Dong

Vsauce used to have this series called “DONG” or “Do Online Now Guys.” This page is a list of resources that I think would be useful to people on the internet.

Finding stuff

Torrenting (not just for losers)

If you’re unable to find something via typical search engines, you may have better luck searching the BitTorrent network.

BTDigg

BTDigg is a DHT search engine. Unlike other websites with magnet links, BTDigg gets its results from existing torrents that it discovers via the “decentralized hash table”, not user submissions. I think that this gives it a much wider reach than other sites. Try to guess the filename of the thing you’re looking for.

Note: many of BTDigg’s results are aggregations of many files. Most torrent clients will let you select just the file that you are interested in!

Clients

On your computer, don’t use a torrent client that has ads. Use qBittorrent or Deluge. You can actually install a torrent client on phone, too. I have LibreTorrent. This is nice for audio files that I know I will listen to on my phone specifically.

Other archives

You need to know about:

Try the Internet Archive for more than just pdfs and websites. There is a lot there!

Aside from Google’s image search, try TinEye and Yandex.

Downloading stuff

youtube-dl is a Python script that lets you download videos from sites that make it hard to do so. This includes YouTube but also TikTok and Instagram. I specifically use yt-dlp which seems to have more features than the original.

Most websites (do they exist anymore?) that let you download YouTube videos are just using this in the background.

Working with text (Power User Zone)

Pandoc

Pandoc is a tool that converts documents between formats like .md, .html, .tex, .epub and .pdf. Say that you found a long article on the internet and you want to read it on your e-reader or phone. You can download the article as html and then use Pandoc to convert it into an epub.

I also use this to create pdfs from markdown. You can include LaTeX for math equations in the markdown and pandoc will handle it properly.

Zathura

Zathura is a pdf viewer that gets out of the way. It has basically no user interface at all. If you install extra stuff, it can work for other files like epub or mobi. It can also recolor your files into a colorscheme that you set. The default is just white text on a black background.

This means that you can take a straining white-on-black pdf and convert it into colors that you can read comfortably on a computer screen at night.

Misc. Informational Links