State of the Apps for 2021
Few things have changed over the last 12 months since I wrote the last version of this post. I’ve managed to continue using Firefox for both work and personal use and hardly touch Chrome at all anymore.
We’re still rocking a PiHole to block ads at home, and can’t see this changing anytime soon. I am looking into ways to use the PiHole outside of home, but I think it would just be easier to use something like NextDNS.
Fastmail is still our email platform of choice, and Apple Music still doesn’t (and won’t ever, realistically) support Last.fm so we’re still using Spotify Premium.
Note Taking #
For notes, I have settled on Obsidian.md syncronised using iCloud Drive. This has the benefits of being free, and also allowing my notes to exist as plain markdown files if I ever want to migrate to another note system.
The plugin system is great. I use Advance Tables, Kanban, and Daily notes (core plugin) extensively:
- Tables suck (a lot) in Markdown, and the advanced tables plugin takes away all the pain. It even makes them pretty for you.
- I use Kanban’s to plan projects. It’s handy having them in the same place as all my notes. This has replaced my self hosted instance of Kanboard.
- Daily Notes are great for reflection. I’m alternating between using a theme system journal and Obsidian for this, and I haven’t really decided which way to go yet.
Life Logging #
I’m still using Exist (you should sign up for a free month!) to track my daily vitals, along side InfluxDB/Grafana to track my game time. Not much has changed in this department.
Task Management #
At work, I use Asana as it’s what we use. It works well for multiorganisation projects, and gets the job done.
At home, I am back on Remember the Milk and this is forming a big part of my theme for 2022 which is the ‘Year of Focus’. I am creating lists of things I would like to focus on for the next week, month, and quarter and moving items through the lists until they get done.
There will be a theme blog post coming soon(ish)