That diverges from how the app was intended to be used or for what audiences it was marketed for
I have home assistant running on my home server. It’s default use is managing your smart home but my house is too poor to be smart so I use it to push notifications about chores to my kid.
Any link to it? Whats the state of the art these days for private home assistants?
https://www.home-assistant.io/
Home Assistant IS the state of the art. Local and privacy first, very powerful and has a huge community that provides a huge catalog of integrations that fill the gap that official integrations don’t cover. Incredibly customizable and capable.
You can buy their official hardware, install it on a raspberry pi to make a dedicated hardware yourself, or install it on any computer.
Their hardware has matured and is now in the polished luxury category, so I would only consider it if you start using it and know you’re going to use it enough to justify it, just install it on a computer or Nas/(docker) if you have one and try it out.
There is a learning curve, plenty of good YouTube tutorials and a very helpful community online though. Have fun!
GSam Battery Monitor, I use to check things like until what time I was up or how cold it was in the bedroom overnight. The graphs show when my phone screen was on (when I set my alarm) and log the battery temperature which I’ve found matches room temperature after a few hours (with WiFi/data off so it’s not doing whatever background tasks if people are conversing in a group chat or so)
One time I was absolutely certain my alarms hadn’t gone off but you could see a little blip on the screen graph, once every minute, matching precisely the (turned off) alarms. Either Sam is in on it or I just slept really soundly that day :D
Apparently it has ads though. Wouldn’t recommend, I always had it firewalled because I didn’t think it needed internet access to display some offline data from my phone in the first place and apparently that also works as an ad blocker? Fun side effect. But so I’m very interested in any open source alternatives people know of!
I have used Telegram, for over 12 years, to send messages and important notes to myself, and to very quickly send files between devices. It supports fast and smart search and pinning, and it acts as an archive for certain dates and events, but with the ability to have file attachments or screenshots on those dates (unlike a normal calendar). Everything else I have tried has some of these features, kind of, but nothing else has all of them and in the way that I need. Plus it’s free and fast and fully cross-platform.
Threema would be better and more private for that, huh? Actually use it for same purposes as you
Interesting, I know that’s paid only, does it have full search indexing and unlimited file storage though 🤔💭
Not sure but definitey look into it, Telegram is a scary thing. You’re paying with them monetizing your shit
Thanks for the heads up 🙏
Its a great tool for replacing AirDrop too
I use Signal as my camera and as a note-taking app.
Filing Cabinet too
I’m not sure if this counts, but I use Readdle Documents, which is a file browser from before the files app on iOS, on my iPad as kind of a siloed collection of files and folders exclusively for work. I can still access those folders from my desktop finder at home through iCloud Drive just like anything else, but accessing all my personal files from the app on iPad (which is what I take to work) is a bit trickier, so it just keeps all my work things organized, focused, and away from my personal life.
There is a particular camera app that a few of my close friends and I have used for group photos since over a decade ago. It’s proprietary and tracker-infested, but there’s a certain humor and nostalgia to the filters and effects that I’ve never found a good way to replicate without the app. It’s sort of an in-joke that we insist on using it whenever we do get together. So I have it on my secondary device and painstakingly patched the apk so it can run without any unnecessary permissions.
If you turn off cellular and disconnect wifi when using i think you can mitigate that mostly
Well, that’s the thing. I wasn’t going to bow down to that app’s demands or put a band-aid on it, I had to conquer it.
The DeepL app as a “Syntax corrector”.
English is not my main language. I translate what I write in English to Spanish to see if it’s correct.
This is what im talking about 👍
Merlin Bird ID - it’s Shazam for bird calls with a Pokédex for tracking what you’ve discovered.
Right but do you use it for some orthogonal use? Arent you just using it exactly as intended for its primary purpose?
Idk about merlin, but with iNaturalist, the purpose was logging sightings and locations of plants/animals/fungi/etc, and letting people double check your ID so it can be used in research.
This built a massive database of images, locations, times, etc, which is a really good training set for image (or sound) recognition. Now the app is really good at automatically recognizing stuff from pictures, so people just use it for that. The app actually started to try to penalize you for using it for identification without actually logging stuff.
Should have read more, I wasn’t aware that was part of the question. I’m just posting about niche usage apps I like. I don’t use them often, but they’re essential for their niche.
Idk if this counts, but I use the Reminders app on my phone to create packing lists for work travel. Very easy to uncheck everything then re-check off things as you pack them. Keep building a perpetual packing list and you’ll never forget things. Lists in general are awesome for offloading cognitive workload.
