That diverges from how the app was intended to be used or for what audiences it was marketed for
Me and my wife use element classic for RP with our ff14 characters.
I use Signal as my camera and as a note-taking app.
Filing Cabinet too
I have home assistant running on my home server. It’s default use is managing your smart home but my house is too poor to be smart so I use it to push notifications about chores to my kid.
Any link to it? Whats the state of the art these days for private home assistants?
The other guy gave a better explanation than I could have, but l will chime in emphasis that learning curve. I’m not great at computer stuff but I know my way around Linux and how to find a tutorial, home assistant is just not very user friendly. The ui is really pretty but not intuitive. Of wasn’t clear when I got into it that there’s a software and an OS version and they aren’t identical, the software is missing a lot of the things that the OS gives but the OS apparently isn’t great if youre running other things on your server, mine is set up primarily for jellyfin and I only wanted home assistant to take the stress of constantly dogging my kid about chores off my workload. Don’t let this dissuade you of you’re interested, I genuinely feel like it’s a great thing if you have the time to learn it, but it’s not something to start if you’re already struggling to juggle all your plates.
https://www.home-assistant.io/
Home Assistant IS the state of the art. Local and privacy first, very powerful and has a huge community that provides a huge catalog of integrations that fill the gap that official integrations don’t cover. Incredibly customizable and capable.
You can buy their official hardware, install it on a raspberry pi to make a dedicated hardware yourself, or install it on any computer.
Their hardware has matured and is now in the polished luxury category, so I would only consider it if you start using it and know you’re going to use it enough to justify it, just install it on a computer or Nas/(docker) if you have one and try it out.
There is a learning curve, plenty of good YouTube tutorials and a very helpful community online though. Have fun!
The DeepL app as a “Syntax corrector”.
English is not my main language. I translate what I write in English to Spanish to see if it’s correct.
This is what im talking about 👍
There is a particular camera app that a few of my close friends and I have used for group photos since over a decade ago. It’s proprietary and tracker-infested, but there’s a certain humor and nostalgia to the filters and effects that I’ve never found a good way to replicate without the app. It’s sort of an in-joke that we insist on using it whenever we do get together. So I have it on my secondary device and painstakingly patched the apk so it can run without any unnecessary permissions.
If you turn off cellular and disconnect wifi when using i think you can mitigate that mostly
Well, that’s the thing. I wasn’t going to bow down to that app’s demands or put a band-aid on it, I had to conquer it.
GSam Battery Monitor, I use to check things like until what time I was up or how cold it was in the bedroom overnight. The graphs show when my phone screen was on (when I set my alarm) and log the battery temperature which I’ve found matches room temperature after a few hours (with WiFi/data off so it’s not doing whatever background tasks if people are conversing in a group chat or so)
One time I was absolutely certain my alarms hadn’t gone off but you could see a little blip on the screen graph, once every minute, matching precisely the (turned off) alarms. Either Sam is in on it or I just slept really soundly that day :D
Apparently it has ads though. Wouldn’t recommend, I always had it firewalled because I didn’t think it needed internet access to display some offline data from my phone in the first place and apparently that also works as an ad blocker? Fun side effect. But so I’m very interested in any open source alternatives people know of!
I used a Color Picker app (an app that generates color palettes of complimentary colors from one or more color inputs or a picture) to find good paint combinations for d&d miniature painting.
That’s not that far off from it’s intended use, but I bet it’s not the audience they imagined lol
I use those for Hue light stuff
I’m not sure if this counts, but I use Readdle Documents, which is a file browser from before the files app on iOS, on my iPad as kind of a siloed collection of files and folders exclusively for work. I can still access those folders from my desktop finder at home through iCloud Drive just like anything else, but accessing all my personal files from the app on iPad (which is what I take to work) is a bit trickier, so it just keeps all my work things organized, focused, and away from my personal life.
