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: Cloud Demat (much to my regret, my accountant is stuck with it but I prefer OkiOki or Bizzey).
  • ๐Ÿค– Automation, monitoring: Changedetection (and its browser extension), cron jobs, Miniflux -- Check also my articles Reading RSS in peace with a few Miniflux Hacks and Default settings for watches in Changedetection.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • ๐Ÿ“… Calendar: Google Calendar for sharing various agendas with my partner. One for her events, one for mine, one for our common events (company, and both of us), one for the little one/school.
  • ๐Ÿ‘จ๐Ÿปโ€๐Ÿ’ป Code Editor/Text Editor: VSCode, Neovim. And even if rich UIs are lovely, I'm a terminal nerd.
  • ๐Ÿง Code version control server: Gitea.
  • ๐Ÿ’พ Files sync: Syncthing, Dropbox, Signal.
  • 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’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: Gmail and Hostinger. I'm looking for true privacy friendly alternatives to Gmail but lot of so-claimed privacy email providers are doing it wrong, so the hunt for alternatives is paved with well intentioned but disappointing email providers.
  • ๐Ÿ’ฌ Messaging: Signal, Session, Slack (work), WhatsApp (unfortunately everyone).
    I don't trust Telegram nor WhatsApp nor Slack.
  • 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...
    • Miniflux comes with nice bookmarklet and has many integrations.
    • Changedetection comes with nice extension.
  • ๐Ÿ“ Notes: Obsidian + Signal 'Note to Self', and Shaarli.
    • Shaarli comes with nice bookmarklet.
  • ๐Ÿช„ Productivity: all above and ChatGPT sometimes, also Tampermonkey, CLI/Scripts.
  • ๐Ÿ” Password manager: Vaultwarden.
  • ๐Ÿ“ป๏ธ Podcast & Music: Spotify, Navidrome, Last.fm, Rate Your Music.
  • ๐Ÿ’‚๐Ÿป Privacy: Kill the Newsletter! and private email generator by DuckDuckGo.
  • โœ… To-Do: Notes + Calendar events + my pocket notebook, Obsidian, Shaarli.
  • ๐Ÿงฎ Spreadsheet Processing: NextCloud (personal ones), Google Spreadsheets (shared ones).
  • 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, Collabora.

โ›ฝ Services subscriptions

  • ๐Ÿ–ฅ๏ธ Self-hosting web apps: Cloudron.
  • โŒจ๏ธ Cloud Server/VPS: Contabo for running web apps through Cloudron, Hetzner for running CI/CD workflows.
  • ๐Ÿค– AI Language model and hallucinations generator: ChatGPT.
  • ๐Ÿ’ป Web hosting/DNS/Nameserver: Hostinger. I've used OVH and Gandi in the past.
  • ๐Ÿ’ฝ Cloud storage/backups: Dropbox and Hetzner Storage Box (migrated from Contabo Object Storage).
  • 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.

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.
  • fish - user friendly shell.
  • 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.
  • 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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