Uses

It's amusing and eye opening to see what other people are using to get their stuff done. So like many folks at /uses (https://uses.tech/), I'm sharing below some of the tools I'm using daily.

Software

  • ๐Ÿ“Š Accounting: Odoo since 2025, coming from Cloud Demat (crap) from 2022 to 2024, which was the default solution of my former accountant.
  • ๐Ÿค– Automation, monitoring: Changedetection (and its browser extension), cron jobs, Uptime Kuma, Miniflux -- Check also my articles Reading RSS in peace with a few Miniflux Hacks and Default settings for watches in Changedetection. I'm also using Macrodroid for automation on mobile.
  • ๐Ÿ—ฃ๏ธ Blogging: WordPress (self-hosted), it's not as fast to load as a static site (pure HTML - see ๐ŸŒฑ Web minimalism) but it saves me from the pain of having to deal with extra tooling and docs. It just works and I'm used to it, switching to alternatives is harder than expected, e.g Ghost โ€“ not fitting as WordPress replacement.
  • ๐Ÿ”– Bookmark: Wallabag, Shaarli, Tapas (Home-made, still WIP, see Ideas)
    • Wallabag comes with nice extension and integrates with Shaarli. -> its search engine lacks precision for years and they are too much focused on refactoring and frameworks upgrades instead of features, so using this tool is a waste of time.
    • Shaarli comes with nice bookmarklet.
  • ๐ŸŒ Browser: Brave. I don't trust Mozilla Firefox (whose existence depends on Google) but the appeal of extensions in Firefox would be great on mobile. Anyway I stick with Brave for now for it's advanced privacy protection, despite Brave is, mostly because of history, not always reputable.
  • ๐Ÿ“… Calendar: FastMail Calendar, synced with Google Calendar for sharing various agendas with my partner using my former Gmail address. One for her events, one for mine, one for our common events (company, and both of us), one for the little one/school. And TickTick syncs perfectly (1-1) with Google Calendar and FastMail.
  • ๐Ÿ‘จ๐Ÿปโ€๐Ÿ’ป Code Editor/Text Editor: VSCode, Neovim. And even if rich UIs are lovely, I'm a terminal nerd.
  • ๐Ÿค– Code generation and correction: OpenAI's Chat GPT4 Plus o1, Mistral's Le Chat Pro, sometimes GitHub's Copilot.
  • ๐Ÿง Code version control server: Gitea at home, GitLab on Premise at work.
  • ๐Ÿ“ธ Duplicate photos finder: dupeGuru and fdupes are my friends, and some LLMified scripts.
  • ๐Ÿ’ธ Expenses management: Wallos for my own thing, and Google Sheets for what is shared with my partner.
  • ๐Ÿ’พ Files sync: Syncthing, Dropbox, Rclone, and Cron jobs. See also LLMified.
  • ๐Ÿ–Š๏ธ Font: I'm a big fan of Miriam Libre which I use on this blog, but I'm migrating to Geist Mono.
  • ๐Ÿ Habits tracking: TickTick.
  • ๐Ÿ’ป Information system (OS): mostly Linux Ubuntu (work) and MacOS (ex-work, now rather for projects).
  • ๐Ÿงพ Invoicing: InvoiceNinja, free self-hosted version. I'd be happy to pay them when they emit valid business invoices ยฏ\_(ใƒ„)_/ยฏ.
  • ๐Ÿ“ฎ Mail: Fastmail, Gmail (forwarding to Fastmail), DuckDuck Go (forwarding to Fastmail), and Hostinger (DNS).
  • ๐Ÿ’ฌ Messaging: Signal, Session, Slack (work), WhatsApp (unfortunately everyone).
    I don't trust Telegram nor WhatsApp nor Slack.
  • ๐ŸŽต MP3 tagging: AutomataTag to fixing tags and missing album covers on MP3 files and each change is synced to Navidrome. I think that Navidrome is acting poorly here, relying too much on file metadata, while most of my content is organized into folders but sometimes with album compilations which are a pain to re-tag. Jellyfin is fitting me better for this.
  • ๐Ÿ“– News/stalking: I'm using Miniflux (and RSS-Bridge) + Changedetection to ensure I do not miss new content from my favorite sites. Miniflux tackels the "read news, track RSS feeds" while also, in pair with Changedetection, let me follow blogs, and monitor changes in websites, blogs, lists, GitHub repositories, blogrolls...
  • ๐Ÿ“ Notes: Obsidian + TickTick + Shaarli.
    • Shaarli comes with nice bookmarklet.
    • Obsidian requires syncing between work and personal devices, such a chore even with Syncthing, due to changing plugin configs and workspace files, git conflicts etc.
    • TickTick provides a very nice app.
  • ๐Ÿช„ Productivity: all above and LLMs sometimes, also TickTick, Tampermonkey, CLI/Scripts.
  • ๐Ÿ” Password manager: Vaultwarden.
  • ๐Ÿ“ป๏ธ Podcast & Music: Navidrome (Spotify alternative player) which I consider to replace with Jellyfin, DSub (Android client) which I consider replacing with Finamp (for Jellyfin), Last.fm which I consider replacing with Listenbrainz, Rate Your Music, Seeker (music collection) which I consider replacing with a web version of Soulseek, self hosted.
  • ๐Ÿ’‚๐Ÿป Privacy: Kill the Newsletter! and private email generator by DuckDuckGo. I'm also using Fastmail as privacy-first email client, and I use Brave browser for privacy-first web surfing, and AdGuard for blocking some IPs and domains in our home network.
  • โœ… Tasks/To-Do: TickTick + shared calendars for the reminders and prioritization, + some notes through my pocket notebook, Obsidian, Shaarli.
  • ๐Ÿงฎ Spreadsheet Processing: Google Spreadsheets which I want to replace with something as powerful but self hosted.
  • ๐Ÿ”Ž Search engine: DuckDuckGo, occasionally QuackQuackGo, even feedle. Bing (Microsoft) and Google in last resort and if possible not directly. Look also the search engines in my /links.
  • ๐ŸŽจ Theme: I'm a big fan of Ethan's Solarized Dark theme but I'm migrating to Catppuccin (https://github.com/catppuccin/catppuccin).
  • ๐Ÿ”‘ 2FA: Aegis and Vaultwarden.
  • ๐Ÿ“ท๏ธ Screenshot: Flameshot on Linux, Skitch on Mac.
  • โ™Œ SSH client on Mobile: JuiceSSH. Because we can... ๐Ÿคฆ๐Ÿผโ€โ™‚๏ธ
  • ๐Ÿ“œ Word Processing: Google Docs, Obsidian.

โ›ฝ Services subscriptions

  • ๐Ÿ–ฅ๏ธ Self-hosting web apps: Cloudron makes self host apps so easy without making it feel like work.
    • I've tried a few alternatives whose maturity and UX are not so convincing, e.g : NextCloud, YunoHost and Coolify. Cloudron wins everytime.
  • โŒจ๏ธ Cloud Server/VPS: Hetzner for running Cloudron (migrated from Contabo) and other services/apps and CI/CD workflows.
  • ๐Ÿค– Language model and hallucinations generator: ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and Mistral Le Chat Pro.
  • ๐Ÿ’ป Web hosting/DNS/Nameserver: Hostinger. I've used OVH and Gandi in the past. I consider switching to Hetzner in the future to let Cloudron automate itself even more.
  • ๐Ÿ’ฝ Cloud storage/backups: Dropbox and Hetzner Storage Box (migrated from Contabo Object Storage).
  • ๐Ÿ“ฑMobile UX enhancements: Macrodroid for enabling more features and automation on mobile.
  • ๐Ÿ“บ๏ธ Legal streaming: Netflix, Prime, Disney+ I'm testing alternatives (Plex / Seedboxes etc) as all those offerings are very expensive and their catalogs shrink over time.
  • etc.

๐ŸŒŽ Browser extensions

  • User-Agent Switcher and Manager - spoof your browser "user-agent" string to a custom designation, making it impossible for websites to know specific details about your browsing arrangement. I used it to be able to access lobste.rs from brave browser which otherwise is blocked, but now I've just delete my lobste.rs profile like many users, because a community with a closed mind is not worth it, I've left X/Twitter/FB, and now I leave lobste.rs.
  • Tampermonkey is my killer app for overriding default web apps behaviours and change the way the web works for me.
  • Changedetection is the perfect companion for checking when web pages change. I'm self hosting my own instance of Changedetection and I subscribe to updates through ntfy or RSS channels.
  • DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials as its name tells, this is an essential privacy-peace-of-mind companion. I love its temporary email generator feature that fills web forms on websites when prompted for an email to register an account.
  • Fontonic - Change fonts - a companion for forcing my favorite default font on websites. I have configured it with Geist Mono.

๐Ÿ”ณ Terminal tools

I run most of the commands below within the comfort of Terminal on Linux or iTerm2 on Mac, Usually with Ethan's Solarized Dark theme applied. And even if rich UIs are lovely, I'm a terminal nerd.

  • asciinema - terminal session recorder.
  • atuin - sync shell history between machines.
  • bat - cat clone with syntax highlighting.
  • broot - another way to see and navigate directory trees.
  • chezmoi - dotfiles manager.
  • colordiff - colorize diff output.
  • diff-so-fancy - human readable diff.
  • dive - explore docker layers.
  • emote - emoji picker for Linux.
  • fd - alternative to find.
  • fdupes - find and eliminate duplicate files.
  • fish - user friendly shell but not POSIX compatible (for this, prefer bash or sh).
  • git-delta - syntax-highlighting pager for git, diff, grep, and blame output.
  • git-extras - git utilities.
  • gitlab-ci-local - tired of pushing to test your .gitlab-ci.yml?
  • glab - bring GitLab features to your terminal.
  • htop - interactive process viewer.
  • httpie - modern CLI http client, alternative to curl.
  • hyperfine - benchmarking tool.
  • k9s - manage your kubernetes clusters.
  • lazydocker - manage everything docker.
  • lazygit - simple terminal UI for git commands.
  • lazyjj - simple terminal UI for jj (Jujutsu) commands.
  • lsd - next-gen ls.
  • lychee - dead links checker.
  • lynx - text web-browser.
  • ncdu - better du (disk usage stats).
  • neovim - Vim-fork with better usability and extensibility.
  • ohmybash - bash configuration, it's the bash equivalent of ohmyzsh.
  • ohmyzsh - zsh manager to unleash your terminal.
  • ๐Ÿ python3 venv - for managing virtual envs because some pythons can be dangerous ๐Ÿ˜‚.
  • rclone - sync data, similar to rsync but between various cloud providers.
  • ๐Ÿ”Ž rg (ripgrep) - blazingly fast grep.
  • ๐Ÿ’Ž rvm - ruby version manager, it feels like pain but it saves some.
  • shellcheck - static analyzer for your shell scripts.
  • shellharden - does actually the fixing that shellcheck complains about ๐Ÿ˜‚.
  • shfmt - shell formatter.
  • thefuck - corrects your previous console command.
  • tig - git repo browser.
  • tldr - simple community driven manual pages.
  • wttr - the right way to check the weather.
  • yt-dlp - A feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader. Ideal for archiving YouTube.
  • zoxide - fast jump to any directory.

see also my public dotfiles.

Hardware

  • ๐Ÿ’ป๏ธ Home Laptop: Apple MacBook Pro M1 Max 32GB.
  • ๐Ÿ’ป๏ธ Work Laptop: Dell Precision 5550 with Ubuntu 22.04.
  • ๐Ÿ“ฑ Phone: OnePlusOne 10 Pro.
  • ๐ŸŽง๏ธ Audio: Sony WH-1000XM4 Midgnight Blue + KLIM Nomad CD Player.
  • โ˜•๏ธ Coffee: Breville Barista Express. I drink my coffee mostly black and mostly espresso.
  • ๐Ÿ–ฑ๏ธ Mouse??? Fuck the mouse, I'm a keyboard user.
  • โŒจ๏ธ Mechanical keyboard: Mechanical ? No thanks. I don't need fancy keyboard yet, as long as my current keyboard is not noisy. And I don't play computer games, any keyboard is well.
  • ๐ŸŽฎ Gaming/Entertainment: Nintendo Switch Lite.

Food & drinks

Further

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