Errm, Wireshark. Please bear with me.

Wireshark is a shining example of an open source project completely and utterly crapping on the closed source competition. As a result we all benefit. I recall spending a lot of someone else's money on buying a sort of ruggedized laptop with two ethernet ports to do the job back in the day.

Nowdays, I can run up a tcpdump session on a firewall remotely with some carefully chosen timings and filters and download it to my PC and analyse it with Wireshark.

OK, all so convenient but is it any use?

Say you have a VoIP issue of some sort. The PCAP from tcpdump that you pass to Wireshark can analyse it to the nth degree. Wireshark knows all about SIP and RTP (and IAX) and you can even play back the voice streams or have them graphed so you can see what is wrong or whatever. That's just VoIP, it has loads of other dissectors and decorators built in.

So what?

The UK (for example) will be dispensing with boring old, but reliable, POTS (Plain Old Telephony System) by 2025. Our entire copper telephony and things like RedCare (defunct soon) will go away.

We are swapping out circuit switching for packet switching. To be fair, a lot of the backend is already TCP/UDP/IP that is shielded away from us proles. When SoGEA (Single Order Generic Ethernet Access) really kicks in then the old school electric end to end connection will be lost in favour of packet switching, which never fails (honest guv).

If you are an IT bod of any sort, you really should be conversant with Wireshark.

• LibreWolf, a privacy-optimized fork of Firefox
• Mull, hardened Firefox for Android.
• EteSync with self-hosted Etebase, an end-to-end encrypted solution for syncing calendars and contacts.
• Molly, a hardened Signal fork for Android.
• Accrescent, a secure, alternative app store for Android. Still in an early stage of development though.
• UnifiedPush, a privacy-friendly notification system.
• LibRedirect, a browser extension that automatically redirects you to private frontends for privacy invasive websites.
• movie-web, a web app that let's you watch any movie/tv show for free. I highly recommend it.
• Seal, an amazing Android app for downloading videos. YTDLnis is an alternative.
• Cobalt downloader, a website that let's you download basically everything imaginable from the internet. All kinds of posts, photos and videos from various social media platforms and many other websites.
• Linkwarden, a bookmark manager that can be self-hosted. Also check out Omnivore and wallabag.
• ArchiveBox, a self-hosted app for archiving websites.
• Tube Archivist, a self-hosted app for archiving YouTube videos/playlists/channels.

(I love downloading and archiving stuff lol)

• OpenWrt
• Syncthing
• VeraCrypt
• KeePassXC
• GNUCash

Lemmy

(applause)

I use the Unison file sync tool to keep backups of all my important files on flash drives and servers. For mobile devices I do use Syncthing because MTP is painfully slow and taking the SD card out of the device to plug it in is too much of a hassle, but I would rather use Unison.

Loop habit tracker app on android: https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits

They are in the google play store and f-droid i believe

Barrier: https://github.com/debauchee/barrier

Edit: Input Leap looks like a promising KVM replacement for Barrier, thanks for sharing!

Android

• Podcini
• deku sms
• carrion
• linksheet
• florisboard beta
• gptassist
• grayjay
• [mastodon, lemmy, peertube] redirect
• markor
• german only: kleine wettervorschau, öffi
• saveto... + shelter/island
• wormhole, localsend: sending files over internet or local wifi (when creating a hotspot it works without wifi too)

Immich is the must for self-hosting photos. Bye Google.