Everyday Tools

If like me you enjoy fiddling with your IT configuration to try and make your life easier, then welcome, this is the post for you! I’ve come to realise that I’ve built up quite a collection of tools that I use to make my life easier and it might be a good time to share them.

Finding and installing these tools can be quite the faff (with the exception of the portable apps - see below), but that’s all part of the fun. An hour spent searching out and installing the best tool for a certain job, can easily save orders of magnitude more than that hour over the period of time it’s used.

Lets get down to it.

Linux Mint

You know that laptop that’s in the cupboard unused? Get it out now. Using Linux avoids the various Windows sagas around updating and viruses but most of all, the performance deterioration over time as hardware ages. I’ve rescued multiple laptops from the scrapyard by wiping them and installing Linux. Mint is user friendly enough (e.g. similar enough to Windows) that anyone can use it. For 95% of users who just want to browse the internet, check emails, listen to music etc, it’s perfect. It’s also free. I’ve witnessed a lady in her 70’s use it for years with less issues than Windows would cause. I know someone else with a 10 year+ old laptop that was so broken running Windows that it was more or less unusable. 99% of the time it spent spinning the hard disk and launching any application would take minutes. It was T-1 minute from the bin. An hour installing Mint and a couple of years later, not only is it still working, but the owner is running a small book keeping business from it!

If you want to try it out to both check it works on your laptop and to try it on for size, download to a USB key and run direct from that as a trial.
https://www.linuxmint.com/

Hugo

I build this website in Hugo. Not a beginner tool, but nothing AI can’t help you fix. Once it’s up and running I write my posts in plain text using Obsidian (Markdown formatting), use a command line instruction to re-build, then another to post. The website has a ’theme’ which provides the style of the site. This can be easily changed.
https://gohugo.io/

Firefox

A way to escape the Google tentacles. If you like Chrome, use . .
https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/new/

Brave

A somewhat de-googled version of Chrome.
https://brave.com/

Browser add-on that automatically responds to cookie pop-ups. As a side note, whoever thought the cookie prompting idea had merit was a bureaucratic idiot and spoiled the internet. Strong word, but true. Like warning signs, they only work the first time or two.

uBlock Origin

Browser add-on that helps limit the pervasive data scraping performed by websites.

DuckDuckGo

A privacy centric search engine. Escape the Google information harvesting machine. Set your default search engine on all your browsers to this and you won’t accidentally end up using Google.
https://duckduckgo.com/

Perplexity

If you want an AI augmented search engine, this is very good.
https://www.perplexity.ai/

Claude

Talking of AI, I find Claude the best particularly with coding help.
https://claude.ai/

youtube-dl

A simple command line interface controlled download tool for YouTube. Very handy if you don’t have a YouTube subscription and want to watch videos offline. May also work for other content e.g iPlayer. Just noticed that it looks like a shut-down has been attempted on this, so installing it is still possible, but may need some extra effort - consider it a fun challenge. Newer alternative seems to be yt-dlp which installed ok for me.

Obsidian

Write notes using a simple interface without going anywhere near a cloud. Is very capable and extensible using a wide range of Plugins that anyone can produce. I started using Notion a few years ago, but immediately stopped when I fired up my laptop one day while camping and found that it needed an internet connection to show me anything. No such issues here.
https://obsidian.md/

Portable Apps

If you work in a ’normal’ company, dealing with dysfunctional IT is part of corporate life. One way around this is to use portable apps. Portable means no installation required. Download the app, tuck away in a folder somewhere and run them directly (think Windows 3.0!). No IT request that takes days to arrive at an actual human, no weeks spent assessing the software for suitability including having to convince people you’ve never heard of that you actually need it to do your job, no waiting a further few days for an IT person to turn up and then spend hours fighting against the obnoxious IT system to actually install it (assuming all previous stages worked).

Some of this software comes in both normal and portable versions, so you will need to specifcally download the portable version.

Notepad++ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ Text editor with huge capability

DrawIO https://www.drawio.com/ A simpler, easier to use version of Visio

ReNamer https://renamer.en.softonic.com/ Bulk rename files

qimgv https://sourceforge.net/projects/qimgv.mirror/postdownload If you too are amazed that Microsoft can break even a simple image viewer by making it slow and with no ability to navigate through a folder full of images using the arrow keys, download this. Fast, simple and portable.

YouTube Premium

Worth every penny to avoid adverts

Bitwarden

A decent password manager. If you don’t yet understand the absolute NEED for a password manager, watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1tVI5OhWRM

Tutanota

A secure email provider. I pay the basic subscription which gives me additional email aliases under one login as well as additional storage for €3 a month.
https://tuta.com/

Nostr (Damus and Nostur)

Just discovered this. Nostr is a decentralised protocol used for sharing notes. If you think that sounds a bit like X, you’d be correct. Nostr stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relay. Damus and Nostur are clients (apps) that use the protocol. Once you’ve created a profile on Nostr, you can sign in to any Nostr client and have your profile available to you. Because it’s decentralised it can’t be controlled easily by governments and organisations. Because there are no centrally controlled algorithms, you don’t get to see things you didn’t ask for (this can be a positive or negative). You just follow or unfollow people as required. It’s beautifully simple but also extensible, so there are possibilities to build even more functions on top of the protocol. Oh it’s also used daily by Jack Dorsey. It’s got a little bit of a ‘Bitcoin Bro’ feeling at the moment, so the more people start using it the better. Get involved.
https://nostr.how/en/get-started

Enjoy!