Software I use

Last updated 2024-09-25

Desktop

Software status quo, trending towards more open source projects wherever possible

Windows 11
Google Chrome, using Activitywatch I realized that >90% of my time on the computer is in the browser
Google Drive for backups, though it is a bit intrusive
Github desktop (I have a writeup for how I use Github to create a durable digital library)
SketchUp Make 2017, the last free desktop version on archive.org
VSCode
KdenLive video editor, very comparable to Premiere or Final Cut but open source
Notepad++, I really do use it like a notepad, and opening random code files without the hassle of getting them into the right VSCode directory
ArcPro - maybe transition to QGIS soon
LibreOffice, LibreCalc is great, LibreDraw is very good at editing multipage PDFs. I've been really impressed with the whole suite.
Darktable, though barely used as an Adobe Lightroom replacement
Ableton 12
Calibre for ebooks
iVPN
Deluge
VLC
Foobar for listening to MP3s
Rekordbox for DJing
Python
Node.js
Activitywatch with Chrome and VSCode watchers
Steam for playing games

Online services

Google Docs suite, the integration between the different apps isn’t as tight as in MSOffice, but the cloud-native makes up for it
Discord, the app is constantly bugging out on me, and the website is no better or worse
ChatGPT and Claude both pro as of 2024-09-25, this week ChatGPT is ahead, but last week it was Claude, and sometimes it feels necessary to debug each other.
Google Cloud for hosting
Datawrapper for charts
Khan Academy for the kids
Whatsapp but I really wish I didn't

Interested in starting

R, always an aspiration, although using Jupyter notebooks is edging its way in
Local LLM
Pandoc (need to find a use case)
Ubuntu on older machines to keep them useful, and handoff to the kids for offline use
Expanding into other “homeschooling” or self help education materials, like that one from that one cyberpunk book picked up by the migrant who then taught himself to be an operator…
Offline maps with ability to download satellite images for navigation, assuming computer also has GPS

Dropped

Thunderbird, I love the idea, but it is way too slow, too much memory use, would be nice if it ran quietly in the background. Instead, GMail has some offline capabilities.
Mixxx, missing a lot of Rekordbox’s features
Inkscape and Gimp never did it for me
Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite, its a shame because I’ve sunk a lot of hours into it, but they keep closing the gate while competitors are getting better
Dropbox, at somepoint I had to choose between Google Drive and Dropbox, and Google Drive was “good enough” and I was already paying a monthly subscription for GMail storage
Slack, just use Google Chat and Spaces, one less place to go
Obsidian, Notion, Evernote, etc. I always want to like these, but having everything on Google Drive and searchable works better for me. However, I really dislike the fact that gdocs are stuck on Google Drive, if I could periodically get all my gdocs converted to markdown or something that would be awesome. I even tried using straight Git/Github for notes, but keeping it in sync was a nightmare, and for ephemeral stuff, convenience wins.

Apps in rotation, incomplete list, currently on iOS (iPhone 13 Mini)