I started a german Podcast "Terminal Treff" - about cli tools I love, have loved or would like to love: https://podcasts.philipp-weissmann.de/@terminaltreff/episode...
Beeminder: Personal accountability through commitment contracts. Helps me stay on track with my goals, often serves as a little extra "push" to do something useful even if I'm really low on willpower that day.
Anki: Maybe not underrated, but seems like it only really took off in language-learning circles. I create a card for anything new that I'd like to retain, and have been doing so for almost 10y now. Really multiplies the long-term value of sitting down and learning, since I can be relatively certain that I'll keep the knowledge with me for a long time. Particularly useful for papers.
Does Zettelkasten count? I started using a more formal approach to note-taking and idea review and it's been fantastic in helping me generate ideas, hypotheses, topics to write essays on, and so on.
It requires a bit of rigour but it's helped my intellectual productivity immensely.
Qubes OS, a security-oriented desktop OS with fewer vulnerabilities than in Xen thanks to a clever design and reliance on hardware-assisted virtualization: https://www.qubes-os.org/security/xsa/#statistics
- pen
- paper (especially in the form of A5 paper notebooks used as lab diaries)
- reading
- listening
- writing
- drawing
- plain text files (together with text editors and UNIX tools)
- full text search
Probably the coreutils, like grep and cat. They hold the world up.
z - Jump around:
lefthook for githooks.
justfile to avoid typing long commands.
sleek to format sql.
and many more.
Readwise Reader
Pen & Paper. For all the time that I spend daily in front of computers, when I must reason deeper and clearly about a problem, nothing beats sketching drawings and doing some quick calculations by hand. Typing in a keyboard, physical or virtual, doesn't give me the same feeling of "flow" to my thought process. Also distraction-free.