Tools are amazing. They’re what separate us from the animals. A good tool not only does the job, but feels like an extension of you, the tool user. More than anything, tools are worth spending money on (though most of these are free).
DuckDuckGo’s !bangs—which allow you to search corgis !gi and be taken straight to Google Images, or CDPQ !w for Wikipedia—are great. But DuckDuckGo is slow, and bangs are processed server-side, which makes a query with a bang that will trigger a redirect take a while. Unduck processes bangs client side with a JavaScript worker (I think), and lets you change your default bang, so you can use bangs with any search engine. I shamefully have !g for Google set as my default bang, but the amount of slop in every search page is making me reconsider.
Marginalia is a search engine that searches at the margins of the web: blogs, forums, scholarly articles. More importantly: it generally excludes stuff from the “corporate web”, which is annoying indie-speak for human/AI slop on big platforms. The search isn’t amazing, but it’s great when I need to query the blogs of thousands of cranks for information only they would have.
Tailscale is virtual private networking without a bunch of configuration or thinking about IP addresses. The free plan is more than you’ll need and they’ve committed to keeping it free, if that means anything. It’s nice having my Docker containers running on a rack in Virginia appear as if they’re on the same network as my laptop.
People also have taken to trying to install Tailscale on everything. I’m running it on a couple VPSs, one server, an Apple TV, my Kobo e-reader, my phone, and my parents’ devices. We’ve been in Montréal for medical reasons recently, and being able to easily route all my traffic through an American residential IP is really nice.
Tailscale does a lot more than I’ve mentioned here. Their blog is worth checking out to see a showcase of all the annoying things that can be made possible or easy with it.
In a world where Zotero exists there is no excuse to get citations wrong. Zotero has changed my life more than any other piece of technology in the last couple years. I add every source I encounter to Zotero, which has full text search for PDF contents, metadata, and annotations. It has a great PDF reader with annotation support, and group libraries also work great. You can buy more storage from them if you want syncing, run it fully locally for free, or point it toward any WebDAV server, the latter of which I have definitely exploited. The browser extension makes adding things effortless, and it is unopinionated about organization, allowing you to organize with tags, hierarchy, or a mix. Items can be in multiple collections (folders), which is amazing.
ocr-my-pdf is a simple command line tool that wraps tesseract and makes adding an optical character recognition layer to PDFs easy. In English: it makes the text in a PDF selectable. It has lots of options, and is easy to automate with.
If you just want something that works inside Zotero, check out zotero-ocr, which is also tesseract based.1
Fastmail is a great, cheap, reliable email provider. They’re not weird crypto-libertarians like Proton Mail. Besides, using Proton Mail sucks. You have to use their bridge client to use it in normal IMAP/SMTP clients, and good luck on iOS. It’s slow, expensive, and you only get the security benefits they so widely tout if you exclusively email other Proton users.
Fastmail has a good UI, will happily generate configuration profiles for your iDevices or just let you set it up yourself, and it’s so cheap. I pay $6 a month to have email on what can only be described as an embarrassingly high number of domains. My Christmas present for my dad was migrating the family domain from Google Apps to Fastmail, saving us ~$200 a year.
The static site generator this blog is built with. It’s highly customizable but still easy to use, and it’s pretty fast. I pay $0 to host this site by using Cloudflare2 Pages to build and host the files.
It came with your iMacPhonePadPod
I just really like it.
These are the best tools I own. They’re a pretty penny, but they feel amazing, have some magic patented design that makes them not destroy your bolt heads. Treat yourself to good tools so you’ll keep fixing and building and making.
ExcalidrawZ is a local Excalidraw client for Mac. Excalidraw is a really nice, fast and simple whiteboarding tool. I use it all the time, from taking notes in class3 to helping thinking through a complex idea, design or flow.
I love my bike, it’s the best. It feels like an extension of me in the most freeing, beautiful way.
If you’re a CitiBike member, you can get a key for free. It’s a little NFC doodad that you can throw on your keychain. To unlock a bike, you stick it in the dock or tap the front of the bike. Even better, if you have Lyft Pink (which I only have because it’s a better deal than the CitiBike subscription–I don’t use any of the other perks), it even works in other cities!
It’s just a good app. They offer free subscriptions to students or anyone else who can’t pay (email them), and have a cool blog where they talk about their cool tech.
I’ve got a pair of Doc Marten chelseas and some Hokas for running. They’re great. Both inspire confidence and make me want to use my Lamborfeeties.