Hi friends! It's (kinda) that time again: no Installer coming from me this week, but a HUGE one coming next week on all our favorite stuff from 2023. And to that end: I want to know yours! It doesn't have to be your one single legally binding Favorite Thing Ever, but when you think about this year, what awesome show/movie/app/creator/origami trick do you think of? Tell me one, two, a few! All your favorites, hit me
@davidpierce I got a steamdeck this year, to help not doomscroll, and it worked.
@davidpierce Sleep Token is the band of the year. Their album Take Me Back To Eden is a grand achievement in every way possible.
@davidpierce ‘The Town’ podcast from Matt Belloni. The best source of Hollywood and entertainment news. Excellent guests, every episode is a banger.
@davidpierce The Game Boy wallpapers for the iPhone linked here: https://www.threads.net/@johnvoorhees/post/C1GHauppo5K
@johnvoorhees @davidpierce these are great. just purchased. thanks for recommending John
@davidpierce We sent a robot, OSIRIS-REx to land on asteroid Bennu. Get a sample of the asteroid and drop it back on Earth. The capsule landed Sept. 24, 2023 exactly as planned.
@davidpierce It's been the year of self-hosted, paid, and/or open-source apps for me. I migrated away from several Big Tech apps I've been using for over a decade.
Standouts: Kagi, Immich, SyncThing, and Obsidian
https://dev.to/isaacdlyman/my-top-personal-software-upgrades-f64
@isaaclyman @davidpierce thanks for the write up!
@isaaclyman Great list, definitely a couple of new things I need to check out! One minor correction (hope you don’t mind), Apple Photos has a setting to “Download and Keep Originals” on any device, no need to live with low-res proxy images! (I totally understand your desire for an open source alternative though, and the one you mention sounds interesting, I hadn’t heard of it previously.)
@alextm That’s true! I find the whole experience frustrating though. They push you pretty hard to store thumbnail versions on your phone to “save space” when the actual play is to get enough of your photos in iCloud that you don’t have space on your phone to download them all, at which point you’re trapped. Happened to my wife this year.
@isaaclyman Yeah, running out of space is for sure an issue. Personally, I only keep originals on my MacBook (which is backed up to various places), and proxy images on my phone. Best of both worlds imo, my phone doesn’t fill up, and I know I have multiple copies of the original photos in places less opaque than iCloud. Of course this requires even more Apple hardware *and* a reasonably sized iCloud account. The integration is worth it to me, but I’m glad there are alternatives!
@isaaclyman @davidpierce
Hi Isaac. I read your blog post and I am interested in relying less in big tech for my backups. My main computer is a Macbook Pro. I have all my personal files (documents, photos) in Google Drive and Photos. My email is in Gmail. Everything work related is dispersed in several Outlook/Onedrive accounts.
What services and home server hardware do you recommend? Thanks for the inspiration!
@mfmas @davidpierce
- Hardware: I bought a cheap desktop computer on eBay, but a lot of people use a NAS drive. Both are good options.
- File storage: Syncthing is great. If you can get all your files downloaded to one place, you can Syncthing them super easy.
- Email: I’m still on Gmail. I’ve been tempted to switch to e.g. Proton but I’d have to forward all my mail from Gmail, since that’s the address I’ve been handing out for 20 years, so it’s sixes IMO.
@mfmas @davidpierce If you’ve got any important files you’ll want a second layer of backup as well. You can set up RAID on your home server or sign up for a personal hard drive backup service like Backblaze. Not super expensive and provides a lot of peace of mind.
@isaaclyman @davidpierce I went down the NAS drive rabbit hole after your post. Looking into it. I have a free Protonmail account but rarely use it for same reasons.
@isaaclyman @davidpierce have you looked into housing your email locally in your server?
@mfmas @davidpierce No. There’s some good discussion of that here: https://youtu.be/iH626CXyNtE?si=UJ0tnqTI32_FjsQd
@isaaclyman @davidpierce are you using syncthing to sync from a local server to other computers? So for example I drop everything in home server/NAS and have multiple computers syncing to that?
@davidpierce gotta plug my app, Close-up (https://closeup.wtf / @closeup). It lets you take a daily selfie that you can then make time lapse recaps out of at the end of the year. This is the perfect time to start using it.
@davidpierce Slow Horses TV show on Apple TV is excellent.
Really enjoyed the game Dead Cells & Vampire Survivors on various platforms.
@davidpierce “The Big Dig” podcast. Fascinating tale of one of the largest public works projects in U.S history, told superbly well. Recommended to me by Installer - thanks.
@davidpierce Forks, s2e7 of The Bear, a beautiful episode of television about purpose, service, and Taylor Swift.
Also, this song: https://open.spotify.com/track/4rOUCnPgp5QW9uAkAReJUa
@davidpierce iStory, a simple totally free app that allows to see the history of your iDevices and browse photos taken with them. Nostalgia vibes! (hint: I might have made it) https://istory.timelabs.io
@timefrancesco I immediately downloaded this. It's a wonderful idea. Thanks!
1) Steam Deck
2) Scavengers Reign
@davidpierce One of my favourite things to come from 2023 is the creation of @404mediaco
Their podcast is now one of my favourites to listen to every week & it was an easy decision to pay for a subscription to get access to their bonus content
@rylancole @davidpierce thank you for the support!
@davidpierce I'll tell you what I wish I had for 2023. An app or service that would collect & protect all of my health information while maintaining CoC and fully under my control and help me figure out how to navigate the healthcare system.
@davidpierce this year my consistently top used apps were Ice Cubes (my mastodon app), Inoreader (my rss reader), Discord, Spotify, Apple podcasts, Firefox and Google, and the Wikipedia app!
@davidpierce My new years' resolution was to listen to more albums. To that end, https://musicboard.app/ has been a great companion, sorting the stuff I want to hear, allowing me to rate / write a few thoughts about them, and also having a community of reviewers. It's a simple app but it helped me a lot!
I also visited https://www.albumoftheyear.org a lot to see if something that's not on my radar deserves my attention, specially now when the ACTUAL "Album of the year" list is being built!