below are some pieces of software that just made my life better.

syncthing

ever since i ditched the iphone and mac setup (after exactly one year), syncing files between my computer and phone has been a chore. sharing picture from my phone to computer involved uploading it to drive, then downloading it to my computer. sounds simple, but add notes, ebooks, audiobooks, and music files, and it quickly became a headache. overwriting the wrong files, double-checking if they were the latest version, syncing todo lists. i’m tired.

it might sound like one of those infomercials, but then i found syncthing. it’s peer-to-peer file sync software, that changed my life. i’ve got a folder called shared on both my computer and phone, and anything i toss in there syncs immediately. no conflicts, extremely fast, like my own local cloud.

i also wrote a script that shows the sync status in my top bar, so i know at a glance how much data is in there. you should check out my dotfiles.

firefox sync and bookmarks

i’m sure this isn’t just a firefox thing; chrome likely does it too. but until recently, i never cared much about bookmarks. i thought, “if it’s on the internet, i’ll find it again.” now that i’m reading and doing more, though, i run into tons of stuff i want to revisit. a plain list of links isn’t structured, so future me has no shot at remembering why i saved them in the first place.

right now i have hundreds of links, grouped and nested three levels deep, all synced to my phone. thanks to good old fox.

stow

it’s funny-most of my problems revolve around syncing files and moving data to another place, time, or device.

on linux, almost every app throws in a dotfile somewhere in your home directory, which is usually portable. you can get things back just the way they were: every shortcut and detail.

i used to manually copy these files to github for safekeeping. that was a pain. stow handles this by symlinking configs into my dotfiles dir. i can tweak settings all i want right there, then git status shows me exactly what changed so i can commit and push in one go. relief.

honorable mentions