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My Essential Software

List of my essential software and services at the moment.

On a laptop (MacBook Pro, pre-M generation):

  • JetBrains IDEs: PyCharm and GoLand
  • Firefox (because of Containers for work accounts) and Safari (energy efficient)
  • MailMate - outstanding mail agent that keeps me sane
  • MS Teams - team collaboration (quite buggy)
  • MS Outlook - to accept office invites (mail is handled by MailMate)
  • Vorta and Borg Backup - incremental backups of important files
  • Typora - Markdown editor in which I'm typing this blog post.
  • Apple Notes - gets the job done and surprisingly lean
  • Monosnap - making screenshots and quickly annotating them
  • Anki Desktop - to manage my collections of flash cards for learning
  • iTerm2 - terminal

Mobile (Pixel 3a, Android):

  • Firefox (because runs uBlock)
  • AnkiDroid - flash cards client for Anki. This where I learn German vocabulary
  • CoolReader - for reading books in epub and fb2
  • Telegram and WhatsApp - primary chats

CLI (shared across systems via dotfiles):

  • vim - lightweight editing
  • Emacs - just for the org-mode (timesheets)
  • zsh - just a shell that I'm used to
  • tmux - to keep things running and have multiple tabs in the terminal

On a server:

  • Jupyter Notebook - to play with ideas, data and charts
  • PyJournal - web app to extend my brain when working with multiple projects
  • Wireguard - private VPN (mobile and laptop are in that network)

Services:

  • Hetzner - dedicated server for apps, VPN gateway and encrypted off-site backups
  • Integromat - automation service used for tracking interesting (for me) tweets and posting them to my Telegram channel
  • Spotify and Netflix
  • DigiCal - because beautiful calendars
  • AWS - S3, Route 53 and CloudFront to host this blog

iPad:

  • Adobe Draw - for sketches (discontinued)
  • GoodReader - to read and annotate PDFs

Published: December 12, 2021.

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