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My top home software upgrades

Isaac Lyman on November 23, 2023

I've made some big changes to my personal tech ecosystem over the last few years and discovered some great applications along the way. Here are a f...
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Brisa

Affinity Photo & Designer by serif - upgraded from v1 using the Universal package deal. A fraction of the cost of Adobe CC and you get robust photo and vector apps. With the Universal package you get even more.

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Eric Murrell

Both great tools

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Camilo Martinez

Interesting list. I would like to shout-out Cryptomator an open-source project to encrypt files.

cryptomator.org/

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Michael Tharrington

Excellent list of recommendations, Isaac! Appreciate the share.

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Sephyi

Is Kagi actually worth the money? Do they provide such good results? I will check their site out later. I switched to DuckDuckGo some years ago and I'm personally very happy with it. You can personalize it and disable, for example, the voluntary ads. Oh, and you're able to easily switch between international and local results, which is a great feature for me.

I'm using Bitwarden for my passwords and 2FA. Their app also works on the Apple Watch and shows the 2FA codes there.

Obsidian is great; I'm using it myself.

As for browsers, I've been using Brave for a long time now, but I have everything like the wallet and earning money from their ads disabled. Besides some settings adjusted and with ad block on aggressive. Never had an issue. I never really warmed up with Firefox, maybe i give it another try some day.

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Isaac Lyman

I haven't used DuckDuckGo. My understanding is they might not track you like Google does but you still get ads in your search results. So they're not paid for by the user, open-source, or self-hosted, which disqualifies them from this list.

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Sephyi

The display minimal, unobtrusive ads, which are clearly marked and contribute to keeping the service free. They respect user privacy by not tracking users and provide an option to disable ads in the settings as stated. While not open-source or self-hosted, DuckDuckGo’s commitment to privacy and user control makes it a strong choice for privacy-conscious users.

So, from my understanding, the only difference is that you don’t have to pay for DuckDuckGo. Sorry if that disqualifies them. I thought of them as a valid alternative here.

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Isaac Lyman

Kagi has no ads, ever. That’s the differentiator for me. I’m paying for my own search results, so they’re incentivized to show me the ones I want.

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Sephyi • Edited

I’ve just signed up for a Kagi trial and am excited to test their service.

Edit: I gave Kagi a try and just reached their free tier limit. Honestly, it didn't quite live up to my expectations, especially considering the pricing; the search results were not better than what I get with DuckDuckGo and nothing else really stood out. Also, having to link my search history to an account is a big downside for me. But of course, everyone has their own preferences, so what didn't work for me might be ideal for someone else.

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Matt Ellen-Tsivintzeli • Edited

Great article. I definitely want to check out Kagi and mastodon.

As an aside relating to Kagi rhyming with doggy: does corgi also rhyme with Kagi, for you? Do hag and hog rhyme for you?

For me Kagi rhymes with waggy and Maggie, but not doggy.

Just very interested in the English language ❤

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Isaac Lyman • Edited

The Kagi FAQ says it’s pronounced “kah-gee,” and I interpret “ah” as a short O sound. They may have meant a short A though, as you say. There’s not really a way to distinguish between them if you write phonetically, they’d need to use IPA or something.

EDIT: They link to this YouTube video for a pronunciation demo. Definitely rhymes with "doggy."

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gautam0523

It counts as self-promotion but I really recommend replacing your Android Default Launcher with Yantra Launcher if you are a CLI enthusiast

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Peter Witham

A great list. Thanks for sharing. A minor suggestion: post the links for each one.

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Isaac Lyman

I went back and forth on that, but didn’t want anyone to think I was affiliate link farming or anything. As a community mod I see a lot of that here.

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Peter Witham

Totally understand

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Aleksandar Kostadinov

What's wrong with the open source FreeOTP that you need a payed alternative?

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Isaac Lyman

You assume I know what FreeOTP is. I don’t, but on looking it up it doesn’t appear to be nearly as highly rated. It also doesn’t support key export or connect with Apple Watch.

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Aleksandar Kostadinov

You can review it's source. Very solid. If you trust more the user ratings of proprietary apps, that's super strange but so be it.

And I'm not an apple user so I don't know about watch.

wrt key export, I'm not sure what you mean. It has a backup function. Or you need something else?

Actually though nowadays I use much more the OTP capabilities of my chosen open source password manager than the standalone OTP app.

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Nicholas Drone

Browser vivaldi, and they recently released an iPhone version.

For a search engine I use the searx public instances which scans multiple engines of bing, duckduckgo, google.

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Asanka

I would suggest Brave as a browser alternative. I have Firefox as my default, but Brave is better at blocking a lot of things by default. Including youtube ads.

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Isaac Lyman

A lot of people have some very serious concerns about Brave, though broadly I do think it's better than Chrome.