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

2025-07-06

• Thunderbird - I've got a weird calendar fetish right now that I'm hosting my own .ics files. Thunderbird connected to my server with no problems, which was the main thing, and the style is fine for a calendar.

• One Calendar - Likewise, on my phone (Android) I went with this one because it's compatible with CalDAV again, and it's a pretty, simplistic calendar with no ads.

• rucola - A TUI for managing markdown files. Although I think I can do a significant chunk of markdown management with helix with the marksman LSP, I do like the feel of this tool. You don't edit files in rucola itself, but it loads your editor of choice. I like that, given I'm pretty hardwired to helix now. rucola can still create new files, and the navigation of back and forward links is nice and intuitive.

2025-06-29

Blasted through a week of self-hosting stuff this week:

• Unifi Network Server network monitoring (for work)

• Forgejo git forge

• twtxt micoblogging service

• FreshRSS RSS reader

• Radicale CalDAV calendar server

• Glances system monitoring tool

• ntopng network monitoring tool

During my week of self-hosting I discovered and revisited many other apps that fit the bill but I didn't get to because of various reasons. Here they are.

• Jellyfin as a music server. I haven't done this because I haven't got decent storage capacity for anything I would consider running a server on. I do have it installed on my laptop though to get my music across to my phone every so often.

• immich photo server. Like above, I haven't set this up because of storage capacity. I really want to host and serve this for myself and family.

• WatchYourLan - before I found ntopng I liked this simplistic view of IPs connected to the LAN.

• Cacti another LAN network monitoring tool.

• podgrab - I really want to automatically download podcasts to my own server for future listening. This one looks like it does it, but I couldn't get it to install.

• Airsonic Like above, but for much more than just podcasts. I haven't tried it because it seems a bit overkill for what I need.

• Mealie recipe management tool. I have recipes stored as bookmarks, pdfs and emails, and this might be the ticket to pulling them all together.

• ttyd terminal in a web browser. Just have to combine with Tailscale then I can ssh into the terminal on my computers at home, anywhere in the world.

• excalidraw I remember this when I was all out in Obsidian, but didn't realise it was a standalone self-hostable software. Pretty cool.

2025-06-22

• Freeplane - I haven't done a mindmap for a while, but after asking the fediverse for some tips on building structure around my programming process, Freeplane was suggested for some high-level brainstorming and project mapping. I used to use MindManager back in another (Windows) life, but I'm very impressed with what I see here after a quick play. It is free and open-source software of course.

2025-06-08

• fitparse - parse .fit files into something useful.

• surfshark - the VPN service I use. Does what I need. Never had any issues.

• spike.news - aggregator of news. Neat design. Uses supabase as the backend.

2025-06-01

• btop - a prettier and more informative tool to top

• screenfetch - a lightweight alternative to neofetch

• cpufetch - like screenfetch but for CPU details

2025-05-05

• stew to manage binaries. Made life a lot easier this time round, and good to know it can update them too.

• vimium firefox or librewolf plugin - I love I can do just about all my browsing with my keyboard.

• qutebrowser - I tried this before vimium, which got me hooked on keyboard-focused browsers, and I liked the function and the minimal interface, but in the end I went with viumium because I found the ad-blocking much better in Librewolf.

2025-04-27

• tmux - Decided to give this terminal multiplexer a go over my usual zellij as I noticed you get more screen real-estate. I'm not a power-user of these so the switch is going ok for my very basic use. I'm still using the default key bindings, but think I'll look into quicker pane-switching options. I've got it going on my Raspi server too which works from the console.

2025-04-21

• MkDocs and Material for MkDocs - A beautiful and functional static site generator for documentation/notes/wiki-style websites. Documentation is great. Start with out-of-the-box settings, or customise the hell out of it.

• GTL: Gemini Tiny Logs - A TUI for the Tinylog format in the Gemini protocol. Tinylogs are getting a healthy dose of love and revamping right now, which is apt given a lot of folks are getting tired of the regular socials. GTL allows you to build your own feed (like RSS), and reply with your own Tinylog if you have one.

• caddy - website server I'm using for notes.zkbro.com running on my Raspberry Pi. I am still a little confused about running these tools as a daemon with systemd and setting up correct file permissions, but I found it a tonne easier than Apache to at least get things working at the basic level.

• ddclient - used to push my current IP to my domain dns record on namecheap.com. I can't get the refresh to happen automatically and regularly, but I can quickly -force an update if needed. The setup is very minimal so don't know where I'm going wrong.

2025-04-13

• Tailscale - I can now connect any way from/to my laptop, Android or Raspi. Either SSH or via dedicated apps. When you activate Tailscale you join a VPN which is shared by all the other devices connected, then it's just like being a LAN. That's how I understand it anyway.

• Material Files (for Android) - Works as expected as a file explorer on my phone, but has the amazing ability to integrate with my Tailnet VPN so I can view and edit files on any of my other connected devices. Mind blown again.

• Auto Reader View Librewolf/Firefox plugin - I've been reading some indie-web websites recently which have some great reading, but I find hard on the eyes sometimes due to creativity-overload, so I've been flicking to Reader View in my Librewolf browser quite regularly. Because the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Alt-R doesn't work in Librewolf (yeah, they have it mapped to reset browser as well!) I thought I'd go for an automatic reader view (when the site has it available) plugin. This one is good because you can also add domains to NOT be toggled (for instance I don't like GitHub or Codeberg in Reader View even though it is possible, so I turn them off).

• Bash Static Site Generator (BSSG) - A new SSG on the block. In bash. Love it. Have tested and going to use it as my up and coming tech-notes page, synced with my Gemini capsule. Seems fit.

• ripgrep - Search for strings within files from current directory within the terminal. Integrates well with yazi - Just press "S" and search for string.

2025-04-06

• Image Map Generator - Quickly map links to an image to make it clickable. The interface is really simple.

• screenfetch - A 273KB neofetch alternative that doesn't require 32mb of dependencies.

• cpufetch - Like screenfetch, but for hardware. 113KB. Both available on apt.

2025-04-01

• The Unsinkable Molly Brown Gemini server. It was hard to get running, but mainly because of the stuff outside of the server itself - setting port forwarding, generating TLS certificates, domain configurations - but once going, the server just sorts itself out. It just runs in the background, and any changes to files and folders in the base directory just get updated dynamically on my Gemini capsule. Great stuff.

• lagrange Gemini client. I find this the nicest browser for Gemini. Once you get used to the keyboard shortcuts its quite easy to navigate around.

2025-03-02

• bagels - Groovy little terminal budget tracking tool. I'm still not all over my change of pay 4 months ago and the exact adjustments I need to do, so thought I'd start tracking some expenses. It's a neat little tool that does everything I need.

• strava-rs - The bagels tool made me think how it'd be great to have a similar style for my Strava running data, and I should try and make one as a cool wee project. Thought I'd search around if it had already been done - and it has. strava-rs looks exactly how I was envisioning it, however I can't install the damn thing. There's no instructions on how to, it seems to be a rust and cargo thing with a Makefile which I don't totally understand and can't get going on my Debian machine. I'll keep trying.

2025-02-23

• durdraw - An ASCII art editor for the terminal. Supports mouse-mode, different colour schemes, symbol pickers, and has some nice keyboard bindings which I could pick up fairly quickly. Having a bit of fun here.

2025-02-02

• tsacdop podcast player on my Android. Wanted to try something different. Seems pretty good so far. Weird name though.

• codeberg - I want to start a wiki. These git forges seem to be pretty capable for handling markdown files and I'm getting comfortable running git commands. Codeberg is free, open-source and has Pages to publish it as a website, or even an Integrated Wiki function that allows anyone with access to edit the wiki. Thought I'd try something that isn't GitHub.

2025-01-26

• todo.txt-cli - I've been going back-to-basics with todo lists lately, namely creating a @DOING list in my Monday daily notes each week (in Obsidian, synced to my laptop) to keep track of shit to do right now. This is ok, but I like a quick capture and sort by priority, completion, project or context, which is why I have used Nirvana HQ in the past, but starting anew I am finding Nirvana too feature-rich for my needs, and not available in the terminal. Enter todo.txt-cli. This is possibly the most amazingly simple (yet still feature-rich) todo approach and tool I have come across, and I absolutely love it. I feel like it is made for me. It is based on the plain-text single-file todo.txt approach. Each line is your todo item, structured in a way that it is sortable and searchable with any basic text editor or simple tools like todo.txt-cli - This one in particular has some really nice colour scheme (customisable) and built in commands for basic list functionality. I'm using the alias 't' to run the tool, so I just have to type t add "(A) This is a task +project-name @home" to add a task with A priority, tagged project-name with context @home.

• markor - And behold, markor is an Android text editor that supports the todo.txt approach. I have synced (via syncthing) the folder that contains my todo.txt file between my laptop and Android, and re-mapped markor to point to it, so anything I edit on my phone, shows up on my laptop, and vice-verca. Now I have 2 beautifully simple tools with style on my two devices where I can manage my single-file todo list (actually two, the cli tool splits done tasks into a second file, done.txt, when you complete a task or run t report).

• peek - GUI screen recorder. I couldn't manage to install or get to work terminalizer or byzanz, but to be honest the GUI makes life easier. This was a recording I did of publishing a blog post.

2025-01-19

• wttr.in - Weather from the terminal. Typing curl wttr.in/queenstown?format=2 gives me ⛅️ 🌡️+15°C 🌬️←7km/h right now, but without ?format=2 it gives you a 3 day outlook. I have a bunch of other websites I use if I really want to dive into the weather (learnt from paragliding... it's kinda important), but this is pretty nifty anyway. Gives me ideas of embedding weather into posts (see top of page).

• jellyfin - Set up my music server on Debian for the first time. It was a bit of a pain (see "Daily Notes" below) but I got there, and definitely worth it.

• finamp - This is the jellyfin client for Android I use to stream or download my music from my laptop. It is a nice UI and has everything I need.

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.