this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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Enshittification aside, any new technologies you find yourself relying on/using regularly?

This can be anywhere from hardware or software/apps.

I recently started up a CalDav/CardDav service (radicale, think like your own private Google Calendar and Google Tasks that can also be synced on multiple devices) on a VPS. One step closer to degoogling myself.

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[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Yt-dlp to mirror YouTube channels to my Jellyfin instance.

[–] ch00f@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Does that still work? Last I tried it, YT broke it.

[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I update it once a month with the inbuild -U switch

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well, fuck. Just at this exact second you've taught me that I've been doing that the hard way for ages, by actually going to the project's github page.

Anyway, another shout out for yt-dlp regardless. I get a giggle every time I see one of those sporadic news articles involving the music recording industry still whinging about piracy. Er, the record labels themselves pathologically post every single track ever recorded to Youtube to rake in that ad revenue, and it's all free for the taking. If you decide you'd like to be proud owner of any of them forever you can just hit it with the ol' yt-dlp -x.

I am continually amazed at the number of non-Youtube sources that yt-dlp Just Works with as well. It seems any video content posted online that you'd like to gaff can be handily vacuumed up with it, regardless of the site operator's desperate attempts to prevent you from doing so.

[–] clif@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

How did I not know about the -x param? I've been doing --list-formats and then choosing the high quality audio only. This will save me a step. Thank you.

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

Same way I didn't know about the -U update parameter, I'll bet you. You ask yt-dlp to list its flags and arguments and it spits out a listing into your console that's about nineteen miles long because apparently it can do anything.

The only command line tool I use regularly that's comparably capable and even more byzantine is ImageMagick.

[–] krakenx@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you have a high refresh rate display, Lossless Scaling is life changing. It's a $5 app on Steam and it can take any application and introduce frame generation. It requires a decent gfx card, but it doesn't need to be a recent one. It works on Linux now too, or at least on the Steam Deck.

The use case for me is primarily for older games that are locked to 30 or 60 fps, including PAL region games locked to 50 that normally have microstutter. Games from the PS1 era at 120 fps with geometry correction never looked or played better. But even some newer games are fps locked and can benefit. It also makes the app full screen eliminating my need for Borderless Fullscreen too.

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[–] underreacting@literature.cafe 9 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I got a smart watch a while back. Had a lot of fun setting up workout routines, tracking my run, measuring my activity and sleep, putting in reminders for water and movement, setting alarms, journaling my period, syncing music to headphones, connecting calls from my phone etc.

Then I got bored with running and stopped logging in online to transfer my data, got annoyed with all the reminders that always popped up at the wrong time, turned off bluetooth and wifi within a week because it drained both phone and watch on battery, so no longer connected to headphones or phone, and of course I quickly forgot all about tracking periods etc because I had to turn on wifi and sync to do so, and figured out the sleep tracking was bogus.

I still use it all the time, to check the time without pulling out my phone and risk getting distracted. It's great to have this technology that shows the time right there on your wrist!

Kinda annoying to have to charge it weekly but well worth it for keeping the phone tucked away safely. I even finally started automatically checking my wrist instead of reaching for the phone when needing the time. Pretty neat!

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 months ago

Regular wristwatches: are we a joke to you?

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[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago

3d printing. Custom parts for the house. Replacement plastic bits that broke or got lost. Custom toys for gifts.

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 6 points 2 months ago (6 children)

For something that's sure to be enshitified, I use Perplexity regularly, especially since Paypal gave me a free year of its Pro plan. I'm finding it considerably more effective than traditional web search when I'm looking for something specific, though to be clear, I'm looking for an existing web page rather than the output of the LLM. It's also pretty good at providing the exact command line incantation for some one-off task and producing short code samples for some API I'm probably never going to use again. Sometimes I pay Anthropic for the latter.

Some other stuff:

  • Cleverkeys, an open source Android keyboard with open source swipe typing (no Google library dependency).
  • Rio terminal - GPU accelerated, written in Rust.
  • Lemmy - you may have heard of it.

Not actually new, but more people should know:

  • KDE Connect - notification sync, shared clipboard, remote control, etc... between phones and PCs. Supports Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, Mac, and more.
  • Syncthing - sync the contents of a directory between multiple devices. Syncthing-fork to do it on Android.
[–] bassgirl09@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

I've found KDE connect to work better than the native Windows Phone Connect when I was using windows. I switched to Linux Mint a few weeks ago since I primarily value stability.

[–] thakritik@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Cleverkeys is such a good find from you. Thank you so much for it 😃

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[–] it_depends_man@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

"new"?

The fediverse is really nice. Some cool advances in programming, but nothing major.

Obsidian is really nice, with plugins can do virtually everything you'd want from a note taking or even writing app.

localsend is a syncing/sending solution via wifi for smartphones or computers in the same network.

[–] Saapas@piefed.zip 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's wild following the Obsidian subreddit. People are turning it into a whole ass OS or into a desktop environment at the very least.

It's like the new emacs hah

[–] it_depends_man@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oh yeah. My favorite (and only) plugin so far is the https://github.com/twibiral/obsidian-execute-code

Let me explain: Obsidian is basically a very fancy wrapper around a folder with markdown files in it. (which makes it git compatible, which is one of the upsides). In Markdown, you can define codeblocks, with syntax highlighting, because of course you can, programmers will improve their own tools first. Now, there are two cases when you would do this:

  1. you want to execute the code because it's actually driving something. Like some kind of interactive, "this is the manual, but also, you can just do it right away by executing this code" and then they give you the code.
  2. you're actually building it as a document, and you want something in your document that is actually the output of some program that's producing some output. Like... analyzing numbers and creating a graph. You can now just put the code in the document, hit "execute" and you get your output in the document right then and there. And that concept isn't new, it's what "jupyter" also does, but jupyter uses a weird bytecode, xml zip format or something, in obisidian, because of the markdown base, it stays just code. (which again, makes it git compatible where jupyter isn't) AND you can do it not just with python but with...
  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • Python
  • R
  • C++
  • C
  • Java
  • SQL
  • LaTeX
  • CSharp
  • Dart
  • Lua
  • Lean
  • Shell
  • Powershell
  • Batch
  • Prolog
  • Groovy
  • Golang
  • Rust
  • Kotlin
  • Wolfram Mathematica
  • Haskell
  • Scala
  • Racket
  • Ruby
  • PHP
  • Octave
  • Maxima
  • OCaml
  • Swift
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[–] clif@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you like obsidian you might check out the FOSS project Silverbullet. I have almost no experience with obsidian, but I love Silverbullet.

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Love Obsidian. I’ve been using it to study for IT certs and organize my worldbuilding ideas. Been looking for a FOSS alternative that won’t enshittify. Hasn’t happened with Obsidian yet but they do paywall useful features like accessing an existing vault on mobile from a file share.

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[–] ceenote@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I live in a pretty busy car dependent city, and I usually put my daily commute into Google Maps just to get advance warning about traffic jams or wrecks.

[–] halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Same, my commute is about a half hour, with 2 main routes I could take that are about the same time. Just knowing if one of those is screwed up can be the difference between an okay drive in and hell.

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[–] dusty_raven@discuss.online 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not new, but I recently transferred over my balatro game from steam to my android phone after degoogling (the official balatro app needs google play services to work). It means I have to pretty much start over, but it's been nice re-unlocking the cards and seeing how much better I am now. (Link for those interested: https://github.com/blake502/balatro-mobile-maker )

Also, its not a technology but I recently learned how to darn my socks and that's been a lot of fun.

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[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 2 months ago

Telegram, the 'Saved' channel is very useful, good for quick note taking and sending files across devices. I consider its contents public and don't upload anything important tho.

[–] sheridan@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

AirTags. I have 7. One for my keys, a Find My compatible third party card shaped one for my MagSafe wallet (also third party), one for my second wallet, and the rest for my bags and suitcases. They have saved me so many times.

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

As a blind person with ADHD they’re invaluable. I’ll forget where I put something mere minutes after setting it down and can’t see where it is.

[–] philpo@feddit.org 2 points 2 months ago

VMs and Clusters are nothing new,neither are KVM/QEMU.

But Proxmox has given the whole thing a huge boost,made it available for smaller deployments and hobbyists and generally pushed a lot of people away from MS, the cloud and towards digital sovereignty.

[–] michael@piefed.chrisco.me 2 points 1 month ago

Probably my Steam Deck . My wife and I use them quite often for our games.

Yunohost works well if your into hosting.

I'm loving my fairphone lately. Very repairable and up to date.

[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I would say youtube autocaptions have gotten pretty good. I often download and read the transcript instead of watching the annoying video.

[–] ComradePenguin@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 months ago

To get the transcript? Either copy/paste from the web page, or download with yt-dlp and clean up the.vtt with a python script.

[–] Saltarello@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Not really new but something new to me - OsmAnd public transit.

I'm a big fan of being able to use my phone offline. I use OsmAnd all the time, ditto Joplin.

We were lucky enough to visit Budapest recently. I always plan interesting places, tickets, restaurant menus etc in Joplin & add locations into OsmAnd.

We made use of the offline capabilities of OsmAnd public transit. Absolutely fantastic!

[–] msokiovt@lemmy.today 1 points 2 months ago

I honestly use Stable Diffusion models for AI art references for any artist to recreate if they wanted to. My producer does the exact same thing.

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