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Software I use

Software, tools, services I use

Operating system

  • Ubuntu latest releases with KDE as desktop in my Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop.
  • Android 11 in my Redmi note 10 phone

Editors

  • VS Code - Primary IDE for software development.
    • Fira Code as monospace font with programming ligatures enabled.
  • Kate - For quick text editing. KDE's text editor
  • nano - for editing in console. Also Git commit message editor
  • Libreoffice - For all ODT, Presentation, Word documents

Online editors

Browser

  • I use Firefox as primary browser.
  • Chrome for my WMF account. Also for its powerful developer tools.

Shell

Design

  • Inkscape - for all kind of vector drawing, typeface design
  • Kolorpaint - for quick Image editing
  • Gimp - For image manipulation like resizing , scaling

Typeface design and development

  • Inkscape for design
  • Fontforge for inspecting fonts
  • Trufont for quick corrections like bearing, positioning.
  • VS Code for opentype engineering with VS code AFDKO extension that I wrote. Automation require python programming, shellscripting and Makefile. I use VSCode for all of these.

Illustrations

  • Excalidraw - for illustration concepts, flow charts and so on
  • Kami for PDF annoations, especially for type speciman reviews. Integrates with Google drive

Typesetting

  • Latex, Xetex - primarily for Malayalam typesetting and research papers
  • Gummi - for simple TeX editor with live preview
  • Scribus - rarely. Only for Malayalam support experiments

Reading

I own a Kindle Paperwhite 10th gen ebook reader. I like its darkmode. I use Calibre for ebook management.
I use the Reader View in Firefox to get clean reading for many websites including wikipedia.
For my wikipedia based learning, I use my own Wikipedia reader application - wikipedia.thottingal.in as PWA(installed in computer and mobile)

RSS

For newsfeeds and RSS subscriptions, I use a telegram bot https://github.com/santhoshtr/telegram-rss-reader It fetches the feeds in regular intervals. Helps me to read in mobile and deskop without any extra application. Adding new feeds is just a matter of pasting the URL to chat. Cons: It is just a linear list of chat messages(I mute it) and don't expect feed categorization and organization as you would expect in a RSS reader application

Movies

  • Netflix
  • Amazon Prime
  • Youtube(free account).
  • VLC - Not much these days as I use online services.
I primarily use duckduckgo as my search engine. Occassionally switch to google if I am curious to see google specific results

Social media and Chat

  • Twitter - I use tweetdeck client in desktop
  • Facebook - I don't use mobile app or login from mobile. In laptop I access it using Firefox Facebook container. Now a days I check facebook in 10 mins or so maximum per day. Often ends up with various Malayalam computing related questions people ask in its chat.
  • Telegram - regularly use for family and friends. Also several foss community channels
  • Whatsapp - Not active in any group, but this is required for people to reach out me quickly including some immediate family members.
  • slack - All my Wikimedia foundation work related communication

Blog and Notes

  • Hugo for blog
  • Gitbook spaces for private notes and this knowledge space. My todo list is also with gitbook

Password management

I use pass for password management with GPG encrypted passwords synced with a private gitlab repo. I use its browser extensions too.

Digital wellbeing

I use no-distraction mode in Android always. From 9AM to 5PM, I set focus mode in android - it disables many apps in the phone. At night I use the bedtime mode in Android, which makes the screen black and white, and disables all notification till earliest alarm set.
In desktop I use night time color setting to warm up the screen color at sunset. I use the same setting at phone. Avoiding blue light exposure after sunset improves sleep quality.

Internet

I use wireguard VPN and a pihole in a small VM hosted in oracle cloud.
I Use nextdns for DNS in my router
I also use a VPS by Hetzner to host my web applications(that is a referral link worth €20)