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

• Note-taking: Obsidian, including stuff for this website! Plus it’s Markdown, which is plain text, which means you’ll never lose it
• Browser: Firefox for the privacy settings, with these extensions:
• 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
• Password manager: Bitwarden, which
• is free and open-source
• has a desktop, mobile, and web version
• can handle passwords, passphrases, passkeys, addresses, card info, and more
• Search: Everything, unbelievably fast
• Reading music: forScore (Apple only), a little expensive but fully-featured, and can link via bluetooth to MIDI devices!
• Editing audiog: Nothing beats Audacity
• Creating music: Garageband is on another level, particularly with its bluetooth MIDI capabilities, drum machine, and voice recording
• Phone connection: Phone Link does everything you can on Apple devices, and the most useful one is cross-device copy and paste
• Tasks: Microsoft To-Do is simple, cross-device, and works well. The best to-do list app is the one you use
• Texting: Discord is a bit annoying with Nitro ads, but the servers are so useful and you can play games!
• Budgeting: Actual Budget is what I’m trying at the moment
• Sharing costs: Splitwise makes it so much easier to keep track of who owes whom, and it simplifies payments, reducing so much hassle
• AI: Honestly a mix between Claude and ChatGPT, with the occasional Gemini thrown in. There’s no point saying more, the field changes too fast
• Writing papers: $\LaTeX$ on Overleaf is the standard, but I’m increasingly curious about Typst which seems to make stuff a lot easier!
• Bus timetables: bustimes.org is the absolute gold standard, with live bus tracking across the UK
• Train timetables: and ditto for traintimes.org.uk
• ISAs: Hargreaves Lansdown are simple and probably good enough for your LISAs and your Stocks and Shares ISAs and what have you

Software Development

• IDE: VSCode, I’ve tried others but it really has the most features and it’s pretty fast! I have these extensions:
• Github Copilot
• Live Server
• Dracula for my theme
• Rainbow CSV to make reading CSV files a bit easier
• Shell: I use Windows Terminal, with a customised oh my posh theme
• Python package management: uv is insanely fast and good at everything you used pip, poetry, conda, and all those other tools for
• Linting: Ruff is by the same company and also very fast
• General tools: I can’t believe Microsoft PowerToys isn’t pre-installed, it has so many things I use constanly:
• screen snip OCR to extract text from an image
• system-wide colour eyedropper in all major formats
• 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

Customisations

• Spotify upgrades: Spicetify lets you set custom themes, remove ads, and add a bunch of functionality with extensions and applets

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.