Software

I’m a big believer in customising everything you own, including tech. As everything becomes more homgeneous and bland, it’s nice to imprint your personality on the objects and services you use. Here’s a few ways I’ve done so.

Programs and Apps

I use Obsidian for notes, including the stuff that goes into this website! I don’t like to forget stuff, so if I see something I really like, I dump it in a note somewhere, just so I can find it again.

I use Firefox for its privacy settings, with the following extensions (which work across browsers!):

• Wayback Machine to save the sites I visit
• uBlock Origin to remove ads and tracking
• Unpaywall for scientific papers
• What Font because sometimes you’re curious

For a password manager, I use Bitwarden. It’s free and open-source, there’s an app and a web extension, and it can handle passwords, passphrases, passkeys (which are becoming a thing!!), addresses, card information, and more. It’s very easy to start using: click ‘export’ on whatever you use now (like Google) and click ‘import’ in Bitwarden. I used to reuse passwords, now I don’t. It’s also got great integration on Apple platforms.

Microsoft PowerToys is an insanely useful program that adds a bunch of functionality to Windows and I can’t believe it doesn’t come preinstalled. Some things it has:

• screen snip OCR to extract text from an image
• system-wide colour eyedropper
• power file renaming
• quick accents (so I can type characters like ℚα∀ηèɞ∄ẋɰμǐ∏¶χ in less than a second without fiddling around in settings, or worse, googling them)
• keep your PC awake indefinitely
• quick run for opening programs, making searches, doing maths, using Alt+Space

And lots more.

Phone Link is very useful to sync your phone and PC if you don’t have the Apple ecosystem. I particularly like it for copy and paste, like if someone messages you a link and you want to open it on your laptop.

Everything to search files, because Windows Search is very slow sometimes.

forScore on my iPad for sheet music. It’s paid and a little expensive, but it’s really fully-featured, and I’ve actually been able to connect it wirelessly to one of the pedals on my digital piano to turn pages!

Programming

I mostly program in Python using VSCode. Alongside the standard extensions (like Python and Jupyter), I use:

• Github Copilot which is incredibly good, both the inline suggestions and the chat
• Live Server for live editing
• Monokai Pro for my theme
• Ruff for incredibly fast linting and formatting
• Rainbow CSV to make reading CSV files a bit easier

Customisations

I use Spotify, but to customise it on desktop I use Spicetify which is also free and open source, and comes with a bunch of lovely themes and extensions. You can tweak how everything looks, how your queue works, whether you see audiobooks and podcasts, when to play videos, and a lot more.

I also did a lot of customisation of my Start Menu, so it looks like this:

Each of those icons is a clickable file! I did this by writing empty C programs, compiling them to executables, creating a shortcut for each with an icon from the Web, and pinning to the Start Menu.

This was very in-depth, if you’re doing this remember the files must have different names, or it won’t work.