Enshittification aside, any new technologies you find yourself relying on/using regularly?
This can be anywhere from hardware or software/apps.
I recently started up a CalDav/CardDav service (radicale, think like your own private Google Calendar and Google Tasks that can also be synced on multiple devices) on a VPS. One step closer to degoogling myself.
I’m going to be that guy; I actually use LLMs to get more done as an IT technician. It’s a starting point, not a cure-all. And being honest/direct in one’s prompts is a huge part of the output, too.
But nobody wants to talk about tokenized data and how word groupings reduce false positives. It’s only going to replace window lickers.
- Nitter.net as a clean alt to Twitterx.
- Imginn.com as a clean alt to Imgur.
- GPT5.1 has its issues, but it’s been incredibly useful as a quick research assistant, basically saving me loads of time from having to perform multiple, laborious steps via search engine.
Telegram, the ‘Saved’ channel is very useful, good for quick note taking and sending files across devices. I consider its contents public and don’t upload anything important tho.
I’m using owncloud for that but (don’t hate me) I’m having to use chatgpt a LOT for the initial configuration. There’s a lot of stuff I’m having to learn to get back into it and it’s really good at searching docs by fuzzy match, pointing out what part of a function block isn’t working, and drafting individual function blocks to experiment with (I’ll comment out the original, paste in the chatgpt one, test it, etc). It’s a much better experience than a decade ago and I haven’t gotten emotionally abused by a more experienced person on stack overflow or reddit once yet.
I’ve got owncloud running as a lan only service so it just auto syncs my calendar, contacts, and a few folders of documents / pictures I like to keep with me but only whenever I’m home. Right now I’m just also configuring the same old computer to do some basic media / retro gaming on the TV and the hard part right now is configuring magic mirror as it’s idle display to keep hubs and I straight on our calendars and tasks (and show some family photos). Nothing major just as I get back onto Linux after ten years it’s nice to not get called lazy and stupid while I’m learning.
AirTags. I have 7. One for my keys, a Find My compatible third party card shaped one for my MagSafe wallet (also third party), one for my second wallet, and the rest for my bags and suitcases. They have saved me so many times.
Smart Tags for us Android peeps. They work well.
Isn’t the MagSafe wallet attached to the phone that you can use find my phone for, or is there some advantage to having an AirTag in there?
I often take the wallet off so I can wirelessly charge the phone, and occasionally I’ll lose the wallet that way.
That makes sense!
linux
“new”
Podman. For everything. Creating user services has been fun, especially orchestrating how all my self-hosted services connect. With Podman I’m hosting:
- Subsonic
- Syncthing
- Immich
- Kavita
- SFTPGo
- Jellyfin
- And a servarr stack
“new”?
The fediverse is really nice. Some cool advances in programming, but nothing major.
Obsidian is really nice, with plugins can do virtually everything you’d want from a note taking or even writing app.
localsend is a syncing/sending solution via wifi for smartphones or computers in the same network.
It’s wild following the Obsidian subreddit. People are turning it into a whole ass OS or into a desktop environment at the very least.
It’s like the new emacs hah
Oh yeah. My favorite (and only) plugin so far is the https://github.com/twibiral/obsidian-execute-code
Let me explain: Obsidian is basically a very fancy wrapper around a folder with markdown files in it. (which makes it git compatible, which is one of the upsides). In Markdown, you can define codeblocks, with syntax highlighting, because of course you can, programmers will improve their own tools first. Now, there are two cases when you would do this:
- you want to execute the code because it’s actually driving something. Like some kind of interactive, “this is the manual, but also, you can just do it right away by executing this code” and then they give you the code.
- you’re actually building it as a document, and you want something in your document that is actually the output of some program that’s producing some output. Like… analyzing numbers and creating a graph. You can now just put the code in the document, hit “execute” and you get your output in the document right then and there. And that concept isn’t new, it’s what “jupyter” also does, but jupyter uses a weird bytecode, xml zip format or something, in obisidian, because of the markdown base, it stays just code. (which again, makes it git compatible where jupyter isn’t) AND you can do it not just with python but with…
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- Python
- R
- C++
- C
- Java
- SQL
- LaTeX
- CSharp
- Dart
- Lua
- Lean
- Shell
- Powershell
- Batch
- Prolog
- Groovy
- Golang
- Rust
- Kotlin
- Wolfram Mathematica
- Haskell
- Scala
- Racket
- Ruby
- PHP
- Octave
- Maxima
- OCaml
- Swift
Yt-dlp to mirror YouTube channels to my Jellyfin instance.
Does that still work? Last I tried it, YT broke it.
New build, external JS runtime, works well for me.
Edit: sorry, that’s yt-dlp, not yt-dl
I update it once a month with the inbuild -U switch
Well, fuck. Just at this exact second you’ve taught me that I’ve been doing that the hard way for ages, by actually going to the project’s github page.
Anyway, another shout out for yt-dlp regardless. I get a giggle every time I see one of those sporadic news articles involving the music recording industry still whinging about piracy. Er, the record labels themselves pathologically post every single track ever recorded to Youtube to rake in that ad revenue, and it’s all free for the taking. If you decide you’d like to be proud owner of any of them forever you can just hit it with the ol’
yt-dlp -x.I am continually amazed at the number of non-Youtube sources that yt-dlp Just Works with as well. It seems any video content posted online that you’d like to gaff can be handily vacuumed up with it, regardless of the site operator’s desperate attempts to prevent you from doing so.
3d printing. Custom parts for the house. Replacement plastic bits that broke or got lost. Custom toys for gifts.
I live in a pretty busy car dependent city, and I usually put my daily commute into Google Maps just to get advance warning about traffic jams or wrecks.
This is one of the only reasons I have yet to fully de-Google. Maybe once CoMaps gets traffic data…
Same, my commute is about a half hour, with 2 main routes I could take that are about the same time. Just knowing if one of those is screwed up can be the difference between an okay drive in and hell.
I just installed a minimalist phone launcher. It creates a much more focused and less distracted phone experience. Also, not exactly new, but new to me, I switched from windows 10 to Ubuntu Studio. The experience is night and day, and I wish I had done it sooner.
Not really.
As a matter of fact, like I once used to when I was much younger, I realize I rely more and more on old tech (think pen and paper, printed books, physical medium) because they’re reliable, I can fully own them, and I know they won’t be spying on me and they will respect my privacy. Maybe it’s just me getting old, or maybe I’m (finally) becoming cautious?
cloud services, unfortunately. They are just too user friendly and useful.
Usenet for obtaining movies and TV shows, it’s so much better than torrenting. I only pay for one streaming service these days (and only because they’re fairly small and I really like their content).
That’s 50 year old technology! But still better than the stuff being foisted on us now.
Yep, it kinda died when Reddit-like sites became popular, now it’s been repurposed for filesharing.
Edit: Oh, I missed “new” in your title!
