Mine is Local Send which is a FOSS alternative similar to air drop that works across a variety of devices.
If you’re in any flavor of academics from middle school to doctorate program or otherwise writing papers that require strict citation formatting, drop what you’re doing and click that link.
Or probably YouTube it or something first so you can see why it’s so much better than your standard internet citation generators.
Don’t forget to share the intel with your classmates!
Edit - honorable mention to Desmos for 99% of your calculator needs… with the unfortunate exception of exams, cuz phone.
I wish i knew about this during my degree
it’s the sort of tool that is really just fundamental now and should be ubiquitous and promoted and taught and talked about every where there is knowledge work. Even more so as there’s a great open source version of the tool.
This, logseq, and PKM in general for me. I guess it’s not really “can’t live without” because I hardly know where to start, but the possibilities for organizing my mess of a brain are enticing.
It would probably help to have a project to work on and actually use the things rather than diving too deep into PKM conceptually… Really wish I knew about them in school, though.
I was previously using Obsidian, which is great! but didn’t like that it was closed source. I then went on to try various options [0] but none of them felt “right”. I eventually found notesnook and it hit everything I was looking for [1]. It’s only gotten better in the last year I started using it and just recently they introduced the ability to host your own sync server, which is one of the requirements it didn’t initially make, but was on their roadmap.
[0] Obsidian, Standard Notes, OneDrive, VSCode with addons, Joplin, Google Keep, Simple Notes, Crypt.ee, CryptPad (more of a collabroation suite, which I actually really like, but it did not fit the bill of a notes app), vim with addons, Logseq, Zettlr, etc.
[1] Requirements in no particular order:
- Open source client and server.
- Cross-platform availability as I use Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android.
- Cross-platform feature parity.
- Doesn’t fight me over how notes should be taken - looking at Logseq’s lack of organization.
- Easy notes syncing.
- End-to-end encryption (E2EE). It’s about to be 2025, if the tools you’re picking up aren’t E2EE, you’re letting unknown strangers access your data and resell it. It doesn’t matter what their privacy policy says as that can always change and/or they can get compromised/compelled to expose your data.
- Ability to publish notes.
- Decent UX.
Nice ive been using obsidian as well I’ll give this a shot
Currently im using standard note but id love to give this a try. I first heard of it from techlore
I am using Logseq and the organization is basically the only thing not working for me. I will try this out.
I really tried making Logseq work for me but even if they added some kind of organization/hierarchy, I still had performance issues with my limited notes (just testing things, didn’t want to go all the way in), and various copy/paste drag and drop UX issues that made the experience frustrating.
Can you self host this yet?
Nice, I checked earlier on mobile but couldn’t find it. Not sure why. Thank you!
Immich - Such a polished piece of software that I couldn’t imagine storing all my images without
Seconding this. Legitimately better than Google photos in a lot of ways, even if you don’t care about the data ownership aspect. If you’ve ever been annoyed at how Google Photos handles face detection / grouping, you’ll love Immich.
Thirded. Immich has no right to be as good as it is after such a short time. Completely took down my google photos, finally, and I still have face recognition, word search and automatic backup from my phone.
Jellyfin. Use it daily. Dropping more and more atreamjnf services, it’s been awesome.
Honorable mentioned to Revanced.
What apps do you use revanced for? Maybe it’s just me but the two apps I use haven’t had new revanced versions in 6+ months.
YouTube, mostly. Twitch.
This isn’t exactly “can’t live without,” that would be HomeAssistant. But what I Immediately thought of?
This is an RTS game in the spirit of Total Annihilation.
- labor of love
- fully 3d, including ability to rotate or raise/lower view
- tens of thousands of units without hardware lag for reasonably modem hardware (3-4 years old)
- all shots actively rendered, leading to:
- realistic friendly fire
- even air units can get hit by ballistic shots targeting land units (although odds are fairly slim)
- redirect-unit-to-dodge micro is effective in some situations
- meaningful terrain
- radar will have blind spots based on line-of-sight
- radar gives clear indicator of coverage during placement
- two factions, almost 200 units each, with tier 1, 2, and 3 units. A third (currently playable with a setting change) faction is in the works.
- crafty, non-cheating ai opponents
- free server hosting (!)
- active servers all times of day
The overall feel and balance of the game is great. The changes they make to balance are generally light and reasonable, and the game had a good community.
Fam and friends play together often.
Loved TA as a kid. Played it for countless hours on GameSpy and EA Zone. Will definitely give this a try, thank you!
Sweet! For others coming by, here’s the official trailer:
That link doesn’t seem to work for me 🙁
Fixed, but it’s a youtube link.
Syncthing
Jellyfin Sonarr Radarr Prowlarr stack
Syncthing; it’s a modern miracle
When I learned about it first time I thought it sounded too good to be true. Turns out, it is just that good.
What is it?
It syncs things.
No but really, it’s Pretty freaking cool A tool you can use to automatically sync data across multiple OS with minimal interaction from you.
Oh, is it like a Dropbox but without a cloud?
Yes. You have a “share”. That’s the imaginary dropbox-like thing. Then you have a folder on some device that you link to that share. All folders you link with that share become the same on any device, intelligently.
For sanity’s sake, unless I’m doing something like syncing game map folders across devices but inside a game’s special map folder, i keep them all in a folder called ‘sync’, and name the folders in ‘sync’ after the share name. Otherwise, things can get wonky. Consistent naming is important imo. With a share called “share with bob” started from a folder called ‘bob sync’ on sam’s end, ‘Sam’ on bob’s end, and they stay that way after anita joins, and she calls it ‘bob and Sam’ or something. Someone else joins and calls it “buddies”. Then, people say things like ‘i put it in the sam folder’, and it brings up questions.
But with a little bit of organization, it’s awesome. Drop a file in a folder, and it’s now on the other person’s computer too. They move it out, and the file’s gone for you.
If the computers can talk to each other (same lan, or proper internet connection) they will. If you have dysfunctional NAT or phones with no public-facing IP that are connecting to each other, just make sure some system can be accessed, and it’s all good. You want a cloud backup? Just set up the daemon on a server somewhere, and join the share.
Similar in function to google drive or onedrive or other cloud sync services but everything is kept local, more performant, and non-intrusive. Each device keeps your chosen synced folders up to date with other devices. You choose what is synced with each device on a foldee-by-folder basis.
I use it to sync my password manager database (keepass) and my notes app, among other things. So all my devices have the password database up to date and i can use the same password manager accross them.
It also provides version control optionally. I use obsidian for notes so if i screw up i can revert to the prwvious revision as a complex ‘undo’ option.
Works on major platforms including android, Linux, windows, and i assume apple stuff.
Awesome. I wonder if I can incorporate OneDrive easily. I’m on a family plan and have 1 TB of storage. Maybe there’s a way to upload stuff to OneDrive without the garbage of OneDrive.
Hmm. No it won’t work like that. It only syncs between devices. But i suppose you could have a dedicated device sitting in a closet or whatever which only handles a cloud sync service to which you could use synching with the one drive folders. That would minimize the suffering of having to deal with the broken interface of onedruve/google sync.
Yeah exactly. The Drive Sync hasn’t been too bad but OneDrive app is much more limited and I’m afraid to use it because it’s so flaky. Especially on non-Windows.
Last time I tried it, it choked on anything over a million files. Is it better now?
Not discovered last year but ffmpeg.Crazy how many tools it can replace and how many usecase it has
What exactly is FFMPEG an alternative to? I keep hearing people mention it, but I’ve never stopped to look into it until now.
I tend to do some very basic video editing just to put an image with an audio file so I can upload my music to YouTube. This can do what I need it to do? To what degree can this replace a video editor with a full graphical interface?
Edit: Nevermind. I definitely misunderstood what the tool was at a fundamental level. Got it now.
Proxmox, if that counts, life changing.
Same. I went from one overly complicated Debian install to two dozen neat and self contained VMs that do one thing each. I even tricked a Windows VM into not knowing that it’s a VM, so I can game with anticheat games.
Got any recommended sources for someone looking to do the same thing? My home server is approaching 18 years old, was looking to set up something neat and tidy to replace it when it eventually fails. Tricking a windows vm sounds pretty useful too!
I don’t have a good primary source, its been a lot of disparate googling. But if you have any questions at all, let me know. I love helping
I might take you up on that, thanks for the offer!
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I didn’t discover it this uear, but I started using QGIS professionally when the small city that hired me to, among a lot of other duties, be the new GIS department.
Turns out they thought ArcGIS cost the same as like Office or Acrobat, and they didn’t budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.
Anyway, I’ve gotten pretty good with QGIS, and we’re sticking with it. It does everything I need it to do, and I can still pull stuff from most REST servers.
Turns out they thought ArcGIS cost the same as like Office or Acrobat, and they didn’t budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.
ESRI is in the position that Microsoft and Adobe want to be in, a de-facto monopoly.
I use this for architecture and it’s saved me so much time
Linux and godot
My favourite recent one is Yunohost, which makes it super easy to spin up a little self-hosted server with a bunch of apps. I’ve been having good fun with that and a spare Raspberry Pi lately.
DeltaChat.
It packetises and encrypts chats, using email(SMTP) as the transport medium. Sends downsampled pics, videos or push-to-talk audio by default. Can send full quality pics, videos, or attachments too, as a file.
Integrates with Jitsi Meet to connect video-calls.
It’s available on F-Droid, and you can use a seperate free-email-address(100MB limit) for the SMTP backend (from https://nine.testrun.org/ ), or use your own existing email address.
Elegant and robust.
Really cool! An interesting concept well executed. Sadly has the same problem every new messenger has - barely any users.
But that’s hardly their fault.
