Uses

state

evergreen

in

blog (draft)

Uses

Hardware

Some of my favourite pieces of hardware

Software

Some software I particularly like.

Websites

Various websites I use

Hosted

Listed are the cheapest prices, although not necessarily what I pay for the services

Selfhosted

Colophon (How this site is made)

Gaps

• I’m not a huge fan of Obsidian, my note taking & blogging solution

Thoughts

I pay for almost each one (where of course it’s applicable), and that’s ok because I pay a fair price for the service offered. There is nothing special about these services, their forgetfulness is what makes them beautiful.

There are no flashy UI’s, no, these are often two tone. These sites are one person shows, often, so support is handled impressively fast and passionately by Steve, the founder, lead developer, and agent. Steve has no corporate interest, really, all he hopes is to make a few bucks back and keep the service running, and because of that minimalism Steve can afford to ask peanuts, say 3$ a month.

Of course, this is not indicative of all the services listed here, there are often a few steves, and it’s easy to feel as if everyone wants to make money, but it sure feels like the people on the other end of the screen care about you and their service, it’s a great feeling.

I will run a service like this, someday.

What I kept

Bitwarden

Bitwarden is ok, the UX could use work and so could the extension. Their open source stewardship could use some work. It is dirt cheap, open source, and works pretty okish, but great for it’s price, improvements are:

Extension

• Prompt to login on potential autofill, currently it just does not.
• Actually show autofill options when clicking on a login field

UX

• When I search something and click the add new item the name field should populate with whatever that search was

Stewardship

• PR’s are not really merged, they tell me they are working on this

cloudflare

We are off to a bad start, but cloudflare’s generosity is astounding. I register my domains through them because only cloudflare offers registration with zero markup.

I am aware of https://gandi.net as an alternative, but they strike me as little improvement, for a steep markup. Of course, price is not a huge factor, but their site tells a different story then their goals. They claim to support net neutrality but fail to understand what it fully is. They claim to stand up to large monopolies, but they strive to be one, offering a website builder, wordpress hosting, flash sales, referrals, and a crappy rebrand. They are not open source as they attempt to mislead. They do try, I suppose, and they live up to their claims to a certain degree with decent support and donations to open projects. Not to say cloudflare is better, they play the good guys with incredibly generous free plans. The only reason I pay them money is their domains, that are also free in the sense they don’t mark them up. The arm they have over our internet is scary though, if they wanted to they could deplatform everyone.

There is no good option here, and there never will be due to ICANN's enraging fees.
I am pleased to announce names.sr.ht is in development.

migadu

This one is unique because, well they say a picture is worth a thousand words.

It’s a nice looking company, pretty pricey but the quality of the service is worth it, plus drew’s recommendation. Migadu offers CalDav, CardDav, and way-just-enough email options. You have unlimited aliases, unlimited domains, unlimited mailboxes, and lots of options for aliases

Support was quite good in my experience. Some people shared horror stories with poor communication about issues but those stories were two years ago when covid kicked in and I am hoping they improved, I want to keep loving them.

Four cons:

• It seems as if it’s not fully open source, I have reached out about this. For a company that touts freedom as their core value (and it’s not flaky, it’s present in everything they write), it would be sad to see their UI is not free
• It was hard to find information on DAV integration even though it existed
• 200 messages a day was fine for me, but a middle ground plan with 15gb and 500 messages would be nice at 50$ a year or so.
• It’s not the same service that it was once upon a time in a pre covid world.

miniflux

For those wanting an RSS reader I highly suggest miniflux. It’s a rare app that stays in its lane, doing what it does best, reading and collecting RSS feeds. There is not much more to say here, they strive to be as minimal as possible, and therefor this review as well.

Still need to look at

• https://pinboard.in
• https://lobste.rs (free)
• https://anagora.org/ (free)

And what I ditched

neeva

Personally neeva was not for me, I was not a big fan of their ui and I prefer the ui of duckduckgo and serex, but for fans of modern ui I suggest checking it out (This link gives you three months free, it also gives me 1 month free but I won’t be using it). I have mixed feelings:

I really like what they bring to the table in regards to this idea of unified search. You can intergrate with some gardens, I intergrated with Google, Notion, and GitHub. There is no API for making new ones, and it felt like the current ones were dragging me back in the wrong direction. The existing intergrations are ok, and it really seems they know their audience, so kudos to them on that. Let me list some sites they have to give you an idea

• Box
• Notion
• Figma
• Slack

I don’t really know how I feel about how “personal results” and “normal” results are different, I think they should be mixed and then you can easily filter between personal stuff.

In this screenshot, I searched for S.B 👀. If I searched just for S.B, I would have gotten normal results for them, I had to navigate to the personal results (S.T.B) for the emails with them, and then there was no normal results. If they were saved as S.B instead of S.T.B then I would actually have no way to get normal results, when I hit enter on an exact match it takes me to the personal results. The query matching was good though

I also was not a fan of the bubble they help you build. You can opt out of seeing news from certain sites, but goodness knows what we need is to escape this bubble, not to deliberately blow one.

In the end, for me, this was the right idea in the wrong way, I hope duck or some other party not lead by google executives implements personal search for themself, it could be quite useful.

After writing this neeva relased the neeva NFT collection. Make of that as you will.

Others

resonate

You can’t capture the essence of resonate in a few price bullet points. The idea is paying for music as you listen, more and more each times, until within 9 times you own it. It’s an interesting model that is fair for the listener and the artist. The app itself is quite minimal, refreshing after experiencing Spotify's mess. The subscription is optional, it’s to join the coop and access the forums. Ideally more artists join in the fun.