Links & Blogroll.

www.pepysdiary.com

A fascinating look back on day-to-day life in the 1600s. It's the blog I'm most excited to read in my RSS Reader ready, and it even inspired by John Evelyn project.

sideofburritos.com

The privacy and security guru I love to keep up to date with. He's a great YouTuber and super friendly over email too.

minutestomidnight.co.uk/blog

Simone writes about tech, the RSS world and other interesting subjects. He also inspired this blogroll.

manuelmoreale.com

A beautiful blog. I especially enjoy his "People and Blogs" series where he interviews other bloggers.

vdna.be/site

I love the simple design and technical content to Floris's blog. Especially the post and approach to Borg backup.

signal.org

Signal invented the secure protocol that other popular apps market themselves on. It's a great UX and solid network of people. More average UK people are using every day. Opens-source but centralised. Honorable mention to Briar.

It's the default messaging service in the UK. It's based on the Signal protocol and marketed as E2EE. However, since it's purchase by Meta/Facebook users data is being abused at both ends and the UX is degrading terribly with their forcing of AI into your human chats.

See alternative signal.

Once the only valuable option, now its non-user aligned business model has slowly eroded its quality to an awful discovery engine peppered with misdirection and data abuse. It's free because you pay some other way.

See alternative kagi.

proton.me

The suite of Proton tools are great, especially Mail. Secure and private. OSS (sort of) and usually a good UX also. The only caveat is that some features are lacking, and I would not recommend having all your important services under one account or provider, especially secret/password management.

feedbin.com

An open-source, but paid, RSS reader service that works on all OS's. It's relatively private and secure IMO based on the source and it's in-house hosting.

1password.com

Secret password management. It does one thing and does it well. It's secure and private in my review of the white-papers and an excellent product. The extra software development features like SSH key agent etc are great also.

duckduckgo.com

A mostly private search engine with an independent index. Startpage is also useful if you need more Google-like results without the Google part.

See alternative kagi.

A corporate product seemingly only designed for business contacts and not people. Poor security practices, and a terrible user experience. Nothing you'd want in a password manager.

See alternative 1password.

kagi.com

An extremely good search engine with sensibly integrated minimal AI tooling. They aggregate and rank results from many engines and have their own. It's better than Google from ten years ago and a great UX. You pay for Kagi, but it's affordable and unbelievably worth it.

www.orionphilosophy.com

Tobias writes extremely well and has a solid and engaging grasp on modern living though Greco-Roman Stoic philosophy, among others. See his writing about ataraxia.

A security hardened and user focused fork of Android. It's a great user experience and you can choose to use Google Services or not. Only supported on Google Pixel devices at the moment.

Its the only visible open mobile option for every day life mobile devices but Google have been hard at work abusing user data and closing the ecosystem as much as they can.

See alternative GrapheneOS.

www.sublimetext.com

I've used VS Code for two years and Vim for five years. But, I simply keep coming back to ST4. It cannot be beaten for a beautiful environment for software development.

obsidian.md

A super nice writing and PKB/personal wiki app. Available on all OS's. It can be a super clean and minimal or super-maximal - you decide.

Apple used to be the good alternative, but in recent times they're more commercially focused than user focused. The software and hardware quality has significantly degraded, and you don't have sovereignty over your own device. FYI They remotely locked an iPad of mine and made it e-waste without recourse.

See alternative linux-mint.

linuxmint.com

My daily driver for 15+ years (excl. a few distro hops). It's rock solid and power-user focused Linux and Desktop Environment. It may have been branded a "noob distro" by the community but in my experience you can't beat it for stability and functionality as a technical person. Although, I am keeping an eye on >= Debian Bookwork and Vanilla OS 2 too.

n8n.io

A poorly named but (mostly) free and open source alternative to automation platforms like Zapier. It has a better UI and extremely reliable service.

github.com/go-gitea/gitea

A clean GitHub clone, and much more light weight than GitLab. It has everything you need for a WUI-based git workflow and even GitHub compatible action runners too. Free, self-hosted or hosted and open source.

GitHub has been instrumental for open source development over the last decade. However, since Microsoft bought them the technical quality has slightly declined (still no IPv6!) and has fuelled MS unethical (perhaps illegal) abuse of content for AI training. Honourable mention for SourceHut should anyone prefer a more traditional approach to software work.

See alternative gitea.

A corporate hellscape of product design, with an ever devolving UX and UI. Extremely expensive for its category, but nonetheless extremely useful.

See alternative n8n.

A commercial dystopia. Avoid at all costs for domains, hosting, or anything really. Their services are poor quality, coupled with extreme predatory sales practices and poor support.

See alternative mythic-beasts.

mythic-beasts.com

An independent UK business with longevity. They're an old school hosting provider for domains, websites, servers, and email. Excellent service and support. Old-fashioned UI.

A.K.A. Future Simple, Base CRM. Originally an acceptable experience due to the lack of simple competition. It has since absolutely tanked in quality since it's acquisition by Zendesk.

An extremely convenient workspace for email, documents, and their creation, storage, and sharing with others. However, their products are designed to serve their business model of collecting and abusing data for advertising. They're clearly not built for the users needs.

It's a bloated user support ecosystem empowered by its lack of viable competition. It champions poor user experience and only a party acceptable experience for its customers. Money is better spent elsewhere IMO.

It almost goes without saying that Microsoft products and specifically Windows are things to avoid. They treat users terribly and are generally very poorly designed.

See alternative linux-mint.