Links

These are links to other blogs, channels, software, or sites that I have found interesting or useful to me.

Blogs

Bartosz Ciechanowski - absolutely incredible animations and detailed information about various natural phenomena.
Bits about Money - really enjoyed the posts about gift cards and BNPL but there are many excellent ones.
Raymond Chen/The Old New Thing - Raymond is a prolific writer and has some really in-depth articles into the nature of software or Windows.
In the Pipeline - There are some real gold nuggets in there especially the Things I Won't Work With series.

Jeff Geerling - has unique videos in the tech space and also has a website.
Steve Mould - fascinating videos examining various natural phenomena.
Practical Engineering (Grady Hillhouse) - great videos focusing on the very practical world of infrastructure around us. I really enjoyed details about projects that you may not have heard of otherwise including the New Harbor Bridge Project in Corpus Christi and the Washington Bridge in Rhode Island.
NileRed - totally interesting perspective as someone from a chemistry-adjacent field.

GitHub Copilot Pro+ - at least for the languages and IDEs/editors I use, this seems pretty solid without paying for the $200/mo offerings. With that, I did move up to the Pro+ tier in May 2026 so I could get access to the bigger models. Microsoft does seem to investing a lot of time and attention into this; whether you feel AI destroying the craft you loved should be supported or not is unfortunately different. Still, the better option now is probably OpenCode + OpenRouter.
Kagi - solid search replacement and, of course, no sponsored or ad-infused listings. Very handy!
Monarch Money - solid budgeting and finance dashboarding app
GeForce Now - avoid buying a GPU when you can rent a GPU
Private Internet Access - love it, hate it, it does the job for a reasonable price.

Pushover - creates an abstraction for you to send notifications to your personal devices
MobaXterm - pretty powerful multi-session remote manager.
Beyond Compare - solid diff/merge capability with continual improvements
Xyplorer - very different and unique way of approaching file exploration from the built-in Windows one. I thought this was most useful in the post-Clover but pre-Windows 11 23H2 tabbed experience.
DMDE - software is exceptional at helping recover data from failing (or failed) hard drives
IsoBuster - software was invaluable for recovering home movies from DVDs that the person who was transferring from VHS did not properly finalize

ASCIIFlow - nice way to have imageless diagrams
pgloader - great way to transfer data and handle data type changes to PostgreSQL.
draw.io - nice alternative to Visio for diagramming needs.
Penpot - handy design and mockup tool comparable to Figma and similar
SourceTree - regardless of your opinion of Git UIs, sometimes, it’s easier to visualize a graph than read git log. For me, you still need a grasp of the underlying commands, but it tremendously helps with getting the right arguments 99% of the time.
Bitwarden - password managers are a controversial topic it seems, but Bitwarden seems quite reasonable. New management seems to be aiming to enshittify it…

Obra Superpowers - seems like others have found a lot of value. I find it to be a little weird at times, but I haven’t done enough testing to verify either way.
Anvil - I’m giving it a shot right now
Open Design - Haven’t used it until the skills become consumable via Copilot more easily, but it seems promising.

There really seems to be so many, so quickly…

Linuxserver Fleet - consistently designed images for software that may be relevant to people running their own homelab.