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Apps and tools I use every day v3

big list of apps and other stuff i use on the daily

  ·   Updated:

iOS Apps

  • Bitwarden - Password manager with autofill, 2FA, lots of power user features. Also desktop app and Firefox extension.
  • BookPlayer - Audiobook player for non-DRM files. Can AirDrop a folder of mp3s to your phone and import quickly.
  • Delta - Nintendo emulator. Roms source.
  • Immich - App/syncing utility for my Immich instance
  • LinkThing - Read-it-later for linkding
  • Obsidian - Current markdown notetaking program I use (cross-platform)
  • Infuse Switched to VidHub for Jellyfin. Also on Apple TV.
  • Overcast - Podcast app. Since for some godforsaken reason there are no good podcast apps with filtering, you can use siftrss to filter podcast feeds when the titles include “Bonus” or “Preview” or whatever to just completely ignore previews of premium episodes in free feeds. Adding the filtered siftrss feed to Overcast works perfectly.
  • Pushover - Notification platform. $5 one-time fee per-device; I only have it activated for iOS.
  • Reeder 5 - RSS reader that plugs into my FreshRSS instance. I like the pull navigation between articles.
  • SportsAlerts - Sports scores with live activities on lock screen
  • WebSSH - SSH client
  • Zenti Meditation Timer - Meditation timer app I like

macOS Apps

  • Bitwarden - Password manager with autofill, 2FA, lots of power user features. Integrates with Firefox extension.
  • Clop - Optimizes images on your clipboard. On macOS when you copy an image in Firefox it copies a giant bitmap version and this automatically converts it to good web sharing format.
  • CotEditor - Text editor
  • Cyberduck and Mountain Duck - For browsing and mounting network drives
  • IINA - Video player (mpv wrapper)
  • MacMouseFix - Gesture navigation like swipping between spaces with a normal mouse
  • Magnet - Drag window to edge of screen to split or fill
  • Obsidian - Current markdown notetaking program I use (cross-platform)
  • Skim - PDF reader with filters

Commandline stuff

  • Homebrew - macOS command line application manager. Can install many regular GUI apps with --cask. All the cli programs in this section can be installed like brew install iterm2
  • iTerm2 - Terminal replacement. I use the Aurora color scheme from here and oh-my-zsh.
  • mpv - Video player that can be run with mpv /path/to/file or mpv <url>
  • yt-dlp - Verstaile video downloader. My config contains -S vcodec:h264,res,acodec:m4a to prioritize getting videos in iOS/macOS compatible formats (otherwise you’ll get a lot of webms).

Firefox extensions

Selfhosted apps

  • Docker - I run everything containerized through Docker on my Debian 12 homeserver.
  • FreshRSS - Self-hosted RSS reader, more of a server the way I use it since so many apps like Reeder, NetNewsWire, and newsboat support it. Supports direct xpath scraping for non-RSS websites. If you cannot figure out xpath like me, you can use the great PolitePol to pick elements and then copy the xpath schemes it generates. I also run a RSS bridge instance to complement FreshRSS.
  • Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, Lidarr, Readarr - Automated piracy stuff. I use nzbgeek and sabnzbd for nzbs and qBittorrent for torrents. Configure Radarr and Sonarr with TRaSH Guides using recyclarr.
  • Jellyfin for watching pirated movies & TV. I use VidHub for iOS/tvOS and jellyfin-mpv-shim on desktop, but watching in browser usually works fine.
  • Audiobookshelf - Audiobook manager
  • Immich - Like Google Photos. Has iOS app that backups albums.
  • Linkding - Read-it-later. LinkThing on iOS but Safari works fine too.
  • Pihole - I run it on a Raspberry Pi to block ads through DNS

Windows apps

  • Playnite - Like Steam library but open source, offline, lots of integrations.
  • Ludusavi - PC game save backups
  • Duplicati - Encrypted backups, I like the smart scheduling compared to Task Scheduler
  • EnvyUpdate - Nvidia card updater
  • Obsidian - Current markdown notetaking program I use (cross-platform)
  • Cyberduck for browsing S3
  • WinSCP - FTP client
  • TeraCopy - For file copying
  • Snapdrop - Because no AirDrop on Windows
  • FTPbox - My Windows machine is a laptop basically only for gaming so the only thing I really ever want to get off of it is screenshots, and to have them available on my 24/7 server machine immediately, so this just one-way syncs those screenshot folders to my homeserver.

Calendar tools

A couple tips about getting stuff into your calendar app with calendar subscriptions to avoid notifications or having to check apps. I only want calendar alerts for subscribed calendars on my phone, so I’m currently using BusyCal on iOS ($10 one-time payment) to access the calendars saved to my iCloud account and Calendar.app on macOS. BusyCal lets you add arbitrary alerts to subscribed calendars.

Sports calendars through Yahoo sports

Yahoo Sports publishes calendar schedule feeds for every team they have a page for. You just add /ical.ics to the end of the team page url. For example:
https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/teams/por/ical.ics
Add that url as a calendar subscription to get all games as calendar events without any signup or ads like Stanza.

Media releases

See Sonarr, Radarr etc. section in selfhosted apps. All of those apps provide a calendar you can subscribe to to get movie releases, TV airings, book releases, and album releases in your calendar.

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