How to Have Fun with a Computer

Watch videos on YouTube. Anything you want to watch, Youtube has it: from funny videos of cats with weird sounds to footage of the Applo Show. Search for videos on a topic you’re interested in, or try watching and hitting the button to subscribe to a popular channel. ^[2] The most popular YouTube channels today include:

• Pewdiepie — video games and game commentary
• HpaSoyGerman — popular Spanish comedy
• Smosh — video games and nerd comedy
• EpicMealTime — delicious meals
• CplegeHumor — funny video and short comedy
• JennaMarbles — popular comedy and commentary
• Nigahiga — popular comedy and commentary
• Machinima — video game and movie commentary
• Markiplier – game play/game commentary, occasional comedy/musical videos

Make your own YouTube videos. Do you want your product to go viral? A great way to have fun with a computer is to create videos and post them online. You can start with the following ideas:

• Try doing vlogs.
• Rate your favorite food or drink.
• Shoot comedy with friends.
• Flip open your purse or bag and describe what’s inside.
• Make a “haul video” (which can be understood as a shopping video), sharing about the items you bought from the store, library or mall.
• A guide to life hacks.

Watch movies online. The best sites often offer high-quality movies for a certain fee, but you can also watch movies without spending a dime.

• Websites that pay to watch movies include:
  • Netflix
  • Hulu Plus
  • Amazon Prime
  • Vudu
  • iTunes
• Free movie sites with no spam (bullshit, annoying messages) and ads include:
  • Hulu
  • YouTube
  • Fpkstreams
  • UbuWeb
  • MetaCafe
  • Veoh
  • Vimeo

Listen to music online. Computers have forever changed music. From the way we record to listen to music, today’s music and digital technology has become an important part of the music industry, rivaling the guitar. Free or inexpensive ways to listen to music online include:

• Pandora Radio
• Spotify
• Soundcloud
• Bandcamp
• DataPiff

Listen to podcasts. Podcasts are similar to free radio programs with content covering a wide variety of topics. Try using PodcastOne or PodBay, because there are many diverse and free podcasts to choose from. From professional wrestler Stone Cpd Steve Austin to novelist Bret Easton Ellis, it seems today everyone has their own podcast. ^[3] Some popular podcasts include:

• RadioLab
• This American Life
• The Moth
• The Nerdist
• Hardcore History
• Stuff You Should Know
• Adventure Zone
• Joe Rogan Experience
• Savage Lovecast

View items online (window shop). Need to kill time but have no money? Try shopping online, but don’t buy anything. You can buy almost anything online, and it can also be fun to browse and compare prices on everything from clothes and shoes to land and luxury apartments. Make a list of the things you want to buy, but don’t let your credit card go over the limit.

Plan your dream vacation. Use Google Maps to explore unfamiliar cities and learn about local sights on Wikipedia. You can then turn to Expedia to review airfares, AirBnB deals, or CouchSurfer ads. Once you know where you want to go, you can start saving to make your dreams come true.

View random web pages. A “random site” service is a type of website that takes you to random, somewhat silly, and interesting places online. It can take you hours to see the different links. Here are some random sites collection:

• The Useless Web – theuselessweb.com
• Pointless Sites – pointlesssites.com
• StumbleUpon – stumbleupon.com
• Reddit FIR (Funny/Interesting/Random) – reddit.com/r/firwebsites/

Learn a magic trick. Want to impress your friends at an upcoming meeting? Learn a coin or trick trick. There are many online websites that explain each step in detail so that you can learn magic tricks at your own pace. One of the most popular is GoodTricks ( goodtricks.net ), but you can also find tutorials on YouTube.

Drawing online. Feeling yourself a little creative? There are many different online drawing services online, from playing to professional drawing. These services are quite convenient because you won’t have to install anything yourself. Some well-known sites include:

• DoodleToo – doodletoo.com
• iScribble – iscribble.net
• Queeky – queeky.com
• Sketchpad – sketch.io/sketchpad
• DrawIsland – drawisland.com

Explore Google Earth. Google Earth lets you see up close almost anywhere you want to see. Using Street View, you can explore the streets of Tokyo, or search for the whereabouts of actor Al Pacino. You can search your home yourself and check if there are any open windows.

• If you want to challenge your geography knowledge, you should try GeoGuessr. This page will give you a random street photo taken from Google Earth, and you will have to guess where that place is. The closer you guess, the more points you get. ^[4]

Read articles in the form of lists (listicles). Want to see the list of 25 most delicious sandwiches in the world in animation? 20 favorite toys for kids in the ’90s? Buzzfeed, Upworthy, Slate, The Awl, and others all have funny and amusing compilations of random stuff you didn’t even know you were interested in. This information is a great way to pass the time without thinking much.

Read local news online. If you want to see the news that really matters to you, you can check out your local online news site. Less and less people read the local news, which means that the average Internet user knows more about the lives of the “stars” than the situation of the local government. Use the Internet to learn about where you live.

Take a free online course. Develop your skills and improve yourself while you’re having fun. Massive Online Courses (MOOCs) are free and easy to find. You will feel like you are sitting in the Harvard Hall of Fame in the comfort of your own home. You can search MOOCs through databases like here.

Read blogs about cultures or areas of expertise. Whatever you like, there’s bound to be an online community that shares your interests. Do you like games? Visit PC Gamer or IGN to learn about the latest games. Do you love music? Go to Pitchfork, Aquarium Drunkard, or Brooklyn Vegan. Look for a community of common interests that you can interact with or at least explore.

Travel back in time on the Internet. If you’re curious to know what the Internet was like 10-15 years ago, you can travel back in time quite conveniently. The Internet Archive has built tools to help you access older versions of web pages.

Read articles and contribute to wiki pages. If you are already here, what are you waiting for without participating! Wiki sites like wikiHow and Wikipedia can only exist because of user-generated content, and because users themselves do all of the work that is essential to running the site. From reviewing the latest changes to writing articles, contributing to wikis is a rewarding and enjoyable undertaking.

Chat (chat) with friends online. Of course you’ve already thought of this, but perhaps there’s another novel way to chat that you haven’t tried yet. Visit UberFacts ^[5] to see who can come up with the most random facts. Share links, photos and videos to make your friends laugh.

• Facebook, Skype, Kik Messenger, and Google Mail are probably the most popular chat services, but you can also use Yahoo, AOL, and other email chat tools if you want a messaging experience (Instant Messenger) style. “ancient” way.
• If you feel lonely, try video chat with friends. Video chat makes you feel like you’re actually hanging out with friends. But don’t video chat with people you don’t know well. Get in touch with an old friend and chat via Facebook or Skype video chat.

Use Facebook or open a Facebook account. Facebook is a great way to pass the time. You can publish your content, check other people’s updates, and chat instantly with friends. Facebook is a great way to stay in touch with people and a computer pastime.

• If you’re bored with your feed, dig into someone’s feed you don’t know. Your best friend’s second cousin’s girlfriend Facebook page probably has a lot of stuff you’ve never seen before. Try looking at vacation photos from 10 years ago.
• You can also add your own content. Research shows that people who spend more time viewing other people’s content and less time creating their own are more likely to get bored than the rest of us. ^[6] So update your status, post photos and write on other people’s Facebook “walls”.

Compose tweets on Twitter. If you’re not on Twitter yet, create an account and follow celebrities, friends, and other Twitter users to get started with hashtag communities. If you are funny, have a short and engaging writing style, you can attract a large number of followers and entertain them daily with ridiculous tweets. You can also spar over Twitter with Steve Inskeep from NPR or Nicki Minaj. Just kidding. Don’t do that.

Write a review on Yelp. Have you ever been to a restaurant and wanted to give your opinion about it? Of course it is. So what are you waiting for without posting your opinion online? Seriously, giving reviews from a customer perspective is a great way to pass the time and have fun. Let others listen to your opinion.

Find great pinboards on Pinterest. Pinterest is a great way to discover recipes, fun facts, outfits, life hacks, and to share your search results with others. You can glance at Pinterest very easily, so it is a great source of entertainment when you are “stuck” on what to do online. Create your own page and start pinning!

Find a message board about a specific niche. Without the message board, we would never have had the concept of a “meme” (which can be understood as an idea that goes viral on the Internet), of “lulz” (laughs) and of the right animations. It’s usually hard to get on the message board, but you’ll always find communities that correspond to every subculture, from punk rock to skateboarding, from anime to video games. Find a message board related to your interests, open an account and chat securely.

Change the screen saver and desktop image. Are you bored? Redecorate your desktop with what computer savvy people call a desktop theme. Click on My Computer, then Contrp Panel if it’s a PC, or System Preferences if it’s a Mac. To redecorate your computer, you can also do a lot of the following things:

• The look and color of the computer
• Computer sound
• Mouse icon
• Screen setting

Change your background photo. Search Google Images or background images to choose great desktop wallpapers. Sharks in birthday hats? Great. Get creative – get a nice photo of a celebrity you admire, an interesting pattern or a pleasing picture of your favorite magazine or brand.

Change your screensavers. Search for new screensavers in your photos, or download images from the internet. You can choose between a screensaver that is a slideshow of your photos (though that’s pretty trivial) or a picture that makes your desktop look like it’s in the movie The Matrix (awesome!).

Turn the screen upside down. Press CTRL-ALT-DOWN on both PC and Mac.

Listening to music. Entertain your computer by listening to music and rummaging through your playlists. Make a new playlist or compile songs suitable for dance, meditation or exercise, and spend some time rearranging them. Turn on random mode on iTunes to shuffle songs and try to guess the name of the song being played. Turn on the visualizer function of iTunes or Windows Media Player so that your eyes are also active when you are “adventurous” in the music. Or simply, listen to really good songs.

Take a photo. If you have a webcam installed, try fiddling around and taking selfies, arranging and photographing strange still life scenes in front of your computer, or playing with filters. Edit your photos to make you look like a crooked alien with a weird nose, or colorize until you look like someone who is seasick.

Edit photos using Photoshop software. If you have Photoshop installed, crop the photo to create a weird and refreshing meme. Your grandmother’s face with the Stallone figure? Good start.

Write an electronic diary. In the dark days (like the 70s), people often keep diaries with them, where they write about their lives clearly and in detail. Shocking isn’t it? It’s really a great way to spend a few hours on your computer, especially when you can’t go online. Open a text file and start writing about your day. Try to keep notes. Who knows, maybe you’ll love it enough to open a blog in the future.

Record a song. Most new computer models have built-in microphones and software that allow you to record a song (or at least record audio), and let you edit the music in minutes. You don’t have to be very talented, or even have an instrument at hand, to record. Simply record your humming, increase the “distortion” in the settings and enjoy the wild sounds you can create. Place an audio file of a random passage from the Bible on top of a file of your dog’s snoring. A masterpiece.

• Record a podcast as if you were a classic DJ, sharing your favorite songs between the songs that air. Select songs by theme and create a playlist, then record and insert voice files between songs. Record with your friends for more fun.
• Work together to edit multiple songs, change Bob Dylan’s song settings to a death metal style, or play with death metal to become ambient drone music. Lately, slowing down music by 700% has also become a meme, from dial-up sounds to Nickelback songs. ^[7]

Learn programming. If you’re tired of playing with the “regular” computer, why not take your hobby to the next level? Learning to code allows you to design and write your own computer programs from scratch. Learning to code is similar to learning a new foreign language, it can be difficult at first, but it can be extremely rewarding (plus, programming skills will enhance your CV). ^[8]

• There are many different programming languages. While there is no single “right” way to learn to code, newbies should start with the following 5 types of programming languages: ^[9]
  • Python
  • C/C++
  • Java
  • Javascript
  • Ruby
• Visit CodeAcademy.com for interactive programming tutorials with several programming languages.

Learn web design (web design). Do you find yourself spending a lot of time online? If so, consider taking a web design basics course to create your own website and contribute to the online community! Some basic web design skills will use the basic programming languages mentioned above (for example, many websites use the Javascript language). In contrast, skills like HTML programming allow you to learn web-specific programming.

• Here is a list of websites that offer free web design training courses:
  • GeekChamp.com ^[10]
  • WebPlatform.org
  • Berkeley.edu ^[11]
  • Learn.ShayHowe.com ^[12]

Discover new operating systems. Did you know that you don’t have to use your computer’s default operating system? That’s right – Macs can run Windows, PCs can run Macs, and both can run free user-created operating systems! Installing these operating systems can be tricky, so read the support page of the program you want to use (or find the help articles on wikiHow) if you run into problems.

• To run Windows on a Mac, use:
  • Boot Camp (pre-installed or can be downloaded for free from the internet)
  • A virtual machine program (Parallels program), such as the Mac’s Parallels Desktop 10 program.
• To run the Mac operating system on a PC, use:
  • A bootable (bootable) USB drive ^[13]
  • A virtual machine program like Virtualbox ^[14]
• Also, try other options like Linux, Ubuntu and Haiku – these are free operating systems that can run on both Mac and Windows!