internet Archive. To begin with, as the name implies, it is an archive of all things internet. Want to know what a particular company's website looked like during the dawn of the web? Use the Wayback Machine. Just type in the address and you'll be given a list of archived versions. This can be quite fun.

Here's what Google looked like in 1998.

Need something a bit more entertaining then looking at how bad websites were in the olden days? Well, how about movies? They have over 22,000 of them, and more are added all the time. Granted, since these are in the public sector, you're not going to find the likes of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. But, you can find a lot of classics like the infamous Reefer Madness, Fritz Lang's brilliant M, Hitchock's original Man Who Knew Too Much, Nosferatu, His Girl Friday, Battleship Potemkin, and of course Night of the Living Dead. All in all, they have over 600 feature length films. But they also have newsreels, cartoons, documentaries, and those great public service films about how to survive an atomic explosion by hiding beneath your desk.

Want some stuff for your mp3 player? Well, there's plenty of music available to you. Most in the form of live concerts. You're in some serious luck if you're a Grateful Dead fan. I'm not, but they have a couple thousand live recordings to download. I was personally happy to find that they had about 20 or so live Decemberist's concerts. They also have the likes of David Gray, Elliot Smith, Tenacious D, Warren Zevon, and well you'll have to search through the massive collection of over 27,000 music recordings.

Be advised that most of these recordings are in FLAC format, which is lossless, so these are big files, up to 50 MB a song. If you want to convert them into mp3's you'll have to get a program to do it. If you have a Mac I recommend a free one called xACT which is available here. Once you have it installed, you can drag your .flac files into xACT and it will decode them into .AIFF or .WAV files which can then be converted and compressed into 3-5 mb mp3's in iTunes or any number of programs.

Not into listening to live music? Well they have a huge collection of studio recordings (almost 12,000 files) including old time radio shows, Christmas music, tributes, podcasts, and just about anything else audio related. Even the New York Fire Department dispatches from 9/11, why anyone would want to listen to them is beyond me, but it could be interesting to some.

Ok, that's all very good and well, but what if you just want to read something. Well, they have about 25,000 books you can download and read on your computer.

Not enough? How about some programs for your computer. They have almost 35,000 of them. For both PC's and Mac's.

And finally, if you don't just want to be entertained, you want to be educated, go to the education section and download courses, lectures, and videos from different universities. They've got a thousand of them.

So, there you have it. You will never be bored again. Or spend any money. Or do anything illegal.

It's all right HERE.

K. Panda