Freebies

As a student, you can take advantage of various privileges; as my student - doubly so! Here's a summary of resources that are at your fingertips.

Take a look at the Rules section to find out what you have to do in order to obtain one thing or another.

Software

Dekart

Thanks to the special relationship I have with Dekart, you can obtain free licenses for various Dekart applications. Specifically, you might be interested in the SDKs:

• Private Disk SDK - on-the-fly virtual disk encryption for all flavours of Windows
• Smartkey SDK (not available to the public) - library for interacting with smart cards and tokens for storage of sensitive data
• SIM SDK (not available to the public) - library for reading/writing mobile phone cards, it is compatible with 2G SIM, 3G USIM, Nextel and R-UIM cards.

Jetbrains

The folks from Jetbrains generously offered classroom licenses for some of their IDEs.

• PyCharm - Python and Django IDE, here's an overview of its features;
• PhpStorm - PHP IDE and a feature guide.

Special thanks to Julia Kuznetsova for talking things over, and the development team - for creating the actual product.

Hardware

Dekart can lend various devices for extended periods of time, it is a source of:

• smart card readers (and SIM card readers)
• smart cards
• tokens
• fingerprint scanners
• GSM modems

Books

• My personal library - you can choose books from this list. Note that some of them are audio-books, some are books I borrowed from someone else or books I gave someone else - some entries may not be available right away.
• FAFlib - a mini-library located in FCIM.213, so far it is 'under construction' and the library is mostly a set of pointers to the places where the books are, rather than a space where the books are physically stored. So far the contributors are:
  • The embassy of the USA in Moldova. I'm not sure who gets the credit for that, so I can't attach a name to this.
  • Myself.

Services

• Hosting for your personal site:
  • PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby on Rails;
  • MySQL, PostgreSQL

Games

I bet you didn't see that one coming, did you? Every now and then I acquire copies of a HumbleBundle, but I don't really have the time to play them.

I can share a game with you, if you really like it.

Rules

• Software licenses
  • issued only to people I actually teach or taught in the past; 'friend of a friend' requests are not accepted;
  • you must not share the license with anyone, it is for your personal, academic use only;
  • some vendors have their own terms of using the software, read about them and make sure you will respect those terms;
  • if you have a personal site, it would be great if you left a reference to the company that offered you the license - this will encourage them to keep offering freebies in the future.

• Hardware
  • take care of it and bring it back in the state it was when you took it;

• Books
  • take care of it and bring it back in the state it was when you took it;
  • do not write in the book, do not bend its pages;
  • take it only if you actually intend to read it; otherwise let someone else have it.

• Games
  • to get a copy of a game, you must beat me at Worms (one of the classic, 2D versions).

Notes

Get in touch with me if there is

• a company that offers academic licenses, but only issues them to teachers (i.e. not students);
• an organization that offers other benefits, but only negotiates with teachers.