The Dialer.
- Comes with every phone
- 10+ digit number instantly connects you with millions of people, services, and institutions
- 3 digits connects you with life-saving emergency support
- Very low-latency voice support
- High quality audio (most of the time)
- No ads
- No obnoxious UI
All kidding aside, I’m routinely astounded at how we have yet to top the ease and utility of old-fashioned phone service.
Until you said kidding I was sold. “Where can I find this elusive beast??”
Wow you’re right. How can we enshittify this? Perhaps you should hear an ad first before we connect you to the other side?
Shit I shouldn’t give them ideas
Your dialer may already be monetized! If you get a call from a company and see their logo chances are they paid for that. It’s not enshittified yet, but it definitely could be. Source: I maintain a codebase that does this for a major device manufacturers dialer.
I’m them-adjacent and I’ll keep my mouth shut
Plz delete this
God… Imagine being in the middle of an important call for say discussing family affairs for a dying family member and you just hear “there will be a 30 second advertisement break in 1 minute.”… I’d probably pop a blood vessel.
OBS, and Blender. Two industry shaping software solutions that ere fully open source and free.
Blender is incredible. I am no master by any means, but I use it all the time for 3d printing. And I’m blown away by what actually-talented people can do with it.
Kodi—It can connect to a media source via FTP, so I was able to effortlessly connected it to my online storage to download shows and movies from it to watch on the fly, and on my TV no less. Without that, it’d be a huge pain just to get the file onto my TV.
SmartTube—It’s an ad-free YouTube video app for Android TVs, and it has Sponsorblock included. You could say it’s YouTube Vanced for Android TVs.
Discord bots—I’ve setup my own personal Discord server (no other humans allowed in it) and set it up with various bots that do things ranging from posting tweets/ posts from Twitter/ Bluesky to letting me know when specific channels have uploaded a new video on YouTube or gone live on Twitch. I’ve also got another bot monitoring some RSS feeds.
Can it so casting? My YT consumption isn’t as high as for many people it seems but when I’m not at a computer I’m very likely to find something on the phone and make the TV play it. Then I’m reminded how bad the ads are and avoid it again for a while
It supports casting via the YouTube phone app (or YouTube ReVanced app).
Sweet! Thanks for the recommendation, absolutely need to try that
It isn’t available on my TV apparently. I guess I need to learn how to side load on the TV now
From the SmartTube GitHub:
install Downloader by AFTVnews on your Android TV, open it and enter
kutt.it/stn_betaorkutt.it/stn_stable, then read, understand and confirm the security prompts. (You can also enter 79015 (for beta) or 28544 (for stable), but this requires an extra step to install the AFTVnews Downloader browser addon if you haven’t already.)The AFTVnews Downloader is available on both Google Play and Amazon Fire TVs. After installing SmartTube, it can self-update on its own without needing another app.
Wow, thanks! I had actually figured that out myself, maybe should have mentioned it. First video went really well
Blender, Gimp, Inkscape, OBS (open broadcast software), Linux distros of various sorts, openHAB, LibreOffice, Firefox (and plugins like uBlock), PiHole, VirtualBox, Notepad++, Paint.NET, VLC, 7-Zip, FileZilla…
I’m sure there’s more.
Gimp is a bit of a stretch.
I’ve used it a lot, but unlike most of the others on this list, the commercial product (Photoshop) is so much better that I’m willing to shell out the monthly fee to use it over Gimp.
I’m not sure what field you’re in and photoshop certainly is the standard but Affinity has been great for my needs and is pay once if you’re looking to avoid SAAS
https://www.photopea.com has everything I need for daily graphic touch ups.
Yeah, it does all i need and uses a format that will be compatible long into the near future, very useful.
Vectorpea is available too.Only problem I have with it is the potential situation of (seemingly) uploading pictures which is bad for confidential stuff.
It may be local but I don’t trust it that much.Now for personal projects: Absolutely. I even used it once on my phone. Great page!
Back when Photoshop was $300 (600 todays money) It was fine for non-professional work.
It could use a little UI finesse, a content aware fill without plugins, and a regular human usable macroining system.
But for 90% of non-professional work clone, dodge, smudge, burn, masking and curves are perfectly serviceable.
I’ve found a nice workflow in gimp to touch my photos. It works wonderfully
Can’t believe no one has mentioned Home Assistant. Automation engine for home and have local control over almost everything “smart” at home.
Home Assistant is awesome! It’s the only way to control your house without giving out all your data to Amazon, Google or apple.
You got a link to that? It has a pretty generic name so I want to make sure I look up the right product. 😅
This one? https://www.home-assistant.io/
Yeah that one
A bit more niche, is Weasis - Dicom Browser for medical images. Alternative is also ImageJ which is used a lot in for scans too.
I use cygwin a lot. I fine it extremely convenient. Most of my personal software development is done in gvim and compiled in cygwin. I wven dosome of my professional work, particularly unit testing in it.
I loved cygwin at one point, but felt it was less annoying to just make the jump to full Linux and only Linux. I’m happier for it.
Image Toolbox, full of useful feature for image editing
Home Assistant
YES! Proprietary home-automation ecosystems are a confusing mishmash of standards, and Matter is only just barely starting to change that. Home Assistant is the glue that sticks them all together. I can have expensive Hue smart bulbs, cheap HomeKit bulbs I found in the clearance bin, Magic Home RGB LED controllers, Sonoff smart switches, a garage door opener connecting via MQTT, and it easily connects to all of them and presents a uniform toggle switch for all of them. I can switch all my (smart) lights on and off from a menu on my GNOME desktop. No fighting with proprietary apps for each different ecosystem. Home Assistant is amazing in how boring and unremarkable it makes the implementation details.
Voyager and pipepipe
Audacity. How the hell is Audacity free?
Since the Muse Group has acquired Audacity and its following telemetry/spy-ware case, it has a little bitter aftertaste, there are good alternatives though like Ardour
Oh, so thats where the phrase “the audacity of it” comes from
The term came long before the program…
Next thing you’ll tell me is Iron Man wasn’t the inspiration for the element iron.
“You have created a new element.”
Audacity is decent, but Reaper is sooooooooooooooooooooooo much better. Sooooooooooooooooooooooo much. And it’s basically free (presuming you’re not a business).
and Ardour
Ardour is a DAW though, isn’t it?
Would you call Audacity a DAW?
I know, right? The audacity!
For me: Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, Keepass, and Aegis
What is aegis in this case? (It’s way too generic to successfully search for)
2FA
I couldn’t get Audiobookshelf to play nice with my networked drive; Apparently Docker just refuses to use networked drives as mapped locations. Since all of my audiobooks are stored on my NAS, it was a non-starter for me.
Prologue is a nice alternative though; It integrates with Plex to stream audiobooks. Plex doesn’t have native audiobook support, but Prologue simply uses Plex to actually access the files. Then it can read the chapter and metadata directly from the files. And since Plex’s remote access is fairly easy, it means Prologue’s remote access is fairly easy too.
The big downside is that you’re tied to Plex instead of Jellyfin. I already had a lifetime PlexPass license, so it’s not a problem for me to just spin up a Plex server with an “Audiobooks” library.
Simply wanted to leave the comment for anyone else who may be in the same boat I was in a few weeks ago with Audiobookshelf.
Yes, I have it mapped as a letter drive on my server, which is what I pointed Docker at. My buddy was having the same issue with his server, for a different Docker container. After some digging, we both stumbled across a post on the docker forums that basically said networked drives don’t work with Docker, even when properly mapped. The container simply refuses to use them for volumes. They’ll look like they’re working, and the container will boot just fine. But nothing is actually read from/written to the NAS, and data isn’t persistent when the container is restarted. And that’s exactly what we were experiencing; The container would boot, but wasn’t usable because it couldn’t actually read/write anything.
Apparently for it to work properly, the container itself needs to contain nfs/smb libraries… And most don’t, because it’s considered bloat.
Jellyfin is awesome, I also use it to serve my music and audio books. It’s a bit more quirky than plex but I like that it’s not tied to some company server in any way.
Apparently Docker just refuses to use networked drives as mapped locations. Since all of my audiobooks are stored on my NAS[…]
Mount the NAS share to whatever machine is hosting the Docker instance, then point your docker containers at that mount point.
I did. I have it mapped as a letter drive on my server. The server can access it just fine via the file browser. And the docker container still refuses to read from/write to it. The container boots up just fine on the surface, but the audiobooks volume appears empty when I check it (there are dozens in the folder) because the container refuses to actually read anything from the NAS. So I tried using the import option that Audiobookshelf has built in. It imported them just fine on the surface, but they all vanished as soon as the server was rebooted; Nothing was actually saved, because it is refusing to actually write to the NAS.
Testing with the local C drive, it worked flawlessly. No issues. I eventually stumbled across a forum post complaining about the same thing, and the responses were basically “yeah you can’t do that, Docker doesn’t support it unless the image itself has nfs/smb coded in. And most don’t, because it’s considered bloat and images are meant to be optimized.”
But since my server only has a 1TB drive for the OS, and everything else is done on the NAS, I can’t commit to storing all of my media on the server directly. So Audiobookshelf was dead in the water for me.
Sounds like a permissions issue, honestly. If the NFS share is mapped to a drive letter (Windows server I assume?), then Docker should see it in the filesystem like any other local drive. At least that’s how I understand it… I’ve never used Docker on Windows.
Absolutely agreed on permission issue.
Sounds exactly like my issue.
I wasnt aware Linux accesses NFS shares with the authenticated user.Linuxserver.io containers have a container user called ‘abc’ mapped via environment variables to the host.
Once I figured that out it was pretty easy.
Also had issues with mapped NFS shares in Docker.
In the end I just mounted it to my hostIt is mapped to my host as a letter drive.
Krita
Syncthing
For work, entire ecosystems of dependencies. For every language, there’s so much you can do by just including a free module.
My company has some decent policies about giving back, but only on a case by case basis. I’ve been encountering resistance from both sides trying to formalize it.
- WTF is that developer saying he doesn’t want to scan his opensource projects or take advantage of automated builds and testing, as well as regular dependency updates?
- WTF is management so concerned about security and confidentiality but want to just ignore an entire category of components?
We have the tools, we have the process: everyone would be happier of opensource were a first class citizen with well understood rules and practices
