Toyguin

Break the Great Chain of Being

  • she/they/neopronouns

Hihi! My name's Phoe (/fi:/; like Phoenix or Phoebe!)

I'm your local queer, trans, polyamorous, plural, θ∆ & neurodivergent mousie! (I'm also a sheep, and also a plushie, and other things!) Look for me in your walls and bookshelves, okay?

I'm an artist, writer, knitter, crochet-er, seamstress, bookbinder and, librarian with a special interest in linguistics and the occult and esoteric. I'm usally playing video games though. Whoops!

Mid-20s, 🔞 please!

BLM, ACAB, Land Back, Free Palestine, and SO SO SO much more!

💚 Ciri 💚💙Rift💙

Temporary Header: Become Eternal


FFXIV - Phoe R'ysinge on Aether!Jenova
na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/character/36730285/

slimelia
@slimelia

i love software i love tools i love utilities. show me your favourite free and/or open-source software that people might not have heard of that you love


slimelia
@slimelia
NameDescription
Chris Titus Tech's Windows UtilityTweak Windows settings, install/update a wide range of useful software from a single screen (including some software featured on this list), run O&O Shutup directly, and has a feature to create super-small Win11 ISOs (which didn't work last time I tried it lol). Runs directly from a single command in PowerShell.
CondutionTask management software with all the standard features you expect from a modern To-Do list application.
DeblurVery fun tool to deblur a blurred image. Not particularly useful as it cannot do so accurately, but fun!
EverythingVery fast filesearch for Windows.
JERNCommand-line journaling tool, intended to be used on a USB drive. Encrypted using AES-128 encryption.
JetUMLFast, simple, free UML diagram designer.
jPDFtweak"Swiss Army Knife" for PDF files. Has a lot of incredibly useful PDF utilities.
JRNLA cute daily journaling tool with fun themes and options for daily notifications.
KDE ConnectConnect your PC to your phone - share files, links, clipboard data, notifications, remote control input, run commands, and more.
magic-wormholeCommand-line tool to send files from one machine to another by providing human-pronouncable keywords.
NiniteInstall and update all your programs at once. Chris Titus' Winutils has a similar feature & includes more software, but this is far more beginner-friendly. No command lines here! Also not that useful if you know how to install software using Winget/Scoop/Chocolatey, but again - beginner-friendly and idiot-proof!
O&O Shutup10++Windows tweaks - primarily disabling telemetry and unwanted bloat from Microsoft. Lets you switch off all the AI bullshit in Win11! This tool can also be opened from within Chris Titus' Winutils.
PlayniteGames library for your games libraries - consolidate GOG, Steam, Itch, and just about everything into one application where you can search & filter your library.
QOwnNotesMarkdown note-taking software. Simple and lightweight without the overload of bloat and features competitors like Obsidian or Notion have.
QTodoTxt To-do manager - a GUI frontend for the todo.txt plaintext format.
RetroSharePeer-to-peer chat, file sharing, mail, forums, channels, boards, and more - almost like a self-contained peer-to-peer social network.
StacherGUI frontend for yt-dlp - a downloader for YouTube videos and also many many other websites. (I use it to get Twitter videos!)
tldr pagesCommand-line tool for simple manual pages - has basic usage and examples for many popular CLI applications.
Winaero TweakerAllows you to make various miscellaneous changed to Windows
Zim - A Desktop WikiPersonal Wiki software with ability to publish files to HTML. Can be minimalist or feature-rich depending on how many plugins you enable.

i have more installed on my home desktop PC that i'm surely forgetting but it was 33°C yesterday so i was NOTTTT turning that computer on

edit: 2024-08-13 @539 - added Winaero Tweaker, O&O Shutup, CTT Winutils, Ninite and Stacher


funbil
@funbil
NameDescription
WinDirStat A program that visualizes all the space being taken up on a hard drive to make quick and easy work of disk cleanup. File types are organized by color and larger files/groups of files take up physically more space in the diagram. The ultimate in maintaining hard drive space.
JDownloader A download manager which makes downloading a simple "set and forget" endeavor. It automatically detects all downloads on a webpage and gives you the choice of which to download and where they should be downloaded. Easily pause and resume downloading large file collections or those from websites with slow connection speeds without needing a browser tab active. My typical use cases include browsing the Internet Archive or bypassing arbitrary paywalls.
Foobar The best music library software. Have complete control over the organization, presentation, and playback preferences of your music collection. Unparalleled in the customization of your music listening experience. Also has Discord integration!
Dark Audacity A community-managed open source branch of the best freeware audio recording/editing software. I personally switched to this when the main branch was under suspicion of security risks and disagreeable management. I don't remember exactly what came of that, because I never felt the need to return to it since this community-maintained branch is much easier on the eyes and free of any possible corporate meddling. Simply a better Audacity.
Jellyfin Similar to Playnite mentioned in OP, this is a user interface for your general media library. Video files (TV shows, movies, etc.), audio files (music, podcasts, etc.) and PDFs (ebooks, manga, etc.) can all be accessed and shared across multiple devices (including being shared with friends!) through this intuitively streamlined interface. Needs to be set up with a server (I recommend Tailscale; here's a guide for this exact setup (If I can do it, you can too!)), but I reckon the average Cohost user won't be too scared off by that.
Libreoffice A complete and fully functional replacement for Microsoft Office and the Google Drive suite. For documents, spreadsheets, and slide presentations, there's really no reason to use anything else anymore. Linux users will know her well.

Seven-Cute-Fish
@Seven-Cute-Fish
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in reply to @slimelia's post:

in reply to @slimelia's post:

i too love tools! a lot that i hadn't heard of in here and some look useful for me, thanks.

total plug, but i wrote netcrab, a pretty good swiss army knife of tcp/udp connectivity a while back.

you didn't mention the sysinternals tools, but a lot of them are extremely useful, process explorer, process monitor, procdump, and psexec especially.

ripgrep is the best regex search program i've used.

icacls.exe is a great built-in windows util for inspecting and changing permissions of files

when my keyboard forgets its repeat delay i've been using keyrate to fix it quickly from the command line

another plug, i wrote a small utility to renumber files with a pattern you select.

and another utility called outtime to prefix stdout output with the timestamp when it was emitted. generally used to pipe output into.

spy++ is very good for inspecting win32 window messages and windowing stuff, at least in some programs

about all i can think of at the moment

Windows PowerToys is a free bundle of little QOL utilities from Microsoft. Out of the 25-ish available utilities, there's some real stand-outs that I use every day.

  • FancyZones lets you snap windows to pre-defined or custom layouts, sorta like a better version of Aero Snap mixed with a tiling window manager.
  • PowerRename gives you a right-click option in Explorer to bulk-rename files and directories using regular expressions. (I've been doing a lot of renaming video files lately, and this is so much easier to use than manually writing a Python script every single time.)
  • File Locksmith tells you what programs are using a file, and gives you the option to kill them.
  • Crop And Lock lets you take an arbitrary section of a window and output it to a little preview window. (If I need to keep an eye on something like food delivery status and I don't want to have an entire browser window open, it comes in handy.)

Another useful program is ShareX. It's a Swiss army knife for screen capture - you can take Snipping Tool-like regional screenshots, record GIFs, take scrolling screenshots, automatically upload captures to file sharing sites, and a boat-load of other stuff too.

in reply to @funbil's post:

Thirding, and for anyone reading this, “faster” here means seconds rather than minutes.

See also: Everything, as an alternative to Windows’ search. So much faster, and it actually searches your whole system.

i personally have taken to using wiztree instead of windirstat as it is literally dozens of times faster (scanning a multi terrabyte drive in seconds instead of minutes). it is free but unfortunately not open source.

I'm not a big PC user but there are some cool mobile apps that I definitely love!

For starters: Nova Launcher goes on all my phones. This allows me to configurate the desktop of my phone as I like in a hurry, and from then on it's very easy to arrange things, set widgets, manage the screensaver, etc.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teslacoilsw.launcher

Photo Editor does just what the name promises: it's a good old photo editor with no trace of AI bullshit integrated. It delivers perfectly: it's simple to work with and useful. Maybe you need to cut a bit of a picture before sending a document, or make a quick meme, add some mark to an image, etc. The free version does all that and more.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iudesk.android.photo.editor

Podcast Addict has been my favorite app to listen to podcasts for a while. It works great to add them via RSS feed, lets you sort out easily your favorite shows, download the episodes, make a reproduction list, etc etc. The IU is clean, showing appreciation for the cover art of the podcasts.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bambuna.podcastaddict

And I really love Radio Garden: a repository of online radios around the world! Visually, you literally hover above the world map selecting radio stations anywhere, but of course you can start searching by a number of attributes: country, type of radio (sports, news, genre of music). There are also features to discover other radios: what's popular, new stations, etc.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jonathanpuckey.radiogarden

i love photo editor SO much. best android app ever honestly. i've never tried Podcast Addict, i currently use AntennaPod - it's free and open-source, no premium features and does just about everything you could ever want or need from a podcasting app. and at the end of the year it gives you listening stats like spotify wrapped! except without sharing those metrics to some corporation monetising them! :D