Softwares that I use...
I have nothing to write and have been stalling this blog for so long. So, I’m going to start with this.
It’s not writer’s block or being too busy to write something but, I have been procrastinating on doing some interesting things and then writing about it. Oh well, I do tend to do interesting stuff but, don’t seem to write about it. For now, I’m going to bore you with software I use daily that helps me get the job done and manage aspects of my life.
Blogging:
- Write.as: Let’s start with Blogging and I use write.as for it as you can see. Previously, I used Jekyll, Hugo and many other frameworks or static site generators. I used to host it all via Github and redirect to my domain. One I hosted on Github’s domain is still up. The whole process of maintaining and hosting was going fine for some time until I found out, there were lots of software out there which could help me focus only on writing and publishing. (Additionally, my way of constantly changing themes on my blogs, and tweaking CSS was also, time-consuming.) I tried every blog hosting service under the sun until I found out write.as. I’m not going to post negatives about them but, I found most of their flow disruptive and hard to read without having an account while some still needed maintenance from my side. Although write.as isn’t free as other services, it makes the writing and publishing experience good. I can also change css and js of this blog and not have to worry about breaking things but, the default theme is just about right.
Organization and Management:
For organizing and managing the daily, weekly, or monthly aspects of my life, work, and activities I depend on multiple software.
- Obsidian: I use Obsidian for everything. Be it for instantly writing down food recipes or noting down addresses. I have a Supernote A5X which I use to read PDFs and take notes on meetings or figuring things out. I export the contents of the supernote to Obsidian for organizing and record it for easy finding. Supernote gives me the feeling of writing down on paper with a pen which I have been accustomed to all my life and Obsidian gives me the indexing and quick searching of things when I need to look into it (like a library).
- TickTick: I use TickTick for my Pomodoro timer and manage my daily tasks list. Using TickTick I can also estimate how much time I should spend on a task at hand(by either taking rough time estimation for a new task or looking at how much time I spent on a similar task earlier). This helps me breakdown my day better and ticking each task throughout the day also gives me a sense of accomplishment. (While writing this blog, I have a timer going on and after much postponing finally, I will be able to check this for today. :–))
Fitness:
- Fitbit App: I use Fitbit App on my iOS and Fitbit Sense for tracking my steps, calories, and most importantly sleep. Although I’m satisfied with Fitbit Sense, I do not like Fitbit App, it’s lacking in many features compared to Apple Health, and also, Premium costs $80/year for 1-2 features that are actually useful to me. Also, the whole Google Pixel Watch and migration to Google accounts is quite confusing and messy. At this point, I think Google should create one app for both Fitbit and Google Pixel watch so that there would be similar features. (Yeah, but, OS is different between them and Fitbit OS has far fewer features than even Android Wear…)
So, this is it for this blog post, maybe in the next post, I’ll write about tools and software that I use for programming and on my work. See you on the next blog.