Tools I use

My website colophon, along with other tools I use.
Published

November 27, 2024

This is a work in progress

I need to fill in the details about many of these tools.

Bear

Raindrop

I use Raindrop as my bookmark manager for the following reasons:

  • It has good browser extensions, including for Safari, which is my main browser.
  • It is reasonably priced (33 EUR a year inc. VAT)
  • You can create folders for bookmarks and share them publicly, add allow others to add and edit the list. This is the main reason I like it, because it allows me to share bookmarks with my discussion group.
  • You can view a folder as RSS, which is the mechanism I am going to use here.

It’s not perfect. You can highlight pages and attach notes, but that functionality doesn’t work as well as I would like. But it’s pretty good all round.

Kagi

Kagi is a search engine. I use Kagi for search for the following reasons:

  • Google Search has become increasingly bad over the years, and often doesn’t return good results. It is also too full of advertisements.
  • I think Google has too much power now and I want to support other options. Google is damaging independent publications and bloggers, and it would be a great shame if we lost those.
  • Kagi results are really nice — no advertisements, configurable, and you can focus on specific sources, such as news or academic sites.

I pay 54 USD a year for Kagi, which I’m happy to do for a tool I use every day.

Quarto

Safari

VS Code

Voice Memos

Record notes by speaking, the app then transcribes them. I have written about how I use Voice Memos here: Using Apple Voice memos to record notes whilst running or reading

DB Browser for SQLite

GitHub

SQLite

SQLite is just a wonderful piece of software. I love the attitude of the main author, Dwayne Richard Hipp, who says “complexity is your enemy.

Python

uv

Like pip, but better.

uvx

Like pipx, but better.

shot-scraper

Takes screenshots. From Python God Simon Willison. shot-scraper https://thisisjam.es/reflecting/on-misremembering-and-AI-hallucinations/ --width 1920

sqlite-utils

This library and command-line utility helps create SQLite databases from an existing collection of data. Also from Willison.

black

Formats python code. Can be run from the command line like this: black *.py

psf/black: The uncompromising Python code formatter

Rich

click

Clop

Espresso

ChatGPT

Claude

Perplexity

Depreciated

These are tools I have stopped using. ## Jina Reader

The wonderful Jina Reader has a very simple interface to do something very useful — it will give you a markdown version of any web page. And they give you one million tokens to do this for free, which I estimate will give you about 400 free URL lookups. A great service, which I won’t mind paying for once I run out of tokens. Python God Simon Willison made a little online interface to Jina which might be a useful addition to your browser toolbar.

I have stopped using this because although it’s a useful, simple tool, it returns all the text in a web page as markdown, including all the crud. There are various Python packages that do this better, just returning the useful parts of a page.