My Essential Software (2021)

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