Software that I use
Here's a big list of software I use regularly, and generally recommend.
My goal is to keep this updated when I have things to add.
Have a look!
Notes:
- My main desktop OS is Windows, and my main mobile OS is Android.
- I have not been paid to say anything on this page.
Shoutout to Ninite for letting you install a lot of these at once. Site is old and looks kinda fishy, but it's kept up to date and is not fishy, actually.
Utility
Obsidian
Type: Notes/Planning/Productivity
Free? Yes. They have paid plans for note syncing though.
Obsidian site
Highly extensible and customizable markdown-based notetaking program.
This video from NoBoilerplate got me to check it out.
Obsidian's plugin support and vibrant community means that if there's a feature you're missing from it, someone has probably already added it to you, for free. The fact that notes are plaintext markdown means that the meaningful content you put into Obsidian is fully mobile. If you get tired of Obsidian, you can take your notes straight from where they're stored in your local file system and throw them in any other markdown-friendly viewer later.
They have daily notes. You can make little checklists and to-do lists. You can do spreadsheet-style tables. You can add normal URL markdown links, or you can add wiki-style internal links to other notes (and note headers). You can easily attach images. You can use raw HTML if you want.
Plugins take things further, letting you add drawings, attach metadata to checklist items for task tracking and sorting, programmatically aggregate content from your other notes into summary notes.. all kinds of fun nerdy productivity things.
They offer a paid subscription for multi-device note syncing. I just put the notes I want to sync into a private GitHub repo and keep it up to date. To pull to my phone, I installed Termux via F-Droid. I registered some SSH keys to my phone and now I just run git push and git pull like I do everywhere else. Works fine, doesn't cost money.
Visual Studio Code
Type: Programming environment
Free? Yes.
VS Code site
Nice balance between feeling lightweight and having extensive functionality. That's the plugin model working well, I guess. I'm not super picky with IDEs. For a little while I regularly used Notepad++ as my main editor for a Python project and had a fine time.
Firefox
Type: Internet browser
Free? Yes.
Firefox Site
We like a little non-Chromium-based contrarian browser sometimes.
Get you a fox browser that runs with the help of its little Gecko and SpiderMonkey friends.
...Firefox is fine. I know most people haven't thought about which browser they should use since they first opened Chrome years ago. From a user perspective they're all pretty similar.
Backblaze B2
Type: Cloud storage
Free? No. Priced according to usage ($/TB/Month).
B2 Storage Site
This is what I use for personal cloud storage.
Their pricing setup is one of the most straightforward. It's worth shopping around different providers for your individual use case, but I like that I'm not paying for a total capacity that I may or may not ever use.
Media
GIMP
Type: Image editor
Free? Yes.
GIMP site
It's far from being "Photoshop but free", but at least GIMP is free.
I have not had good experiences trying to get GIMP to be an art creation tool (try Krita (free) or Aseprite (not free, specialized for pixel art) instead), but when I need to edit a raster image, it's still my go-to.
Inkscape
Type: Vector graphics editor
Free? Yes.
Inkscape site
As someone who never got to spend much time with Adobe Illustrator anyway, Inkscape is pretty great. I can do most of the vector graphics tasks I want in it. I made this site's logo and the logo for Blue Helm Tech using just Inkscape.
DaVinci Resolve
Type: Video editor
Free? Yes. They ask you to do a usage survey though.
DaVinci Resolve site
My use cases for video editing are mostly simple. I'm usually just editing gameplay clips to share with a few people. There are probably editing programs that better streamline those simple use cases, but I have occasionally found it useful to be familiar with something as capable as Resolve, so I generally recommend it if you have a bit of time to learn the basics.
Blender
Type: 3D Modeling
Free? Yes.
Blender site | Blender on Steam
If you haven't tried Blender in the last ~5 years or so, you should give it another shot. It's a lot more user-friendly than it used to be!
I'm sure there are better tutorials out there these days, but I used some version of the Blender Guru donut tutorial series when I was getting into Blender, and had a good time with it.
Last.FM
Type: Tracks your music stats
Free? Yes. Has paid tier that you don't need.
LastFM site
For those unfamiliar, this is like an older iteration of the "Spotify Wrapped" idea, where you can see your top artists/albums/tracks and some detailed info about when, how much, or how often you listened to them.
The UI is not as flashy and they don't package it up nicely for you the way current music streaming apps do, but they also don't limit your access to the data you've sent them! Set this up to track your scrobbles automatically in the background, and eventually you'll have years' worth of listening data to explore. You'll be able to go see what your most-listened album was a few years back, or get a list of your top however-many tracks from last week or month.