The intention of this page is to provide useful links to services for people that may be looking for how to do something. It always feel so good when find some pages like this, providing solutions and real services people could use, that I decided to make one.

Blogroll

First of all, here some other blogs you can continue your browsing on.

I always get excited when discovering some new blog with interesting writings and stuffs. Here I will list some of the most well known (at least to me) and which help others to start writing somehow. Anyway a complete and up to date list of the projects I am following can be found at my elfeed.org file.

I use Emacs with Elfeed to manage my RSS feed subscriptions, and I highly recommend the RSS protocol as a way to keep up to date with people’s work. My configuration for Elfeed is here.

You could also take a walk in The Forest, or checkout Blogroll.org.

Software I use

Workstation

  • Fedora Workstation: I have been with it for some years now and it is working like a charm.
    • I started way back with Lubuntu and Xubuntu, and I could not stand it, I need a more visually featured environment. Then I tried Debian, Ubuntu and Kubuntu, I always had some problems.
    • Then moved to Manjaro, but had many problems with the updates etc.
    • Finally moved to Fedora, and happy ever after.
  • Thunderbird for email. About email providers and other related services:
    • I think Tutanota is great, but you cannot use PGP encryption with it. They say it is more secure that way, but it is also more unpractical and limiting to use. Cannot be used with Thunderbird, but it has native apps.
    • Protonmail free plan is almost similar to Tutanota’s premium, at least in disk space. It lets you use both password protected and PGP encryption. This account gives you also a VPN and a cloud drive. However, it bothers me that they display some banners in the web client prompting you to upgrade to paid plans. Can be used with Thunderbird only for paid plans. It does not have native apps for desktop.
    • Self-hosting the email is from my point of view a great alternative. If you happen to have (or want to have) a domain name and a VPS, you can follow the guide by Luke Smith (link YouTube and link Invidious). In one hour you will have all set.
    • Simplelogin for email aliases. It was bought by Proton recently.
  • Emacs for text editing, RSS feeds, Git, and Denote + Org-mode basically. This and this posts talk about note taking.
  • Brave browser, but would have no problem using Firefox.
    • See this post for randomized fingerprint with Firefox, which was the only characteristic Brave had that Firefox didn’t.

This Blog

  • Hugo is the static site generator that I use to build this blog. It is quite fast and do not need databases or heavy machinery.
  • 1984 is the VPS and Domain Name provider I am using.
    • It is not really well documented, but I was able to set it up with zero knowledge about what I was doing, just by following Luke’s video for self-hosting mentioned above.
    • You could try with Vultr which I think is more documented, and straightforward if learning with Luke Smith’s tutorials. Take into account that referral links gives you some freebies, and I think Luke Smith has a referral program link somewhere.
    • See my experience with GitHub Pages and free services in this post.
  • Umami Analytics is the privacy respecting and self hosted analytic I use.
    • For its installation you can see read the documentation or see this Eric Murphy video. I had to install it using docker compose because the compilation from source did not worked well for me.

Editing photos

  • Gimp lets you edit the compressed image files, it is free software.
  • RawTherapee lets you edit RAW image files. It works great with Gimp.
  • I like to use LaTeX and/or LibreOffice for documents, but most of the time other people use Word and you are just forced to use it too.
  • Zotero for reference managements.
  • Mostly Matplotlib, Numpy, and Pandas for data analysis.
    • I have to confess that for small and punctual graphs, it may be more efficient to use LibreOffice Calc.
    • Another alternative I have not yet tested but heard about the other day is KDE’s Labplot.