Mine is Local Send which is a FOSS alternative similar to air drop that works across a variety of devices.
Well, I guess we’re a little past the year mark but I really like Lemmy and Jerboa lol.
Beets. Awesome CLI tagging manager for music libraries.
paperless-ngx, after having to turn my apartment upside down to find some paper documents.
Thank you for reminding me of this one! I keep forgetting to try it out
Oh wow! Every now and then I feel like I needed something like this. Thanks!
I didn’t discover it this uear, but I started using QGIS professionally when the small city that hired me to, among a lot of other duties, be the new GIS department.
Turns out they thought ArcGIS cost the same as like Office or Acrobat, and they didn’t budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.
Anyway, I’ve gotten pretty good with QGIS, and we’re sticking with it. It does everything I need it to do, and I can still pull stuff from most REST servers.
We’ve been using QGIS at my company for almost 8 years at this point and I really love it. The python integration and deep plugin repository render it head and shoulders above ESRI. Although I admit for enterprise solutions many will still require the turn-key solutions esri offer.
As a GIS person all I can is …fuck yeah. I’m for better or worse deeply embedded in the ESRI world but I’ve started dabbling in FOSS GIS software and honestly it’s all damn good. I don’t understand how ESRI charges what they do. Also, FME is amazing if you haven’t tried it yet (not free or open source) but awesome for quick visual development and data ETL.
I will give ESRI credit for their online stuff. It’s expensive, but it’s also pretty great. We’re actually thinking about getting an online subscription but no software licenses.
Honestly not a bad way to go about it
They tried to nickel and dime me on a $4000/yr product, but I’m just giving them the nickel.
I use this for architecture and it’s saved me so much time
Turns out they thought ArcGIS cost the same as like Office or Acrobat, and they didn’t budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.
ESRI is in the position that Microsoft and Adobe want to be in, a de-facto monopoly.
HomeAssistant, it’s such an awesome Tool. You want to combine your plant sensors with air quality sensors and an plant light? Easily done. You want to forward your mastodon follower count to an mqtt-LED-Pixel-Clock? No problem.
It’s just an amazing piece of software.
My favorite thing I’ve done with hass is put a color-changing light bulb by my front door. It’s connected to the weather forecast. I know what the weather will be at a glance without a website or going outside. (Where I live, it’s not always obvious when I’m gonna get rained on.)
Truely a nice one. The community around it is quite cool as well.
Oh nice I was wondering if there was like an all in one place to put my shitty automations. I’ve been oddly fixated on automating my blinds.
Pretty cool, I use it as well. Works with basically everything thanks to the big community.
I just wish it allowed for proper programming of the automations. I despise the YAML-as-code hack they are using. I get it, it’s much easier to offer a GUI editor for such a format. It feels very limited and cumbersome compared to regular programming though.
Has anyone done any greenhouse automation with hass? I don’t know where to start.
Yeah, as far as FOSS I almost actually can’t live without: HomeAssistant controls my spring pump to the cistern so that the pipes don’t freeze.
Termux. A Debian-based Linux system running on top of unrooted Android.
It lets you interface with your phone’s functions (GPS, calls, etc.), and install packages to extend functionality.
Turned my phone into a mobile network troubeshooting device, lets me grep through my sms, and I can ssh into my server on the go.With AnLinux you can install a full standard linux system in it, including a GUI, and connect to it with a VNC viewer. (AnLinux is just a helper script linking to some dude’s repo, so if you are at all security-minded, you can also bootstrap and install any Linux distro manually).
So you could have a Debian with Gnome desktop running on your unrooted phone.Not to mention that with proot, you can even run kernels greater than that native to your phone.
Oh my god, that’s amazing. I’m getting on something that can be rooted posthaste, but in the meanwhile…
And here I thought this is running with the Android subsystem in a limited environment utilizung “plugins” as the packages.
That sounds so coolanlinux feels like junest but configured it with gui and vnc , I might use it someday.
That sounds fucking awesome
If you’re in any flavor of academics from middle school to doctorate program or otherwise writing papers that require strict citation formatting, drop what you’re doing and click that link.
Or probably YouTube it or something first so you can see why it’s so much better than your standard internet citation generators.
Don’t forget to share the intel with your classmates!
Edit - honorable mention to Desmos for 99% of your calculator needs… with the unfortunate exception of exams, cuz phone.
I wish i knew about this during my degree
it’s the sort of tool that is really just fundamental now and should be ubiquitous and promoted and taught and talked about every where there is knowledge work. Even more so as there’s a great open source version of the tool.
This, logseq, and PKM in general for me. I guess it’s not really “can’t live without” because I hardly know where to start, but the possibilities for organizing my mess of a brain are enticing.
It would probably help to have a project to work on and actually use the things rather than diving too deep into PKM conceptually… Really wish I knew about them in school, though.
Is Desmos open source?
Apparently so! https://github.com/desmosinc
It’s actually recommended by a lot of profs now where I am, which is really nice
They overhauled the UI recently and it looks nice and modern too
Where’s the source code for the first one?
On GitHub
I’ve known about it for longer but just started using KDE Connect over the last year or so.
It’s got some bugs, at least for me. Like sometimes my phone won’t connect to my computer or like the SMS feature takes forever to load, but having something akin to Pushbullet but free from enshitification has been really great.
Warpinator works great too
Not discovered in the past year, but in the year before that:
Blender (program for 3D modelling, animation and rendering)
cobalt.tools(web-app for downloading video or audio content from youtube and other websites)
VLC (media player that plays almost everything)
media player that plays almost everything
What doesn’t it play?
I discovered that VLC isn’t so good at playing .flv files. This are video files that are saved in the Adobe Flash Video container format. I have some episodes from cartoon series which I downloaded years ago. Sometimes there are no playback issues with VLC, but sometimes the audio track is delayed. For this reason I have installed IINA, but I like VLC’s user interface better.
Thankfully, vlc’s audio offset function is very easy to quickly adjust and save. As long as the audio delay is consistent you can adjust it pretty quickly.
Weirdly enough I often find things playing back better in IINA than VLC even though as I understand it they’re basically the same under the hood. I also find the reverse occasionally as well.
The funny thing is that said .flv files could be played with VLC without any issue at the time I acquired them. I downloaded a bunch of cartoon episodes in this file format back in 2010 (?) when once-click-hosters like Megavideo were a big thing then. I was able to play them with the then current version of VLC without any problems.
Since then there were several updates with VLC and some time along the way it suddenly didn’t work that good anymore. I might add that this file format is not very common today (it was, when Adobe Flash was still around), so today there might be no incentive to maintain any old codecs for these type of files any longer.
When it gets worse with dwindling playback compatibility I probably have to acquire these files with a more recent file format (e.g. .mp4) in the future.
You can convertí the files in another playable format with Handbrake, probably you Won’t need Change the codecs of the files only the container and the conversión will be fast than reencoding all
Yes, this would be an option (that I did not think of). But I assume that it would be easier to download the same file in another file format, as there will be probably an improvement regarding the video resolution (480p versus 1080p or higher).
I Think so.
You can, but it’s a lot of number crunching time to convert a bunch of files like that, as opposed to just using a different player.
Yep, but if it only he need to remux then is less time than reencoding.
It also in more recent years had an update that messed with it’s vcd playback ability. Don’t remember exactly the problem but I had a rip of an old vcd and was pleased that it played it back no trouble, and even from the original disc too but then a couple of years later it changed so I had to do something to extract an mpeg2 stream or something to get it to work and it from then on had audio issues that had never been there before.
It can’t go back one frame at a time yet has no problem going forward at the same pace.
Pathetic.
Are there any FOSS apps that can do this? MPV can move frame by frame but moving back is so unusably slow.
Depends on the machine and… maybe other things. I used to think that, too, but on my current machines I can step backwards just fine.
It’s probably a much more intensive operation requiring processing a lot of the file from before and throwing away current buffers or something.
The Stargate SG-1 DVDs for some reason. All others I tried work fine.
Banjo
It’s not good at displaying anime fansubs if they have complex typesetting. I have to use MPC-HC + madVR. Sadly those fansub styles are a dying breed…
Corrupted files
Need to keep Cobalt Tools in mind. Was looking for something like that.
How does it compare to yt-dlp?
Warning, I might be wrong:
yt-dlp seems to be operated with command lines, whereas cobalt is a user interface in an opened browser tab. You paste the link of the desired video or audio source into a search bar and you can toggle different settings (bitrate, file format, video output size etc.). The desired file will be appearing as a download into your download folder.
Ooh nice - if it is indeed a UI it would be perfect for my grand-aunt. We went through many such alternatives, but all stopped working after a while
You might be lucky: there is a gui availiable for yt-dlp on GitHub. I just looked it up. The descripition reads:
Graphical interface for the command line tool yt-dlp, which allows users to download videos from various websites, including YouTube. It is designed to be more user-friendly and accessible for those who are not comfortable using the command line.
Link: https://github.com/dsymbol/yt-dlp-gui
Edit/addition:
There are online services availiable (for instance https://yt5s.com/en173) that basically do the same as Cobalt.tools. I assume that they don’t put any emphasis on privacy tho.
I didn’t know cobalt.tools was OSS. cool!
PCSX2. It’s an open-source PS2 emulator, and a dang good one at that. It has a high degree of compatibility and functionality. I absolutely adore it since so many of my favorite games happen to be PS2 games, and after playing some of my favorite games on this emulator, I realized just how much the PS2’s native resolution doesn’t do the graphics of the PS2’s best games justice.
It is also free and available for Windows, Linux, and macOS!
And if you haven’t used it in a while, we recently made a blog post giving a rundown of the changes leading up to our most recent major release.
Love PCSX2. I play a lot of old games as they have a charm to them and no micro transactions
Same! Have you played the Ratchet and Clank original trilogy? The old games have this special charm to them that I don’t really see in the newer games of the series.
If you happen to have easy access to the ROM, how’s “Star Wars: Racer Revenge” run?
It’s the less popular but more fleshed out spiritual successor to the N64 pod racing game - the PS2’s take nailed the physics - the two engines and racer pod are (or at least feel like) three separate entities, and playing in first person view with the engines controlled separately by the left and right joysticks feels fucking magical.
Tried to run it on PCSX2 years ago, but it was one of the few games that meshed so poorly with the emulator that it wasn’t playable. I’m guessing the emulator has seen some improvements since then - could definitely use a nice shot of nostalgia.
I haven’t played that game yet! But there’s an excellent wiki which allows you to check each game’s compatibility. It looks as though the game has some issues with visual glitches when rendering in hardware mode. In software mode, it is rendered more accurately but the resolution cannot go beyond PS2 native.
I haven’t played much of the older ones, but I really enjoyed Rifts Apart. It’s beautiful, but it’s also mechanically super polished and fluid, and while the storytelling isn’t really my style, I think they do it reasonably well.
- URLCheck: Bring back the “open link with…” functionality of android with so many more features
- PassAndroid: I was looking for a wallet-type app to store tickets. This is the perfect combination of simple but works.
I also started using KDEConnect recently just for the remote input function and I already consider it essential.
KDE connect is 🔥🔥🔥
+1 for urlcheck and add Rethink firewall for me
I actually tried fWallet first but it couldn’t import my .pkpass file at the time and it didn’t show any errors so I just gave up. I might try it again next time I have a ticket.
Hmm, that’s weird. It worked just fine for me. I even tried it with a file that I exported from Apple Wallet, it worked just fine in fWallet.
I just checked out fWallet and it doesn’t support importing random PDFs so that’s a huge downside to me since a lot of events I attend only send a PDF with barcodes/QR codes.
Oh I only thought about the .pkpass use case, as that’s what I’ve been using PassAndroid for, before I switched to fWallet.
Obviously KDE Connect is amazing but URL check is really great too, pretty much every link on my phone goes through it first
I second URL check
My RSS reader! I use NetNewsWire.
NetNewsWire is amazing. I just wish they had a browser version I could use on a non Mac device.
Adding to RSS.
I use FreshRSS to sync to Readably over Fever API.
Works very well!
RSS reader are a game changer. Ill have a look at this one. At the moment im using fluent reader
Vorta for Borg Backup - for linux and MacOS. You use it remotely but I use it for local backup because a) its encrypted b) its Borg so awesome and c) easy to use. I just pointed it at my home directory, told it where to place the encrypted backups and how often to make them.
I’ve had to recover files twice and recovery is just as easy as set up.
And something like this can be used as the docker server to hold the repository
Revanced
Gotta be my Synology NAS. Although the hardware isn’t free. The software is open source.
I moved always from every cloud storage provider to my own private cloud instead! Could not be happier!
My wife loves it too!
Edit: Sorry! Looks like some parts of the Nas is open. Not DSM itself.
Is this a new thing? AFAIK, Synology used to be open source, but then went closed source several years ago. Which is, when the Xpenology project was born.
I sold my Synology NAS as soon as I found out, that I can’t change the underlying software (DiskStationManager). It wasn’t open source and the hardware was dependent on that propriatary software. As soon as they decide, that your device is too old, they drop support and you are left with an unsecure brick.
And you are saying the software is open source. Did I miss something? Did something change?
My bad I think. Looks like some parts of the Synology Nas is open source but not DSM directly.
I think it’s closed source indeed, but their support window is very long at the moment, so while you’re right, at least until now they’re actually acting responsibly.
It would be easy to unlock the devices for different Software - like ugreen does.
And imagine all the possible backdoors in their software. No one can check, because it is closed source. And this on a device with your most senisble data.
Calling their acting ‘responsible’ is a huuuge strech.
By your definition no closed source company can act responsibly. If that is your definition, they indeed don’t act responsibly, my point is that they appear to ship security updates for at least a decade after the device got released, which seems pretty decent. And they have a good record on quickly responding to any security issues and keeping everything up to date.
So they’re doing pretty good. Would it be nice if they go open source? for sure, but for a closed source system, it’s currently doing great.
Yep, my DS415+ is still going strong and fell out of DSM support, so I’m stuck with DSM7.1. However, people successfully converted their xx15+ to a xx17+ model and were able to update to DSM7.2. So there’s no technical reason to not support these older systems.
Also, I had a very bad experience with Synology support when the C2000 bug hit my DS415+. Once this thing dies, I’ll definitely won’t get another Synology.
Any advice for a near (tech) illiterate newb on what to get? I only recently switched from using a patchwork of like 2 dozen different google drives to store all my stuff to a single nextcloud account through hertzner. But it costs per month, and that’s always risky with my finances. Would love to learn how to do it myself, but don’t know where to start. If it matters, I got the 5tb plan, and have 5 people on it (self included).
Here is how I (noobinoob) built my own Nextcloud-Server
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Hardware: I took the old PC from my aunt, no idea about the specs. Added 4 x 8 TB NAS HDD drives and removed the graphics card, the onboard graphic from the CPU was enough. No raid-controller, just connected the hard drives to the motherboard. In future I can add a PCI-Card with more SATA-ports.
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Software: I installed Linux Debian, put my 4 HDD drives in a btrfs-raid1 pool, encrypted them with LUCS, installed dropbear to ssh into my server when it is not started and unlocked yet, installed ddclient to update my domain with my home-IP and followed most (not all) of this guide to install nextcloud. Unfortunately, it is in german, but there are plenty of english intructions out there.
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internet-stuff: I bought a domain (10 Euro/year) and set up DynDNS. I opened the neccessary ports on my router/firewall.
I had to look up a lot of things and failed many many times, but now it works and I am very happy with it - no downtime in the last year. It took about 6-12 months to get there.
In conclusion: Your way (nextcloud on hetzner) is the much better way. You save time and money and your data is more secure.
But if you want to learn a lot of new stuff, building your own server is fun.
I understood some of that! Mostly the things like “a,” “the,” “and,” and other such technical terms. Lol
Is my data more secure on hertzner? I thought self hosting was supposed to be better for that?
It is safer in the sense that, when you selfhost, you have to take care of your own backups. You have to make sure your data is still there, even if two hard drives fail, or your house catches fire and your server burns down. Hertzner is doing that for you.
But you are right of course, from a privacy standpoint it would be much better to have your data on your own server and only send encrypted backups to a remote server like Hertzner.
That makes a lot of sense. I think I’d like to do it, eventually, if for no other reason than I am 33, and I feel like my time to learn this shit is slipping away pretty quickly sometimes, but maybe not for all my important stuff like family pictures. Start small and just make sure i can do it first, once I understand a little more
I started with 30, so not far off. My first step was to try to daily drive Linux. Best decision ever, working with a computer suddenly was fun and exciting again.
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Since when is Synology software FOSS?
