Six Android apps I swapped for open-source, year-one verdict
I have been running a de-Googled Android phone (a phone that has been set up without Google’s apps and services, or with Google’s apps stripped out) for about a year. The de-Googling…
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61 articles
Euro-Office for a week, six years off Microsoft 365
I have been running my own business on Microsoft 365 for six years. I pay about $12 a month for the Business Basic tier, which gives me Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, and…
A self-hosted clipboard that doesn’t phone home
Copy and paste is the most fundamental thing we do on computers all day long. Yet somehow, making it work across devices has remained this surprisingly complex problem. Apple has Universal Clipboard,…
Self-Hosted Trip Planner Beats Another Google Sheet Nobody Updates
Group travel planning always devolves into the same mess. Someone creates a Google Sheet that three people update while seven others ignore it. Confirmation emails get forwarded to a group chat where…
Recipes Die When Apps Do: Why I Run Mealie at Home Now
I have been burned by too many recipe apps. You know the cycle. Find a recipe you love, save it to some app, watch that app either die, get acquired and ruined,…
Self-host e-signing before you upload another contract
Every time I upload a contract to a cloud signing service, I am trusting a company I cannot see with documents that might matter deeply to my business or my life. The…
Super Productivity, self-hosted, finally a to-do app that stays
I have tried every to-do app since 2014. Todoist. Things. TickTick. Notion. Trello. Microsoft To Do. Apple Reminders. I bounced between them every six months, never quite settling, never quite getting the…
Self-hosted passwords make recovery your responsibility
A password vault can look familiar after a move while the work behind it changes hands. In the MakeUseOf account, the author moved from 1Password to Vaultwarden and used Bitwarden clients. Browser…
Decide whether vector search needs a database of its own
A search feature does not need a new database merely because its interface includes an AI model. The useful decision comes earlier: does the product need to find records by meaning, or…
Docker Compose is easier to maintain when each feature has a job
A Compose file usually becomes difficult for an ordinary reason: the same service settings get copied into several places, startup order gets mistaken for readiness, and tools needed only during development become…