Directory
Skills and hobbies points to places for learning a craft, a game, or an instrument at your own pace. Entries range from drawing courses and photography lessons to chess and Go servers, music practice aids, and study guides for a specific pursuit. They differ in how they teach, since some walk through a structured course while others are forums and reference pages that grew from a community. When you pick one, look at the level it assumes, whether feedback comes from an instructor or from other learners, and how much of the material is free before you commit time.
Low-tech Magazine covers past and forgotten technologies and how they can inform sustainable energy practices. Its website is solar-powered and self-hosted, designed to reduce the energy use associated with accessing its content, and it notes that it sometimes goes offline. Articles and guides include building solar-powered devices and domestic low-tech projects.
Lucas Chess is an open source chess program developed with Python and PySide2 for training, playing and competing on a PC. It includes 57 prepared engines with levels from 0 to 3600 elo, and other UCI engines can be added. The program offers trainings, tournaments and PGN database tools.
Make it Yourself is a digital book collecting over 1000 useful DIY projects from creative people worldwide. Each featured item links to its original project website, where the information needed to make it is available.
Music Theory is an educational resource for documentaries, courses, books, reference material, or self-learning.
Online Coin Club is an educational resource for documentaries, courses, books, reference material, or self-learning.
Painting Demos is an educational resource for documentaries, courses, books, reference material, or self-learning.
Pawn Appétit is an educational resource for documentaries, courses, books, reference material, or self-learning.
Piano Trainer is a browser-based practice tool. Users load a MIDI file, then watch falling notes and scrolling sheet music. Play Along mode scores accuracy, and Hand Practice works on one hand at a time. A microphone detects notes played on a piano.
Practice Drawing This! collects free drawing practice resources. These include variable 3D models intended for drawing practice and the Morning Sketches APP, which is described as helping users start drawing every day. The site also links to past newsletter articles.
QFGM is an educational resource for documentaries, courses, books, reference material, or self-learning.
Ran Art Blog is a personal website by Ran, a realist painter and art instructor, dedicated to teaching drawing and painting. It features free tutorials, tips and techniques in its blog section, alongside a gallery of realistic oil paintings of seascapes, landscapes and animals.
Scid vs. PC is a chess toolkit derived from Shane's Chess Information Database that lets users create large databases, run chess engines, and play casual games against the computer or on the Free Internet Chess Server. It began as bug fixes for Scid's computer-versus-player features and has grown into a broader alternative with new interfaces.
Sensei's Library helps find books, reading material, archives, or public-domain educational texts.
Settei Dreams is described as an archive of animation production materials, including settei, color designs, artbooks, storyboards and production sketches. The site states the materials are intended as references for animation practice, fan art, 3D models and cosplay, and asks that settei not be printed and resold for profit.
Shâh Kur is an educational resource for documentaries, courses, books, reference material, or self-learning.
Sight Reading Factory is a cloud-based service that generates customizable sight reading exercises on demand. It offers multiple difficulty levels and unlimited exercises for piano, guitar, voice, strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion. Students can practice in a web browser or iOS app, and educators can create assignments and use auto assessment.
Storied Colors is a catalogue of historical named colors with documented sources, including provenance and chemistry. Entries are published weekly, and the site states that AI assists drafting while entries are checked before publication. It is maintained by one person.
Tactic or Not is an educational resource for documentaries, courses, books, reference material, or self-learning.
The Bézier Game is a game to help users master the pen tool, requiring a keyboard and mouse. It offers tutorial stages, undo, redo, clear, snap to angle and unlink control handles, and reports completed stages with node counts. On touch devices it redirects to The Boolean Game.
UbuWeb is an archive of free avant-garde materials founded in 1996, covering film, video, sound, dance, papers, visual poetry, conceptual writing and related areas. Its about page describes it as a pirate shadow library of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts, with no memberships or passwords required and no advertising or donation box.
Waltheri's go pattern search is a web application for searching go positions such as joseki and fuseki in a database of professional game records. Users create a position on a board and can find occurrences in pro games along with continuations played. It offers fuseki, joseki and manual search modes.
The World Cube Association governs competitions for mechanical twisting puzzles, known as twisty puzzles, including the Rubik's Cube. A selection of these puzzles are official WCA events, and the site provides competition information, records and regulations.
Z-Tonnetz is a free browser-based beta visualization of a neo-Riemannian Tonnetz in 3D. It plays any MIDI file or a user's keyboard and shows chords, voice leading and key relationships in real time. The page notes that these are highly experimental features and some may not work as intended.
ZZ Method is an educational resource for documentaries, courses, books, reference material, or self-learning.
