hal

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

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

alright, i'm gonna play that game too, it'll be Mac-leaning though

There's a lot, and also I'll be listing apps I forgot in the previous post.

• 1Password (cross-platform). Still the best password manager in my opinion. I am in the "1Password 8 is fine actually" camp. It is a controversial stance among Mac users and it does seem to be less reliable but I haven't had any issues and I've been a custom for 10+ years at this point.
• BetterDisplay. I use this to automatically disable my laptop's display when plugged into external monitors at work and to "fake" HiDPi resolutions on my monitors¹ on top of controlling the brightness, volume, contrast of external displays and a lot more.
• CleanShot X. My screenshot/capture utility of choice on macOS. It also has an OCR feature that I use all the time to quickly copy text on my screen.
• DaisyDisk. A killer way to quickly see what's taking space on your drives.
• Dash. IMO a must-have for any programmer, the comfort of having docs accessible offline and quickly is really nice.
• Dato. I think there are alternatives but this is the one app I use to have a customizable clock in my menubar, quickly see the next events during my day, check the time in a given timezone and join a meeting without chasing the link
• Dropshare. I only use this to upload random files publicly, see this post for details. It can do a whole lot more than what I use it for.
• FileBot (cross-platform). If you're a local media sicko, you need this app. It is a bit clunky but extremely powerful and makes renaming collections of TV shows, movies a breeze.
• Gapplin. It's supposed to be a full on SVG renderer/previewer but I don't use any of that, I just rely on it for its Quick Look plugin letting me preview SVG files inside the Finder.
• Gifski (Mac/Windows). Converts videos to GIFs, simple as.
• Ice. Allows you to hide items from your menubar.
• iStat Menus. Lets me show my CPU usage and network speeds in my menubar and quickly get a whole bunch of stats right from my menubar. One of the apps I've used the longest on the Mac I think.
• Keka. A compression/decompression utility. I do not use it for decompression because The Unarchiver (mentioned in previous post) supports more formats but Keka is useful when I want to make an archive that not just a .zip file.
• Keyboard Maestro. A super powerful tool to build macros and automations on the Mac
• Mediainfo. A GUI for the popular CLI tool mediainfo that outputs, well, info about media files.
• Meta. A nice looking and powerful tag editor for audio files.
• MusicBox. I'd describe this as a "read later app for music".
• Name Mangler. Finder has some batch renaming capabilities but Name Mangler comes in handy when I need something more complex and I can't be arsed to write a script to do it.
• Parcel. Very good delivery tracking app.
• Raycast. Spotlight is great, but Raycast allows for so so much more. The one feature I can't live without is the clipboard manager.
  • Alfred is also great. I was using for ~10 years before migrating to Raycast after realizing I didn't need all the features that Alfred offers (and also finding Alfred's look a bit dated)
• Rectangle / Rectangle Pro. My window manager of choice. There are many like this, but I like Rectangle Pro the best.
• Sleeve. Shows whatever is playing in Spotify or Apple Music on your desktop in a customizable widget and can scrobble to Last.fm
• Superkey and Hyperkey. Hyperkey lets you map the caps lock key to Alt+Control+Cmd or Alt+Control+Cmd+Shift, which can be useful when you're running out of shortcut ideas or just want to trigger a complex shortcut more easily. Superkey includes the features of Hyperkey and adds to them by making them more configurable.
• Transmit. The current version (Transmit 5) is a bit long in the tooth and is starting to show its age stability-wise but... IMO there isn't a better SFTP/FTP/more client for the Mac. Panic know what they're doing.
• xScope. One of the apps I can't live without when doing UI work. Comes with a bunch of tools to measure/zoom in on things on the screen. Once you use it, I don't think you can go back.
• XLD. A very good audio file conversion utility.

1. Like, if you want "true Retina" on a 1440p display, you basically need a 5K display and those are expensive. This lets me reap most of the clarity benefits while using any monitor I want.

…and hopefully feed reader?

want to archive your chosts on your website but have too many for the cohost web component? want something like cohost-dl except you can keep posting?

autost is my take on that. you can see what it looks like on shuppy.org:

it’s pretty much a static site generator that can import chosts. some features:

Can we recreate Cohost in a decentralized environment?

It's been great to see so many people planning to keep the Cohost community alive by sharing links to their own blogs following one another through RSS. In theory, something like Cohost should be entirely possible to recreate through decentralized networks — even as we move to different blogging platforms or create our own websites, we can use RSS to follow one another and stay in touch. The barrier of entry is incredibly low: platforms like WordPress and Tumblr already offer RSS feeds, and tools like the excellent RuSSHDown even let you create an RSS feed all on their own!

But there's still something missing... Or, well, there's plenty missing, but one thing in particular stuck out to me: reblogging. Sharing and reblogging content is a huge part of any Cohost-like system... is it possible to recreate it without relying on a centralized server?

The above is a reblog button that I've created that's intended to work on as many different systems and platforms as possible. I have a widget for creating one on the main page at rssr.bluetinge.dev, which doubles as a tool to reblog any RSS feed on the internet, and a sample page of what the results could look like here, but if you don't mind, I'd like to explain a bit about how it works first and make a case for why people should give it a try! And if you
don't have an RSS feed or blog yet, scroll to the bottom where I have a tutorial on how to get started! 

They're not impossible, they don't mean give up and go away, but from my experience and gut, I agree with Anonymous Funder that these challenges are real and they will take a lot of thoughtful, hard work -- and figuring out how to sustain that work long-term in a volunteer community dynamic.

If people want to run their own Cohost(s), which I would personally love, or future sites like it, then I highly encourage you to get together and do work like @invis has started doing on the legal and organizational aspects, which are always underrated, as well as the technical architecture problems, which are difficult even without adding federation into the mix. Open sourcing and licensing are important decisions, but largely easier and separate from the big strategy of how to run a technical organization and platform with random users who will depend on you indefinitely (and malicious users, too). I'm glad to see people proactively engaging with unsexy but crucial stuff like legal sponsorship.

As an analog that people may or may not like: People on my Mastodon feed spend some time talking about specific technical issues with the ActivityPub protocol and the server software, but a lot more time talking about how to manage the workload, moderation, interpersonal, and legal challenges of running your own Mastodon instance; how to govern the Fediverse at large; and because of all of the above, how to avoid big shutdown or defederation events that mean confused users have to scramble to move their stuff. Hell, there is very cool funded research that you should read whose only ambition is starting to get a handle on the best current Fediverse governance practices and future needs. These are Big Human Problems whether it's an open project or not, even if you just wanted to self-host a very popular phpBB.

I would be delighted if enough folks have the wherewithal and skills for it, but I have endless grace and understanding if they don't, or if the time's not right (it's not right for me, either), or if you put your efforts into improving other existing communities who also definitely need the help. If the whole basket of skills doesn't come together, then it's not Cohost 2 (at least not for long); it's just a sparkling raspberry-colored website. So I'm glad people are taking pains to anticipate these problems, or to take a point someone made and really engage with it and come back with a better solution. If it doesn't pan out, you did your besht!