I use Signal as my camera and as a note-taking app.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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Asklemmy
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Filing Cabinet too
I have home assistant running on my home server. It's default use is managing your smart home but my house is too poor to be smart so I use it to push notifications about chores to my kid.
Any link to it? Whats the state of the art these days for private home assistants?
https://www.home-assistant.io/
Home Assistant IS the state of the art. Local and privacy first, very powerful and has a huge community that provides a huge catalog of integrations that fill the gap that official integrations don't cover. Incredibly customizable and capable.
You can buy their official hardware, install it on a raspberry pi to make a dedicated hardware yourself, or install it on any computer.
Their hardware has matured and is now in the polished luxury category, so I would only consider it if you start using it and know you're going to use it enough to justify it, just install it on a computer or Nas/(docker) if you have one and try it out.
There is a learning curve, plenty of good YouTube tutorials and a very helpful community online though. Have fun!
The other guy gave a better explanation than I could have, but l will chime in emphasis that learning curve. I'm not great at computer stuff but I know my way around Linux and how to find a tutorial, home assistant is just not very user friendly. The ui is really pretty but not intuitive. Of wasn't clear when I got into it that there's a software and an OS version and they aren't identical, the software is missing a lot of the things that the OS gives but the OS apparently isn't great if youre running other things on your server, mine is set up primarily for jellyfin and I only wanted home assistant to take the stress of constantly dogging my kid about chores off my workload. Don't let this dissuade you of you're interested, I genuinely feel like it's a great thing if you have the time to learn it, but it's not something to start if you're already struggling to juggle all your plates.
I use FB messenger to text Peter Norbeck, the second governor of South Dakota, my to-do list
Similarly, I got it just to transfer money.
I transferred too much or something recently so they banned me tho. Need freedom of money.
Y
To keep a to-do list in an environment where I can use emojis
But why him
Well, he's dead, so I doubt I'm bothering him. Plus he worked hard and got a lot done and his profile picture is sort of paternal and approving and I guess that helps me feel better about the list.
I'm certain Peter Norbeck, the former governor of South Dakota, would be proud of you
There is a particular camera app that a few of my close friends and I have used for group photos since over a decade ago. It's proprietary and tracker-infested, but there's a certain humor and nostalgia to the filters and effects that I've never found a good way to replicate without the app. It's sort of an in-joke that we insist on using it whenever we do get together. So I have it on my secondary device and painstakingly patched the apk so it can run without any unnecessary permissions.
If you turn off cellular and disconnect wifi when using i think you can mitigate that mostly
Well, that's the thing. I wasn't going to bow down to that app's demands or put a band-aid on it, I had to conquer it.
Feel that
The DeepL app as a "orthographic corrector".
English is not my main language. I translate what I write in English to Spanish to see if it's correct.
This is what im talking about π
GSam Battery Monitor, I use to check things like until what time I was up or how cold it was in the bedroom overnight. The graphs show when my phone screen was on (when I set my alarm) and log the battery temperature which I've found matches room temperature after a few hours (with WiFi/data off so it's not doing whatever background tasks if people are conversing in a group chat or so)
One time I was absolutely certain my alarms hadn't gone off but you could see a little blip on the screen graph, once every minute, matching precisely the (turned off) alarms. Either Sam is in on it or I just slept really soundly that day :D
Apparently it has ads though. Wouldn't recommend, I always had it firewalled because I didn't think it needed internet access to display some offline data from my phone in the first place and apparently that also works as an ad blocker? Fun side effect. But so I'm very interested in any open source alternatives people know of!
I use audiobookshelf to manage my TTRPG pdfs. It can correlate multiple files under one "Title" which makes organizing ttrpg stuff simple and it's a nice interface. Plus it's self host able so I can share it with the other people at my table. I just wish the PDF reader was a little more robust but it mostly does the job.
I also use audiobookshelf in a weird way. I use it to read Manga and comics on my phone/e-reader.
While the folder structure it uses is a bit convoluted, the UI and apps are great.
Not what you were asking, but delta chat is an app that turns email into chat. Same premise.
I use the f droid store as a launcher almost more than I use my launcher's native feature when I have to use an app thats not on the home screen. I can't remember the weird names people give their projects so I just search for what I need and open whatever is already installed.
I use bitwarden password manager to keep notes about websites because it loads in the sidebar according to URL automatically. (More useful on desktop than mobile.)
I fucking love Arcane/Delta Chat I made it my main email client. Murena.io is the best free option with compatibility I have found. There is a rate limit of one email sent per five minutes for it tho. It's a great way to stack a bunch of aliasing accounts. I use Tutanota to make the emails for the Murena accounts.
One weird trick that will change your life (unironically) is setting custom notification sounds for various email reply chains and other Arcane Chat groups. Cheogram for XMPP can do this even better. I wish they could adopt all of each other's features. This may sound like it has limited usefulness to anyone who hasn't played around with feeding bots & RSS feeds into other chat services for portability, convenience, etc, but it can be used to unify all kinds of things. The Mastodon bot is very useful
It's tucked away in the menu but the backups for Arcane Chat are very easy to use, totally extensive due to the storage-based nature of the protocol, with the disadvantage of not being encrypted, automated, and password-locked
If you have trouble remembering app names precisely, I recommend KISS Launcher. Although it is very search-heavy, it has a terrific tagging system. I'd recommend alphabetizing your tags though as it is slightly quirky. Tagging home screen shortcuts is my crack. So, I guess that's my answer to OP as well. Nothing like KISS I am aware of. Best way to use Android.
I have used Telegram, for over 12 years, to send messages and important notes to myself, and to very quickly send files between devices. It supports fast and smart search and pinning, and it acts as an archive for certain dates and events, but with the ability to have file attachments or screenshots on those dates (unlike a normal calendar). Everything else I have tried has some of these features, kind of, but nothing else has all of them and in the way that I need. Plus itβs free and fast and fully cross-platform.
Threema would be better and more private for that, huh? Actually use it for same purposes as you
Interesting, I know thatβs paid only, does it have full search indexing and unlimited file storage though π€π
Not sure but definitey look into it, Telegram is a scary thing. You're paying with them monetizing your shit
Thanks for the heads up π
Its a great tool for replacing AirDrop too
Off all things I don't want to be monetized, they can monetize my uptime-kuma and *arr alarms whatever they are worth.
I just dont have your trust of the Russians. I dont trust any company really but particularly not them. No good can come from anything like that
Again, not much to monetize from that:
At worst they could hack my phone. But then we'd have a different kind of problem.
You use a VPN at least?
Reverse proxy for unimportant, VPN for important
How do (reverse) proxies work?
Im only aware of terms like "Munchausens by Proxy" or "Proxy Wars" aha, seems to be some kind of stand in or something?
You are better served searching up on it by looking for networking guides.
Rudimentary it could be called a middleman facilitating the connection between two hosts (server and client)
Iβm not sure if this counts, but I use Readdle Documents, which is a file browser from before the files app on iOS, on my iPad as kind of a siloed collection of files and folders exclusively for work. I can still access those folders from my desktop finder at home through iCloud Drive just like anything else, but accessing all my personal files from the app on iPad (which is what I take to work) is a bit trickier, so it just keeps all my work things organized, focused, and away from my personal life.
FileBrowser is a good a more private option well. Neat little file manager
I like the security aspect. I typically use my iPad with Readdle documents as a supercharged projector in classes. I display PDFs of the student handouts through HDMI out and mark them up with an Apple Pencil. Does FileBrowser allow for marking up with an Apple Pencil? I donβt see any mention of it on the store page.
Merlin Bird ID - itβs Shazam for bird calls
Right but do you use it for some orthogonal use? Arent you just using it exactly as intended for its primary purpose?
Should have read more, I wasnβt aware that was part of the question. Iβm just posting about niche usage apps I like. I donβt use them often, but theyβre essential for their niche.
Idk if this counts, but I use the Reminders app on my phone to create packing lists for work travel. Very easy to uncheck everything then re-check off things as you pack them. Keep building a perpetual packing list and youβll never forget things. Lists in general are awesome for offloading cognitive workload.
RunPee will alert you when thereβs a lull in a movie so you can sneak away to take a leak. Includes a plot summary of what you missed while you pissed.
RPM app - I use this for ensuring my turntable is spinning at the correct RPM.
Iβve got a Dolby app on my Mac that I use for encoding or decoding Dolby B/C tape recordings because Iβm a cassette nerd. Super niche.
I also enjoy GPS raw data apps for seeing how fast my airplane is going when it takes off.
If I think of any more Iβll post again.
Idk about merlin, but with iNaturalist, the purpose was logging sightings and locations of plants/animals/fungi/etc, and letting people double check your ID so it can be used in research.
This built a massive database of images, locations, times, etc, which is a really good training set for image (or sound) recognition. Now the app is really good at automatically recognizing stuff from pictures, so people just use it for that. The app actually started to try to penalize you for using it for identification without actually logging stuff.
I used a Color Picker app (an app that generates color palettes of complimentary colors from one or more color inputs or a picture) to find good paint combinations for d&d miniature painting.
That's not that far off from it's intended use, but I bet it's not the audience they imagined lol
I use those for Hue light stuff
Me and my wife use element classic for RP with our ff14 characters.