Knowledge Base

Preserving for the future: Shell scripts, AoC, and more

Projects I'm Thankful For

Reasons

My life is made so much easier and more fun because of all the projects on the greater Internet. The vast majority of them are free and open source software. If I ever get spare money, these are the projects to which I would donate, in no particular order.

Projects to be thankful for

OS/desktop environments

Applications

  • http://www.vim.org/ VIM: VI iMproved. My choice of editors on the cli.
  • http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html SciTE: Programmer's editor I use on GNU/Linux.
  • https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ Notepad++: Programmer's editor on a non-free OS. I actually like this way better than SciTE.
  • https://librewolf.net/ LibreWolf is a set of overlay patches for Firefox that makes it a real web browser.
  • https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ Firefox web browser. My third-favorite web browser.
  • http://classicshell.net/ Classic shell. This application modifies the Windows shell so it is extremely functional and include some of the removed functionality of previous iterations of Windows.
  • http://puddletag.sourceforge.net Puddletag: My preferred mp3 tag editor. Its original goal was to provide functionality similar to mp3tag, which was also really useful to me.
  • http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec PhotoRec: Data recovery tool. This software has rescued terabytes of data for me from disks where the partition table was overwritten.
  • https://www.freefilesync.org/ FreeFileSync. Think rsync but with a gui. It allows you to make exceptions from a detailed file listing, before executing the sync.
  • https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html Veracrypt: cross-platform disk encryption. This is basically the replacement to TrueCrypt. I still use this on portable devices, instead of cryptsetup and LUKS, in case I have to use a Windows client.
  • https://www.waterfoxproject.org/ Waterfox: A fork of Firefox around version 55. It still preserves NPAPI plugins and disables all the random cruft Mozilla never should have added to Firefox. The only caveat is it is 64-bit only.
  • https://www.freeipa.org/page/Main_Page FreeIPA: Provides identity, policy, and trust management. This tool provides a domain suitable for GNU/Linux hosts. This is arguably the best product to ever come out of Red Hat (after the .rpm file format). The FreeIPA team maintains sssd, the daemon that makes it easy for Linux systems to join Active Directory.
  • https://cdemu.sourceforge.io/ CDEmu facilitates providing a disc drive to Wine.

Communications

Network storage and transfers