toolbox

This is not an exhaustive list. I recommend one of the following for that:

• Websites that give gigantic piles of alternatives like Slant or AlternativeTo
• One of the hundreds of AWESOME LISTS OF EVERYTHING EVER MADE TO DO A THING that jockey for a top 100 position on Product Hunt.
• Piles of curated search content such as Curlie, run by many passionate people at once.

This is my quick-reference knowledge base, a link-based commonplace book.

I've left earmarks for reference, and my frequency of use approximately correlates to how many earmarks I've placed on it.

• Its starting platform:
  • * - reference sheet or copy/paste.
  • ☁ - browser-based
  • ⇉ - browser/software plugin or extension
  • ⊞ - Windows
  • ⌘ - Mac OS X
  • 🐧 - Unix and friends
  • 🤖 - Android
  • 🍎 - iOS
• Its safety:
  • 🕵️ - helps with trust issues
• Its convenience:
  • ■ - standalone files or portable Windows apps (many through PortableApps.com)
  • □ - CLI-based without GUI (often requires programming experience)
  • 💾 - self-hostable, or runs easily in a container
  • 🤝 - designed for synergistically actualizing collaboratively (i.e., teamwork)
• Its scalability:
  • 🔌 - an affordable/free API, or has API documentation
  • ⦿ - data-intensive tool
  • 🐍 - runs in Python
• Its business model:
  • 🆓 - FLOSS
  • ⬆️ - freemium model
  • $ - requires paying at least some money
  • 🧛 - FAANG website (i.e., Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft)
• 💩 - it's a recursed pile of stuff, curated by someone else
• strikethrough for bad tools, with a clear explanation

These icons are volatile out-of-the-box guesstimates, for several reasons:

• If the specs on a computer are high enough (and they often are if the software is >5 years old), a multipurpose OS can run almost any software, even if it's an unlocked fridge running a sideloaded Linux on an SD card to run Windows 98 to run MS-DOS.
• Developers keep making new things for new technologies, so this is constantly becoming obsolete or adapting to new standards. From the time you read this, most of this toolbox is good for about 10 years.
• Addon features have a funny way of becoming built-in features as everyone uses it, and built-in features will often become lobotomized to make something more efficient or profitable. Nothing is permanent.

If there are many tools to choose from, I try to prioritize:

1. Free-as-in-freedom FLOSS, if possible
2. Free-as-in-beer free, if possible
3. Affordably-priced, if possible
4. Whatever happens to work

I've created this for several purposes as a fork off of the rest of my creative works.

A. Future Convenience

The internet has created a strange trend:

1. Someone searches for something they need.
2. They download and use that tool.
3. They promptly forget about the tool.
4. Months or years later, they need to do that thing again.
5. Recurse to Step 1.

I often find neat things, but I don't trust my memory, so I add them here to avoid re-researching. But, I couldn't tell you what I want to do several years from now. Since I have been a data hoarder in the past, so it's either this collection or terabytes' worth of hypothetically useful software.

I only aim for things I anticipate will be around in 5-10 years, which omits many candidates:

1. If the site is interpreted as suspicious by government authorities (e.g., for piracy), it won't likely stick around, though some future iteration of it will float out there somewhere.
2. When the tool is bleeding-edge technology, a few years from now it'll likely get shoved behind a vastly overpriced paywall, with an open-source iteration floating out there somewhere.
3. Many tech startups curate "kitchen sink" tools that do many things, but in a few years that tool will be repurposed several times over once they've found their market or were acquired by a FAANG corporation.
4. Quick-reference sheets are great, but should still be useful later on. Some protocols move around, others stay nearly the same or simply get more features.
5. Large-scale enterprise-grade software must be maintained by large-scale entities, so their service is counter-intuitively more likely to fall apart if they don't provide an open-source implementation.

Someone can use a computer for many things, and people are constantly inventing new things, so everything is broken into malleable and somewhat arbitrary groupings:

• Audio: to work with sound for some intended aesthetic
• Communicating: to communicate with other people, directly or indirectly
• Files/OS: to manage computer files or operating systems
• Hardware: to make or manage physical things, which typically includes computer hardware
• Math: for calculation-specific needs
• Money: for lucre-specific needs
• Network: for computers across a network
• Text: to work with language for some intended aesthetic
• Visual: to visually design or adapt things which contain some intended aesthetic

Further, some patterns keep cropping up in each domain, and sometimes take on a life of their own:

• Business: to somehow conduct business with others (e.g., marketing, accounting)
• Consuming: human consumption only, without modification to it
• Dev: to broadly make or manage computer code, which may refer to front-end or back-end, be language-specific, and may simply be a more nuanced version of any of the above
• Foraging: to acquire others' created works
• Games: to create and play games
• Internet: a sub-division of computer networking that has its own subdomains
• Productivity: to broadly streamline doing multiple categories of any of the above

For brevity's sake, I try to bias against a few groups:

• The built-in tools. If I need them, they're in the computer already, and if it's that important I'll reference them on my tech essays.
• Most mega-corp tools. They already pay for plenty of advertising and are literally the first thing on a search engine.
• Paid tools when they cost enough that it makes me pause to consider my budget. I'm a big proponent of free licensing whenever possible, and I've made it my priority to never forget that some people people don't have much money.
• Most courses and courseware, which describe how to manipulate a specific tool more than what that tool does.
• Anything associated with a scandal, highly politicized, debatably close to illegal, or was hacked. I've got enough drama in my life without looking for more.

2. Understanding

The definition of "tool" is more complex than first impulses may dictate:

1. Every tool revolves around human purpose, which is a concept created as a relative human value derived as the difference between perceived reality and what is imagined to be possible.
2. Our cognitive bias, specifically "law of the instrument", means we're stuck always interpreting a tool according to what we're presently working on.
3. Hacking can involve using anything for a purpose it wasn't intended for.

When we're familiar with computers, we often forget it can do more than we expect. Fortunately, clever software developers keep build things that expand our horizons and break our expectations.

Extra information management tools can create extra understanding and effectiveness, which spills into the world beyond computers.

3. Awareness

There are quite a few occasions for rebuilding an already-present tool:

• It's often hard to find precisely what you want, and refactoring can be complicated.
• Some software developers reinvent the wheel or reverse-engineer something, just for fun.
• Reinventing the wheel is very educational, even if its results aren't always useful.
• An existing tool might become obsolete, jammed behind a paywall, merged into some bloated software suite, or the software's owner became tyrannical over their IP.
• For any reason whatsoever, a developer may start distrusting software and will make a lobotomized or open-source version of it.

The largest mental wall for most people, though, is knowing a tool even exists. If we know another human already did something, we now know it's completely possible, and it's much easier to find motivation to accomplish what we're certain can happen.

YMMV

I cannot attest to the validity of the software, so caveat emptor. I trust the software developer wasn't lying. Trust no one, and validate the software for yourself.

NOTE: MOST OF THIS IS NOT TESTED. I AM NOT LIABLE IF YOU DOWNLOAD A VIRUS. DO YOUR OWN DUE DILIGENCE

I also can't attest to the current validity or comparative quality of the software. This is hand-curated by me, so it won't quickly change if something new comes along.

And, further further, I am not legally responsible for anything that happens from any software, data, or misuse of that data or software. I'm literally volunteering my time to manually scrape things for free, so everyone is already getting the royalties of whatever you'd want to sue me over.