Tools

2025-01-13 19:28

I mention a tool or two I use each week in my weeknotes. Thought I'd collate them all into a single page, sorted chronologically. I don't use a few of them anymore, but it was fun to read through the context, which I have left in.

Similar: Deafult apps 2024

2025-01-12

• gimp - It stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program but they should have seriously come up with something better. The name is a shocker. Why not just GIP? Anyway, I'm using this to do some basic selections and cut n pastes on the scanning I've been doing lately. It's doing everything I need and is quick and easy. From what I understand, it is free and open source software (FOSS) that does a lot of what Adobe Photoshop does.

2024-12-29

• async-neocities - I use Neocities to host my website and have been using the neocities CLI to upload/update content, but each time I "push" using that tool it runs through every single file one by one at a very slow pace to determine what to upload. It hasn't been an issue because I didn't have many files, but now that's changing it can take 5-10 minutes to iterate through. Luckily async-neocities fixes this, doing some kind of wizardry to figure out what needs to be uploaded in a couple of seconds. So now after building my website I type the alias neopush to run this magical tool and bam, website updated.

2024-12-23

• manpageblog - A nifty little static site generator that makes web pages that look like a Unix man page. I got one up and running in 5 minutes. Have a project idea for using this.

2024-12-15

• lagrange - Gemini Protocol client - A day after I posted my Default apps 2024 post, I switched from amfora to lagrange for navigating gemini, and I must say I like the style and functionality much more. I need to get my head around the keyboard bindings but that'll come with time. I'm not a heavy user of Gemini, just exploring at the moment, but there is something drawing me in about this alternative protocol on the web. There is some really good authors in here if you are willing to dig around. Are you a user?

2024-12-08

• insync - Using the free 7 day trial to sync OneDrive to linux so I can then move my cloud files to filen and be done with OneDrive. I tried simply downloading the folders as a zip but every download crashed near the end. Stupid Microsoft. So here I am doing it the long way.

• Geany "The flyweight IDE" - I finally got a workspace up and running for python on Debian. I wanted something a bit more lightweight than spyder as I'm not a power-user, and Geany seems pretty good. I am using pipx to manage environments which I've never done before so took me a while to get my head around, but once the penny dropped it was all smooth sailing. I still want to just use helix text editor with marksman LSP, but you know.. small steps.

2024-11-24

• lazygit - Such a clever effecient little tool for git in the command line. I've got it sitting at the ready now for this website. Once I've published I'll just press a couple of commands to get it pushed to GitHub. The colour theming help remind me of unstaged works and things.

• debian OS - So far this distro has been a very pleasant experience. I think I'll be here a while.

2024-11-17

• ranger terminal file manager - now I'm in Alpine yazi doesn't work, but this is just as good.

2024-11-10

• zellij terminal multiplexer - I've been using a lot more command line tools lately so it's nice to have a nice terminal workspace where I can quickly switch between the different applications. I'm really enjoying keyboard-only operations and full-screen modes. It's such a pleasant experience.

• helix editor, obsidian and syncthing - Loving this setup for synced note-taking across my laptop and Android. Helix is a super powerful vim-like text editor I use on my laptop, Obsidian on my mobile, and syncthing does the obvious. It's a super powerful setup given I can use plugins in Obsidian and call my own scripts in helix. I'll write a workflow post about this at some stage.

2024-11-03

• Brave browser - All the Vivaldi updates were driving me nuts so I'm giving Brave a crack. I'm really liking it. I've gone really plain, dropped all the fancy add-ons, using only the inbuilt blocking without uBlock Origin and it is working very well. Keyboard shortcuts are fine. Ticks all my boxes so far.

• yazi command line file explorer - Useful for quickly popping up when in the command line looking for files or simple moving of files.

• amfora Gemini client - Enjoying this terminal client to read gemlogs. Something soothing about these text only platforms.

• MS Image Resizer - Was useful on my work laptop for reducing my field photos to a size more appropriate so I can copy them to my own storage. The utility has a lot of options on size and compression, and renaming/replacing etc. Everything I needed.

2024-10-21

While dad and sister are here I grabbed their phones, installed RSS readers, gave them quick rundowns how to find and add feeds and subscribed to a couple. I didn't want them to faff with login credentials or subscriptions so these ones worked well:

• NetNewsWire - for iOS (dad). Simple, no login required.

• Feedly - for Android (Soph). Simple, no login required.

I like to plant little seeds for a better tech life. Some things stick. Some don't. That's ok.

• I use FreshRSS. I like the configurability.

2024-10-13

• warpinator - I installed Warpinator on my Ubuntu distro because I like the ease of file transfer this way. But sheesh, installing this was a mission, all the dependencies, failures and whatnot. I honestly don't know what half that stuff does or where all the files ended up. Ahh Linux.

• tut - Continue to use this terminal Mastodon client. Really dig it. I also don't have anything on my mobile, but I snuck in a peek through the browser a couple times.

2024-10-06

I've spent a bit of time in the terminal this week. Guess I'm starting to feel a bit more comfortable.

• buku - Revisited this CLI bookmark manager after my linkdump the other week reminded me I've got links scattered everywhere. I started by pulling all the links from that post into the database. I asked ChatGPT to convert the markdown text in the buku format, and add appropriate tags, which it did a pretty good job at, then I could import them with $ buku -i bookmarks.md. I'm also working on a workflow to spit out buku bookmarks into a Linkroll page and update weekly.

• tut - This is a Mastodon client for the terminal. Saw it and toot floating around a bit so finally thought I'd give it a go. I'm trying to build some healthier habits around socials and this is perfect, removing all the attractive UIs and encouraging more purposeful navigating. I styled it to my liking (which personally I think is even more attractive..) and deleted Phanpy from my phone. The interactions feel a bit more one-to-one which is nice. I tried toot first, but couldn't get the media to show. tut is working great, with feh as my media-viewer. I like how it doesn't load the images unless I ask it too (by pressing "m").

• helix - This is a very advanced text editor (for me), like Vim, Neovim or Kakoune. I am just experimenting at this stage. Not entirely sure if I need to go down this path, but it is showing me what's possible. What grabbed me was this demo which combined file exploring, text editing and git commands. Note though he's using a combo of helix, zellij, yazi and lazygit to do this. There is a tutorial inside helix which steps you through all the basics. I found that in itself was fun, almost like a game.

2024-09-30

• Runalyze - Awesome personal sports data dashboard. So good. When I toy with Python on my running data this is the kind of dashboard I envision. I really dig the ability to change timeframes and view elevation data. It calculates an "elevation score" and gives a ratio of hilly:flat for each run. Strava seems to be enshittifying itself so I've been on the lookout for something like this.

• Visual Studio Code - I've really been enjoying using this lately for my website. It was a requirement for The Odin Project, but I've adopted it for my website now. I love the terminal window inside so I can now build and publish, and then commit and push to GitHub for backup. I am using it on 3 operating systems - Windows, Ubuntu and Mint. I really like how it picks up on the file types, renders it accordingly and offers TAB completion - really good for writing HTML and CSS.

2024-09-22

• Ubuntu Linux distro - Installed as a dual-boot on my Windows Dell laptop. I've only ever used Mint (which is what I'm typing on now, on my older laptop), but I'm doing The Odin Project which recommends Ubuntu (below on why I'm doing the Odin Project), which I'm doing on my DELL laptop.

• Rufus - How I installed Ubuntu as a dual-boot OS. I've used this a number of times now and never had issues.

• Jellyfin and Finamp - I mentioned these a few weeknotes back, but I want to mention again because I'm just loving listening to my mp3s and scrapping the streaming services. Earlier this week I buggered up and logged out of my server in Finamp and it took me a while to figure out how to log in again, but I've got it all sorted again now and noted how to stay connected.

2024-09-16

I spent a few hours on a wet day turning my Oppo R17 Android phone into a web server. To my surprise I got it running! I have no experience in this stuff so I just cut loose in my browser searches, installed a heap of utilities that worked and didn't, failed, succeeded, and finally got it going. The main tools I used were:

• Termux - Android terminal emulator and Linux environment app.

• Apache2 - HTTP server.

• SSH - Never used this before. Awesome to be able to connect to my phone from my laptop and use my keyboard to write commands.

• Serveo - A tunnelling service to expose my localhost to the web, creating a neat little url like https://zkbro.serveo.net/

I want to do some more research before taking any further steps, and will reach out to some friendly folk who have offered a hand, but yeah, I'm pretty stoked that I got this far.

• buku - Bookmark manager for the terminal.

2024-09-01

• SoulseekQT - Peer to peer file-sharing. I totally use it for legal activities.

• Warpinator - Allows me to send/receive files between Linux and Android.

• Winpinator - Allows me to send/receive files between Windows and Linux. I'm not ready for proper server setups so this is perfect for me. Super quick and easy to use. Perfect for the job.