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geekhack Community => Other Geeky Stuff => Topic started by: jacethesaltsculptor on Sat, 04 January 2020, 20:19:50
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There have been a few pieces of software over the years that have changed everything about how I do things, a short list would be this:
1. Google Calendar
2. Deliveries (The MacOS App)
3. Terminology terminal. (Linux)
4. Nomachine (from windows to other OSes)
I could talk about all, and in time I probably will, but the one that changed everything for me the most was: Zerotier.
This is such a strange piece of software to describe, and I feel like I never do it right, but it in a way makes a VPN out of as many machines as you connect to it, but breaks down the connections so that they don't go all to one point and then relay, like with a VPN, they connect peer to peer, or as close as possible.
This allowed me to access my documents from across the planet quite safely, and ssh around with more security and minimal fuss. It also lets me interact with my Webserver more directly, and a variety of other things.
What it does is create a network interface on your machine, then you interact with all the other machines on the Zerotier network that you have created, as though they were all on the same LAN. It makes sharing files between friends easier for me too. (Lots of Linux user's in my friends group.) As well as share machines. I have a friend who remoted into a machine of mine to run complicated math with my excess compute cycles.
I still scour the net from time to time to find other pieces of software that may change everything for me again.
What about you? What software changed everything?
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Sound Source is fantastic on a mac if you want to control audio sources while connected over hdmi or usb c or whatever else. It's $29 so feels a little pricey just to get something back apple should have given you in the first place but it works well. I do recommend the trial though to make sure it works before using it as I had a friend not able to do what he wanted with it and was pretty bummed he paid for it.
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I like MS Teams. Makes office communication and file sharing very easy.
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I like MS Teams. Makes office communication and file sharing very easy.
So I'm a Unix guy by nature and trade, but this right here:
Teams, and the Phone app, these are really cool bits of software that I just don't understand how Microsoft doesn't shout from the rooftops more. They advertise very little of the new things they are doing that are legitimately well built and good pieces of software.
I do dislike Microsoft for quite a few reasons, but I'll admit that from time to time they put out a good feature. I just wish they'd advertise them more.
I still surprise people by telling them I can text from Windows, using a Microsoft App.
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Software and systems they enabled me to do that sticked with me over the past years:
First YNAB, now hledger (macOS) - I have been using YNABs envelope budgeting system for 5 years now and it is a blessing for me. Gone are the days when impulse buys made me worry about future expenses. Now everything is budgeted and if a purchase exceeds a budget I have to think about from what budget I have to sacrifice money. I have transitioned to hledger two years ago and never looked back.
Docker (Linux) - This has made my life as a developer so much better. I use it personally to deploy self-hosted applications within minutes. I can go into more detail but it is a bit specific.
Things (iOS) - My inbox for all sorts of tasks and information. Things enables me to stay focused and dump all ideas and "need to look at later" stuff into one inbox. I have 15 minutes scheduled each day to look at the inbox and decide if the task is really worth my time, if yes it gets moved to a specific area and can be pulled when I am ready for it.
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So I'm a Unix guy by nature and trade, but this right here:
Teams, and the Phone app, these are really cool bits of software that I just don't understand how Microsoft doesn't shout from the rooftops more. They advertise very little of the new things they are doing that are legitimately well built and good pieces of software.
I do dislike Microsoft for quite a few reasons, but I'll admit that from time to time they put out a good feature. I just wish they'd advertise them more.
I still surprise people by telling them I can text from Windows, using a Microsoft App.
I hurd from microsoft wurkers that they had an extremely toxic culture @ microsoft throughout the later gates/ballmer days. The new CEO has come in attempting to change that.
Their teams are also full of Older-Dudez, and u know how computer Geeks in the 60s-80s are like, they don't have the flashy personality of today's young folk.
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As simple as it is:
-Notes on iOS and Mac OS.
-AirDrop on Mac OS and iOS.
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https://getgreenshot.org/ for taking screenshots, very handy, includes a pretty good image editor, can send to loads of destinations like Outlook, Paint, Word, Printer, built in image editor etc.
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-Notes on iOS and Mac OS.
Ur not worried Apple will steal your 11 secret herbs and spices.
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VirtualBox. The ability to endlessly experiment with new software and OSs was a game changer for me.
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I use telegram all the time now after I was introduced to it. I used to think encrypted messengers were too complex to use and it always put me on edge to know that what i wrote would come back and bite me some day. I know some would say the innocent have nothing to fear, but I find you can't please everyone all the time so it is an impossible task to try. I don't have many other ways to meet others rather than online.
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Premiere Pro and Blender with its wide range of plugins and other stuff changed the game in how i can create content and videos. Free if you crack premiere pro i guess.....
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VirtualBox. The ability to endlessly experiment with new software and OSs was a game changer for me.
I could probably talk at length about this too, this software blew my younger mind, and I still use it nearly daily.
I use Proxmox because of Virtualbox, and I learned tons about linux by using it.
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I don't even know what to say. Probably I can mention some of them. Visual studio for sure because that's how I started coding. EspoCRM (https://www.espocrm.com/download/) is the second one because it means a lot for my work process and communication between co-workers.
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Sublime text 2 with many, many, […] many tweaks. Because for me it’s very fast, there is many packages, and this isn’t a click factory.
Synergy : Drive multiple OS / Computer with a single keyboard / mouse is very powerfull. I have buyed synergy 1 & 2 a long time ago but for some reason this isn’t stable anymore…
Paint.net, like paint but more powerfull.
and…
QMK
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Sublime text 2 with many, many, […] many tweaks. Because for me it’s very fast, there is many packages, and this isn’t a click factory.
Synergy : Drive multiple OS / Computer with a single keyboard / mouse is very powerfull. I have buyed synergy 1 & 2 a long time ago but for some reason this isn’t stable anymore…
Paint.net, like paint but more powerfull.
and…
QMK
It's a shame what happened to Synergy.
I am using Barrier atm, it's a free fork of synergy. I think it's still being developed. https://github.com/debauchee/barrier - although last commit was in December.
Hopefully they are still working on it because there are a few kinks.
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Premiere Pro and Blender with its wide range of plugins and other stuff changed the game in how i can create content and videos. Free if you crack premiere pro i guess.....
I have friends who had sworn off Premiere in favor of whatever native editing application they used. Needless to say we exchanged some strong words and now they see the light.
And blender used to be such garbage with a killer learning curve. With the most recent couple of iterations, it has really become an application that's friendly enough to the point that anyone should be able to use it. But seriously I remember back in 2010 trying to use it... yikes, and I've heard before that it was even worse.
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Google Maps / GPS, seriously, I was recently trying to remember life before I had Google Maps on my phone and had to actually remember step by step directions.
I almost think it's making people lose the ability to hold directions in their heads, or communicate them to others. If I had to tell someone how to get somewhere that involved more than 4 or 5 turns... honestly, I'm not sure that I could do it.
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There's been several.
Networking, Hamachi, VNC, Team Viewer - all allowed me to do more work from home.
Crashplan - cheap, easy remote backups, unfortunately it's gone and nothing has replaced it. This was a major loss.
Windows 2000 - The first truly GOOD Windows, it laid the groundwork for XP.
Linux - Windows be gone.
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Windows XP, ran everything great until microsoft forced DirectX 11 on us.
MPCHC, Plays all the videos
Lav Filter, video decoding, dedicated team, fast update
Madvr NGU, AI upscaling without image haloing.
Displaycal, Everything is the right color.
HCFR, Gooder tone response.
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DOOM
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AutoHotKey makes relevant, professional tech support emails soooo much easier. A few strokes and you get your favorite paragraphs right there. With AHK, I could crank out 60-100 informative, personalized emails per day (it was still insane, very glad to no longer do that).
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Vim
Python
Sed/Grep/Awk
Flux
IRC, and then Discord
All totally transformed how I do what I do with computers for the better, really paradigm-shifting software.
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Vim
Python
Sed/Grep/Awk
Flux
IRC, and then Discord
All totally transformed how I do what I do with computers for the better, really paradigm-shifting software.
True story, Flux made me a nicer person. It allowed me to realize just how poorly I was sleeping in the evenings, I never ever thought it'd make a huge difference.
when I first used it, it was such a dramatic difference with how much better I slept, and then how much nicer I was to people after that.
It's one of the first pieces of software on any new machine of mine.
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- SCCS made me love version control again.
- Acme made me happily use a mouse.
- Perl (Mojolicious) broke my stubborn mind about using a non-compiled language for web development.
- iOS turned me from a Windows user into a system-agnostic user.
- Pandora Mail (for Windows) makes e-mail a funny thing to do again.
- Go (the language) has finally drawn me away from C.
Everything else does not really change anything for me.
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Lots of interesting software mentioned in this thread.
To me it'd be Linux (more precisely Slackware Linux, back in the mid nineties). I've been using Linux on the desktop ever since (and back then it took a real leap of faith).
Second contender is Emacs.
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Crashplan - cheap, easy remote backups, unfortunately it's gone and nothing has replaced it. This was a major loss.
I don't know Crashplan but I know Backblaze has quite a (apparently well deserved) cult following. They're cheap and their blog posts are great (I love their trimestrial breakdowns about which hard disks models are the most reliable: they have so many they do know).
They're also "not MS, not Google, not Amazon" but a smaller player, which is always nice.
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I don't know Crashplan but I know Backblaze has quite a (apparently well deserved) cult following. They're cheap and their blog posts are great (I love their trimestrial breakdowns about which hard disks models are the most reliable: they have so many they do know).
Crashplan today is actually just a reseller for Backblaze or Mozy or some other backup vendor, that was not always the case.
Crashplan used to offer their own remote backup just like those, but what made it truly great was you could backup your computer to a friends computer for free. This allowed you to setup a computer at your office and another at home and let it back up each without any monthly fees. It did this automatically, incrementally and with encryption and best of all, it was extremely easy to setup on Windows and Linux (possibly Mac as well).
By the way,
Backblaze's drive stats are completely pointless for you and frankly, pretty much everyone but Backblaze and I wish they would stop publishing them. Their drives are written to one time, read a few times for data verification then it sits there idle for the rest of it's life. By comparison, your home drive writes only a little now and then and reads lots. Completely different use case and one never intended for by the manufacturer.
On top of that, their drives are mounted improperly and therefore subject to TONS, and I do mean tons of vibration, which is one of the biggest killers of spinning disks. Enterprise drives are rated by how many drives you can put into a case because of the vibration from the drives, only recently has anyone made a drive meant for the numbers that Backblaze puts into a case... Not that it matters because Backblaze uses consumer grade drives, which are rated for only about one drive per case.
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I like MS Teams. Makes office communication and file sharing very easy.
Teams so good. We started using it recently and it is wayyy better than Skype or WebX.
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I am a simple man... Photoshop and Illustrator changed my life.
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Crashplan used to offer their own remote backup just like those, but what made it truly great was you could backup your computer to a friends computer for free. This allowed you to setup a computer at your office and another at home and let it back up each without any monthly fees. It did this automatically, incrementally and with encryption and best of all, it was extremely easy to setup on Windows and Linux (possibly Mac as well).
Ooooohh I can see the appeal of that: thinking about doing something similar with my brother (who lives on another continent). Was the encryption done by CrashPlan itself or was it something you added yourself on top of Crashplan?
Interesting re- the BackBlaze HDD stats!
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Winamp changed everything for me when it came to music and then to a lesser extent Sonique, which I loved for introducing me to application skinning and visualisers.
iOS changed me from a guy who had used a dozen Windows CE and Windows Mobile devices over the years. The introduction of an app management system for a mobile device utterly changed my previous experience of software installation being a very manual process. That was probably the biggest change for me; it really redefined the mobile experience and hasn't stopped.
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Ooooohh I can see the appeal of that: thinking about doing something similar with my brother (who lives on another continent). Was the encryption done by CrashPlan itself or was it something you added yourself on top of Crashplan?
It did all of it itself (forgot, it also did revisions).
If I remember right, to share they had to type in the code you gave them 8 digits(?), you had to enable it (a single check box) and authorize them (an ok button).
Seriously awesome bit of software.
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OS,iOS
PS, AI, AE, Freechat, Quip, Evernote,
Notes got ll my memories
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Onedrive/Dropbox.
I was always the worst at backing **** up. With a terabyte of storage I don't really lose anything anymore.
Also do work with two other people and having everything shared in other offices and across multiple devices without any fiddling is very convenient.
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Onedrive/Dropbox.
I was always the worst at backing **** up. With a terabyte of storage I don't really lose anything anymore.
Also do work with two other people and having everything shared in other offices and across multiple devices without any fiddling is very convenient.
Yeah, keeping my personal one drive available on my work machine and all my various device and having my work onedrive available at home really has been a game changer. I'm able to keep things like AutoHotkey scrips updated across all the devices.
In the same vein, BackBlaze is pretty awesome, it keeps all my drives backed up offsite without really having to think about it and though I've never had to use it, they'll ship you your data on an HDD so that you don't need to download it all, then you can send the disk back or buy it from them.
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Fraps video capture software immensely simplified the way in which I create video preview files of laser shows for customers. Two mouse clicks and three key presses is all it takes. Previously, I had to use the proprietary laser show software which had file-size and resolution limitations, not to mention spitting the file out as an .avi which had to be converted to something more manageable.
Also, Google Calendar changed the way in which my wife and I deal with scheduling. I can't even remember how I kept track of everything before that.
Honorable mention goes to Roll20, the online virtual table-top gaming platform. It provides a way for my gaming groups to continue getting together for goblin smashing during social distancing.
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QuarkXpress. Totally changed my life and extended my career. Graphic design was beginning to bore me and then I stumbled on Quark and that was it. I use InDesign these days, but it, while having many more features than Quark did back then, has never become an extension of my creativity the way that Quark was able to become. I know that sounds weird, and maybe even corny, but that's how I felt. I know Luke Skywalker had a nifty mechanical right hand, but I bet he still missed his real hand from time to time. That's how it feels.
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QuarkXpress. Totally changed my life and extended my career. Graphic design was beginning to bore me and then I stumbled on Quark and that was it. I use InDesign these days, but it, while having many more features than Quark did back then, has never become an extension of my creativity the way that Quark was able to become. I know that sounds weird, and maybe even corny, but that's how I felt. I know Luke Skywalker had a nifty mechanical right hand, but I bet he still missed his real hand from time to time. That's how it feels.
Ha, haven't thought about Quark in years. When I was in secondary school we we did the Young Enterprise program and ended up designing a board game for the final project. I edited so many damn question cards in QuarkXPress. Then when I was in college, I edited the student union magazine and moved to InDesign and never looked back.
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QuarkXpress. Totally changed my life and extended my career. Graphic design was beginning to bore me and then I stumbled on Quark and that was it. I use InDesign these days, but it, while having many more features than Quark did back then, has never become an extension of my creativity the way that Quark was able to become. I know that sounds weird, and maybe even corny, but that's how I felt. I know Luke Skywalker had a nifty mechanical right hand, but I bet he still missed his real hand from time to time. That's how it feels.
QuarkXPress: now you got me started! I spent hours typesetting books on a Mac running old MacOS versions (pre X). Basically 20 years ago I was writing computer books for a big french publisher. First book I didn't typeset myself, but after seeing the people working at my publisher's offices with Macs and QuarkXPress I told them: "Next book I want to typeset it myself, can you teach me to use that software?".
And so I learned QuarkXPress. I even wrote entire books directly into QuarkXPress (which usually nobody would do: we'd just that Word or txt files or whatever, remove all formatting, and start the typesetting from scratch from just the plain text). Then because I was fast at it, I'd also typeset books from other authors (and pay for typesetting was per page, so if you were fast, it was easy money).
But my favorite book I wrote it in LaTeX and did typeset it, well, using LaTeX. It was a fight with the publisher and was quite hard to reproduce the exact book layout the publisher used for all its book. But in the end it worked fine and it's the one I'm probably the most proud of.
Back then we'd all have LaserJet 4M+ printers, those with the PostScript modules. We'd print copies to be proofread: 300 to 450 pages. And these printers would happily do the job (they weren't the fastest and only 600 ppm but it was only for proofreading).
I still have a few LaserJet 4M+ printer, including some I upgraded myself (font cartridge, more RAM, ethernet cards). One of these has printed more than 300 000 pages and was still working last time I tried it.
I sometimes miss these days back when I was writing/typesetting books : )
P.S: and IMO Quark screwed up big times several things... They totally missed the move to OS X (QuarkXPress was really running crappy on OS X at first), their PC / Windows version was horrible at a time when more and more people started typesetting on PCs instead of only Macs and... InDesign came and was way ahead. A sad story for such an influencial software.
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Greenshot all day
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Quite a few software project that has changed how I work or view things. GNU and Fsf has had a large impact of how I view software, and the whole Linux community. Further, there are a lot of elegant programing languages that are helping me a lot.
But otherwise:
* Vim. When I switched from coding in IDEs to text editors and then converged to Vim my workflow improved significantly.
* Ranger. A CLI file manager. There are a log of others to choose from, but this was the first I used and it has stuck.
* i3wm. i3 was the first window manager I started using. There are a lot of other ones to choose from.
* Suckless.org. Their software philosophy is inspiring. The terminal "st" is nice, and the window manger "dwm".
* Autojump. An simple and easy way to navigate the CLI.
* TeX. Donald Knut is a hero.
On a daily basis I use: Vim, Zathura, Cmus, Qutebrowser, Ranger, Autojump, (Python, Julia, Bash).
Running Debian atm, and have some dotfiles and install scripts if anyone is curious:
https://github.com/HanssonMagnus/dotfiles-Debian
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I won't go into the obvious ones like VLC or Realplayer, being the first easy to use universal mediaplayers out there, or indeed Opera, with its tabbed browsing and **** like that, but the one that I love is Wallpaper Engine. It allows animated wallpapers, both 3d rendered, 2d rendered, and video, and you can choose a different one for each screen or one for all of them, and so on. Here's a small video I just made that shows how it can work.
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Warcraft 2
Diablo
Starcraft
Homeworld
Napster
Winamp
Bittorrent
Kazaa
Warcraft 3
Kazaa lite
Diablo 2
muTorrent
VLC
MPC
MPCHC
Madvr
Displaycal
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Numpy and Scipy - Once I started using those, I have been using excell less and less.
Gnuplot - Great tool for just throwing data up and seeing what sticks. I use it along with numpy for my daily work (I know, I should be using matplotlib in python)