A list of productivity tools that I use every single day without fail and really like. A lot of these cost money but I genuinely think these are some of my better software investments. I'm very bad at organisation so without these tools I would be lost
Note: I am a full time academic, so my job involves reading new research, developing ideas for research, running experiments, teaching students etc. I also need something that supports my hobbies (video making + bug bounty, which requires project management+note taking)
Plan (getplan.co) - Is it buggy, yes. But imo this is the best organisation app I've ever used. It combines a planner with multiple todo lists with project management. You can then drag individual items from your todo list and put them on your calendar.
Obsidian (obsidian.md) - Honestly the user tools really make Obsidian, there are so many plugins that you can really customise this free tool to work for you. I really like the graph view for visualising my notes and the tools that grab notes from other places
Notion (notion.so) - I love Notion for it's ability to make dashboard-style setups, prior to Notion I was really considering making a custom app for organising youtube, but the power of something as simple as the database structure is very powerful
xmind (xmind.net) - I think in mindmaps so whenever I need to jot something down or I have an idea I want to expand upon I stick it in xmind. My working files are "things i want to learn more about" and "questions", for a single video I will also mindmap it out
GoodNotes (goodnotes.com) - The iPad note-taking app imo, I use it for studying for my certs, as a planner, for DnD, for random notes about work. Any time I would use paper I use GoodNotes. It also syncs to the Mac app which is also very useful for me.
LiquidText (liquidtext.net) - This is where I keep all my PDFs and notes on books/whitepapers/blogs etc, I have workspaces for things I'm interested in "appsec, APIs, etc...",you can 'pull out' text from different sources and visually place it together w/ your notes
Speechify (speechify.com), you may or not know that I am actually dyslexic so I can struggle to read things sometimes, Speechify will read out PDFs to you and it does it in THE RIGHT ORDER, the free version is also surprisingly good and feature-rich vs competitors
Feedly (feedly.com) - RSS feed reader, sounds simple enough, but I like the addition of organisation so I can have different feeds for different things, also supports notes and highlighting so if I do need something interesting it can be added to obsidian
Fantastical (flexibits.com/fantastical) - Overpriced in my opinion BUT I've not found a better calendar app that integrates with like 5 different calendars, the universities timetabling system, and where I can throw in a natural language event and have it parsed "sunday 4pm at..."
Calendly (calendly.com) - Look I hate back and forth with students on when to meet, having a URL and setting up some rules about when my time can be booked, just makes my life so much easier and pain-free for both me and students/other folks who want to meet
Discord (discord.com) - I'm not ashamed to admit I do 90% of my socialisation on Discord, from DnD to youtubers/streamers I watch, to technical channels honestly to say "there's a bit of everything" really doesn't give discord credit, its half way between IRC and vent
OneDrive (onedrive.live.com) - I keep _everything_ in the OneDrive now days, it was by far the cheapest option when I started using it offering 30GB for free and now with my office subscription I get 1TB (I'm currently using 13GB for reference).
DarkReader (darkreader.org/safari/) - It makes websites dark - I've personally found this one is the most reliable at least for the websites I visit but your milage may vary
Grammarly (grammarly.com) - My writing is genuinely awful and while I know there are privacy concerns with Grammarly and similar apps running documents through their spell check as long as they are not confidential is worth it for me
Dragon (nuance.com/en-gb/dragon.h…) - got it for free during my UG, Mac app is awful, BUT I use the dictation SO much when writing longer documents, it picks up my accent well and just means that writing 3-5k words in a single day is not exhausting
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
@EdOverflow Why is this news big? RFCs (Request for Comments) are these kinda boring documents that describe how the internet works. They're written in a very specific way because they are used by people like browser makers and for the internet to work we need standards
The internet is basically made of paper mache and duct tape, it wasn't designed with modern websites in mind, we had to build that on top. When the internet was first invented there was no way to record state so we couldn't tell a request was from A or B, so we invented cookies
In case you wanted to know:
Sims 3 Outdoor Living Stuff
Sims 3 Master Suite Stuff
and The Sims 3 Seasons
Are the must have Sims 3 expansion packs would a would-be Ukrainian Nazi assassin
Some OSINT-ers can identify weapons from a single image or to identify an exact location from 3 hills. Me? I have honed my OSINT skills to identify Sims expansion packs from a blurry boxart photo