Tools

List of various digital tools I enjoy.

Web

Basic webtools / productivity

• DownSub - Download subtitles from Youtube, Viki, etc.
• PrintFriendly - Web page to clean PDF
• WorldTimeBuddy - Time Converter and World Clock
• Lucide - free, beautiful & consistent icons
• Text Edit Online
  • (regex) text replacer
  • remove duplicate/empty lines
  • case converter
  • remove extra spaces/line breaks
  • number lines
  • word frequency counter
  • many, many more
• Nova Reader (RSVP speed reader)
  • I couldn’t find one that I liked, so Claude made me one; first as a browser plugin, now also a PWA
  • (which you can install through Chrome browser on android, then it will appear in the Share screen, when you share a website from whatever browser)
• regex builder
  • Of all the ones I’ve tried, I liked Olaf Neumann’s the best
  • ofc now you can just describe it to Claude, although this site also lets you test the generated output (and presumably gives the LLM behind it a good prompt)
• QR code generator
  • have tried many different ones, qrgenerator.org is the best I’ve found
    • size and precision selection
    • auto-updates the QR code (some require you to click “generate” after each change)
    • many design options
    • free, no sign-up required
  • worse UI but also has good options: genqrcode.com

Thinking Tools

• ClearerThinking.org | Scientific Personality Test & Online Tools
• List of Cognitive Biases and Heuristics - The Decision Lab
• Seeing Theory - Basic Probability
• Tools for better thinking | Untools
• Steps to solving problems

Emotional Tools

Various emotion wheels

• Junto Emotion Wheel
• Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions
• Plutchik Dyads
• Emotion Sensation Feeling Wheel by Lindsay Braman
• Geneva Emotion Wheel
• Plutchik wheel

Software

• AutoHotKey text expander
  • relatively easy to use w basic coding familiarity, otherwise maybe just a bit intimidating
  • but now just use Claude
  • personal use cases:
    • #[name] puts out phone numbers I occasionally need (e.g. for filling out forms)
    • @[email shortcode] outputs my various email addresses
    • #iban my IBAN
    • #street outputs my full street address + zip code
    • ctrl+shift+esc creates a small browser window to quickly look smth up and to have disappear on ctrl+w
    • various special characters, e.g. ~n produce ñ, -> produce →, ... produces …, -- produces –, #check produces ✔
    • etc.
• Microsoft PowerToys
  • adds so much additional utility
  • I most frequently use:
    • alt+space for a spotlight-like search
    • ctrl+shift+space to pin a window to the top (very helpful for referencing things)
    • ctrl+shift+t for an OCR text extractor
    • win+shift+c for a color picker (hex, rgb, hsl)
    • file bulk rename
    • screen on for a specified amount of time (or indefinite)
    • many, many more features (incl. also key remapping and text expansion AFAIK)
• Affinity Suite
  • professional photo editing and designing software suite
  • used to be a one-time payment alternative to adobe
  • now acquired by canva and free
• PotPlayer
  • very good media player
  • let’s me configure the speed controls to s and d like with the VideoSpeedController browser plugin
  • loads and seeks quickly
• Obsidian
• OBS Studio
  • very lightweight screen recorder (and streaming software)
  • creates surprisingly small file sizes
• Pucoti

Browser Plugins

• CookieAutoDelete
• I still don’t care about cookies
  • auto rejects cookies where possible, accepts minimal or all cookies where necessary
  • rarely creates issues where you cannot scroll on the page; just click on the icon and disable for that site and reload
• DarkReader
  • always, time-based or system-setting-based dark/light mode
• Snoozz
  • lets you snooze tabs so they reopen later
  • can be done to selection of tabs or whole windows
  • can be set to recurring, e.g. when you have to check a Drs page each morning, etc.
• Tab Renamer
  • only very occasionally but then very useful
  • e.g. if all sites of a domain all have the same name
• Unhook
  • lets you choose what youtube elements (comments, search bar, recommended videos, home, shorts, etc.) to hide or to disable autoplay or auto-continue on playlists
• Google Docs Offline
• uBlock origin, bitwarden, fingerprint defenders, etc.