For me, that would be Secure CRT. I have yet to find a terminal emulator that matches its feature set. If you regularly manage hundreds of machines using various connection protocols (serial and ssh mostly in my case) It’s worth the $$$, and so far there hasn’t been any subscription nonsense. I liked using it at work so much I forked over the dough to have it at home.
None of the free alternatives do everything I need.
I’ll also mention a few iOS apps. One is Sun Surveyor. It’s an AR app that shows you the position of the sun, moon, and galactic center at any given time. The other would have to be Radarscope. It’s a weather radar app, but it’s a really good weather radar app.
EDIT:
This one’s debatable, but I use it all the time. Plasticity is 3D modelling software that attempts to bridge the gap between practical CAD programs and software meant for 3D artists like Blender. It’s not cheap considering Blender is free, but it’s buy once use forever, and at (I think) $150 it’s within reach of an individual hobbyist who knows what they want and is willing to pay for it.
Divemate, better than keeping logs in different apps if you change computers. Android only, sorry. If you chew the fruit you gotta find something else.
Plex Media Sever used to be great and well worth the lifetime pass. With the recent UI changes I would drop kick it if I could. Sadly the other options just don’t work right with large libraries.
Torque pro is nice especially if you have a turbo charged vehicle. Free is fine if you just need to check codes.
I feel like there are a lot of people who hate on Plex here, but for me it’s really been super solid so I always try to advocate for it. JF wasn’t for me. Buy once/use forever, great capable interface, great apps (downloads work perfectly now), and I never need to fiddle with it. I replace a Synology package every few weeks when they release a new version and it just keeps ticking.
I paid $89 for it on sale, and I’d definitely groan if I had to pay $250 for it today, but I’d still pay it. I’m just glad they’re paying hardworking folks to make the software I’ve used EVERY DAY for years. It’s the buy-once-cry-once model we wished every other software vendor would go back to.
I agree it’s super stake and works well. The new UI for TV’s is a fail.
There is a school of design thought that says you should be able to navigate to what you need in 3 clicks or less. Old school windows xp is an example, most everything needed was start, mouse over programs and click to access it. It you used it frequently it was start, click on the program. The longest was start, control panel, and then the app you needed.
Plex’s new UI has me hitting the back button so many times it’s faster to exit and come back in when before it was a simple scroll left and move around. To get to movies I have to move up then click multiple times and move down to browse instead of just moving let and clicking movies. As soon as anything else is able to support my library and allow me to use an old school plex interface like what the web browser still does Plex is dead to me. They have already stated the new UI is the future and they are going to eventually move to a more roku type model to profit from streaming. If they would keep the old UI available for people who prefer it I would stick around. They also split the android app so you his need 3 different apps if you have video, audio, and picture libraries.
RadarScope for Android and iOS. It’s a professional grade weather radar app for the US (and Canada?) and is worth every
pennynickel.The computer’s BIOS.
Fight club 5e. If you play enough D&D it becomes quickly worth it. It’s also proven useful in helping our new players get their characters setup more quickly.
It is very slow to be updated. Has he said if there is a plan to update to current rules? Last update was 2+ years ago. I loved the app, I purchased it, but as of now it is useless.
I haven’t seen him say anything about it, but I also don’t really watch his updates. I mostly watch for compendium updates from the Archivist. So far the 2024 stuff has imported fine, I’m using it in one of my campaigns, now. I’ve only had issues in the app with edge cases like changing an attack roll modifier for a specific special weapon, or something else niche.
Just a teensy iOS/macos extension, but Vinegar is awesome for watching YouTube.
I would have said the Affinity suite of stuff, but they recently sold out to Canva, and fuuuuuuuck them.
Agreed on Affinity. At least my old licenses still work. But yeah, fuck them.
Procreate on iPad. Cheap and the best art studio you can ever buy
Sketchbook is free and does the same thing. What does procreate do, that sketchbook can’t?
Not sure, but sketchbook comes from Autodesk and they are notorious for changing the rules and terms and conditions.
Just personal beef, but I refuse to touch their software after the shenanigans they pulled with Fusion.
do games count? If yes, Terraria
i have over 375 hours on 2 games(Terraria and TModLoader) for the 5 USD i paid to get the game
On the game front I have to recommend Creeper World 3. I have over 50 days, yes days, of playing. It was absolutely worth the trivial cost and quite enjoyable.
I would’ve said Minecraft, but M$ unilaterally removed my account even though I bought it when Mojang still advertised it as keep forever.
DaVinci Resolve.
The software is free but not FOSS and on Linux paying for the h.264 support is nice.
Keen live is a good alternative but it feels like an advanced form of movie maker to me and lacks polish. If you learn it KDEN Live can be powerful.
I came to say Davinci Resolve. I got it for $300 with the “Speed Editor” keyboard and a lifetime license. Worth every penny.
It’s FOSS software but I use it so much I donate to support it. FreeCAD. Yeah its interface isn’t the best. But compared to Fusion for my workflow it’s so much bettwr
And only getting better with every iteration.
BeyondCompare. I’ve used it for all my Windows text comparison needs for decades. It also handles comparing spreadsheets and directory structures.
I’ve tried so many other open source or free software for diffing and Beyond Compare is still the best, if only I could convince my company to pay for a license for it
I’m sure BeyondCompare is much more powerful, but have a look at WinMerge if you don’t know it yet. I keep being impressed by it for being free and OSS.
Thank you for the pointer. I’ll try it out and see if I can recommend it to my colleagues. (I’m the library techie, so if a coworker has a problem, I’m the one they’ll ask for help. So, I should at least play around with it a bit first.)
https://kaleidoscope.app/ on macOS is a super nice tool for diffs as well.
One is Sun Surveyor. It’s an AR app that shows you the position of the sun, moon, and galactic center at any given time.
it doesn’t know the galactic center but otherwise check Trail Sense on f-droid. the astronomy tool has a 3d mode that shows where the sun and the moon is. oh it says there will be visible meteor showers in a few hours!
Vegas Pro - it’s pretty easy and user-friendly
The only software I would buy again instantly is Tasker (Android).
I have it too but don’t use it. What do u use it for?
Some of my most used:
- Automatically disable wifi and connect to my Wireguard server through mobile data when I’m not at home, then enable wifi and shut down WG when I return home. My self hosted apps are automatically connected without having to expose any detectable app ports to the Internet.
- Detect when I’m roaming to execute variations on some tasks.
- Enable location only when in the car and using Maps, disable otherwise.
- Voice notifications when my phone battery drops below 25%, or 45% when I’m in the car.
- Change the display timeout to 5 minutes when in the car and charging, and back to 1 minute otherwise.
Any chance you’d be willing to share some of those configurations? Especially the wireguard one. For some reason I have the hardest time getting something working to connect to wire guard using tasker when I leave home.
The others I’d love to see and learn from also if you’d be willing to share. Thanks!
I’ve been using tasker for 16 years now and am always surprised that it hasn’t started to suck or had a lot of functions blocked over the years
Any interesting uses you’d care to share?
The list is literally endless, and more often than not specific to what you specifically need. Here are some things I have setup:
- If my wife texts me “911” it turns my ringer volume to 100%
- When my phone battery is below 5% and my home wifi is not nearby, it will send a text to my wife to let her know my phone might die
- I split my photos into different folders based on GPS coordinates in the exif data. I have one for home and work, then a default
- Backup files to my server when I am on my wifi
- Tracks how much time I am spending at work by checking when I am near my works WiFi
- Auto-enable Wire guard when I leave my home network
- Stores my phones location whenever it disconnects from my cars bluetooth (basically a local parked car location reminder)
- If I turn on my flashlight while pressing the volume down button it instead opens a “flashlight app” that is just a solid color on the screen. This allows me to use a light source without it being the full brightness of the flashlight. Nice when you have a sleeping partner
- I have been using DailyYou and forget to take pictures, so I have it open the app for me every 30 minutes after the reminder notification until I take the picture.
I have also used it previously for job specific tasks. Like I had a button on my home screen that would open a menu with a list of options, and then I would select one of the options. It just saved that selected text and the current time into a file so I could reference what time I did something.
If you have any sort of smart home, the options just keep growing.
Photoshop used to be worth the money. The move to subscription based comes at a time when alternatives are starting to catch up though, so that time (of being worth it) may be coming to an end.
There’s no reason to pay for Photoshop now if you’re just starting. Affinity is free (as in beer) and full-featured.
This is an outbound application firewall for MacOS that allows you to block applications from phoning home. It blocks outgoing traffic rather than incoming traffic, which can be toggled within the firewall settings. It has a time-limited trial period, but I did the one-time-purchase for 9 $ and it served me well since I bought it in - I think it was in 2021 - originally to keep a not-so-legally-obtained Photoshop Suite from connecting to their servers. The app is not intrusive, no annoying pop ups or the like. The app launches automatically at system start up. Occaional updates (bug fixes or to match with the latest OS version) are included with the licence.
Today I use it to block a pirated version of SketchUp (the only remaining software I have installed that has been pirated) from calling home, als well as Affinity 2 (and, probably in the future) the now free Affinity 3 (since it was aquired by Canva).
I consider this app worth its money.
Have you ever used Little Snitch? It’s another great MacOS app that has an outbound firewall. It’s been updated to include a DNS ad-blocker too.
I’ve been very happy with it for many years, but I’m always open to trying out alternatives. Thanks for sharing!
I did once. It was back in the days when all of my software was pirated - even Little Snitch (where you had to add Little Snitch itself to its blocking rules, to prevent it from phoning home). As far as I can remember, it was too expensive to buy - at least for a permanently broke student at that time. Later I discovered Radio Silence. I wrote that I had RS from 2021 onward, but I think I already had it in 2018. Not 100% sure.
