nicc777 / amazing-apps-and-utilities

Applications, tools, utilities etc. I find interesting and useful.

• amazing-apps-and-utilities
• Command Line Utilities for Laptop/Workstation
  • Command Line
  • GUI Applications
  • Containers/Docker and Kubernetes
  • My favorite krew plugins
• Emulation and Retro Computing
  • Software Repositories
• Online Tools (Websites/Plugins/Etc.)
• My Own Homegrown Stuff
• List of Interesting Web Sites (various topics)
• GitHub Projects of Interest
• Development and Software Engineering
  • Python
• NO LONGER USING

amazing-apps-and-utilities

Applications, tools, utilities etc. I find interesting and useful.

I use this repo is a kind of a list of useful stuff I run into. Some I use often, while others where just really interesting.

This is obviously personal and may include a lot of stuff more-or-less useless for most average computer users. But you are still welcome to explore of course :-)

The list is will grow over time. At some point I may create a way to document old/unmaintained/defunct apps - mainly just for historic reference.

Command Line Utilities for Laptop/Workstation

Command Line

Name	Description	Personal Notes
btop	A nicer top	Get a much better view of your system resources from the command line
curl	Tool and library for transferring data with URL	My goto for testing web apps and API's
duf	Disk Usage/Free Utility	Occasionally I use this tool to view my disk space usage. Love the layout.
dua	Disk Usage Analyzer	More granular than duf and interactive. Find what is actually using all your disk space.
irssi	Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Client	Be sure to check out the Docker Version - easy to get started and probably a little more secure.
mc	File Manager	For those old enough to remember, this is a Norton Commander clone, arguably one of the best CLI visual file managers which is why it is still widely used today. IMHO this should be default even with OS minimal installations.
nmap	Network Security Scanner	If you work with networks or with network services, you need this tool!
Oh My Zsh	Managing Zsh configs	I can't live in ZSH without this! Period!
wget	Retrieve web pages and web content	Easily download content from HTTP or FTP sites. You can also mirror sites. Lots of command line options and a really powerful tool. I often switch between both curl and wget, depending on specific needs. curl is more for troubleshooting and wget to retrieve content.
yt-dlp	Command line web video downloader	I use this to save important videos from various online sources.

GUI Applications

Name	Description	Personal Notes
draw.io	Diagram Tool	Excellent selection of stencils including AWS, Kubernetes and many more. Includes stencils for modeling like UML and C4.
Nyxt Browser	Web Browser	The hacker's power-browser. Lots of emacs vibes (key bindings, buffers etc.)
VSCode	IDE	Currently my favorite IDE. Runs basically anywhere - even in a web browser if you use services like GitPod.

Containers/Docker and Kubernetes

Name	Description	Personal Notes
Docker	Basically the industry standard container engine	I use this as my primary tool for creating container images.
Helm	The package manager for Kubernetes. Think APT, RPM etc. but for Kubernetes.	Powerful package management option. Works great with GitOps tools like ArgoCD
k9s	K9s is a terminal based UI to interact with your Kubernetes clusters.	Great for viewing a lot of information quickly. Delve into detail quickly. A tool I now use on a daily basis.
kube-ps1	Adds the current K8s info on kubectl to Bash/Zsh prompt (i.e. the $PS1).	Very quick way to see to which cluster you are issuing commands to from the prompt
kustomize	Kubernetes native configuration management	A simple/easy to use utility to maintain different configuration per environment - a lightweight Helm values if you will.
krew	Krew is the package manager for kubectl plugins	Installation and usage is straight forward and easy.

My favorite krew plugins

Name	Description	Personal Notes
ktop	A top-like tool for your Kubernetes cluster.
resource-capacity aka kube-capacity	Provides an overview of the resource requests, limits, and utilization in a cluster	Convenient way to keep an eye on resources from the command line.

Emulation and Retro Computing

Name	Description	Personal Notes
PCem	Emulate older hardware.	v17 Still worked great on Ubuntu 20.04, but I have my doubts about the future of this project.
qemu	A generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer	Also refer to my Qemu Notes

Software Repositories

Name	Description	Personal Notes
WinWorld	WinWorld is an online museum dedicated to the preservation and sharing of vintage, abandoned, and pre-release software.	Great resource for software if you are into retro computing.
RPM Pbone	RPM Repository that contains a lot of older RPM's as well.	Great for searching for older RPM's

Online Tools (Websites/Plugins/Etc.)

Note: My preferred web browser is Firefox. Therefore, any plugins I mention is what I use in Firefox. Occasionally there might be an exception, and I will try to remember to point these out. On the other hand, most plugins support multiple browsers.

Name	Description	Free/Paid	Personal Notes
Diigo	Online Bookmarks, notes and annotation site with Browser plugins	Either	Been using it for years, before browsers supported cloud sync. I still have a lot of stuff there and still use it occasionally. With the browser plugin, it can augment your google searches with results from your diigo library as well.
GitPod	VSCode (and InteliJ) IDE in the web browser.	Either	Seamlessly integrate with GitHub and/or GitLab. Really good for on the move coding, especially from iPad.
JWT.io	JWT.IO allows you to decode, verify and generate JWT	Free	I use it mostly to decode JSON Web Tokens (JWT). Works great.
MS Office 365	Office productivity suite. SaaS.	Paid	I switch often between Windows, Linux and Mac. MS Office 365 is my goto office suite that I now use almost exclusively in the browser.
Wunderground	Great weather site	Adds	My goto for daily weather. Has a 10 day forecast. Allows to connect to personal weather stations for detailed observation at a location. Historic weather data, air quality and various other features.

My Own Homegrown Stuff

Name	Description	Personal Notes
get_kubectl.sh	Always get the latest version of kubectl on Linux with this command	Quick and easy way for me to keep kubectl up to date.

List of Interesting Web Sites (various topics)

Maintained on a separate page here

GitHub Projects of Interest

Name	Description	Personal Notes
NiceGUI	NiceGUI is an easy-to-use, Python-based UI framework, which shows up in your web browser. You can create buttons, dialogs, Markdown, 3D scenes, plots and much more.	Still need to try this out...
Diagrams	Diagrams lets you draw the cloud system architecture in Python code. It was born for prototyping a new system architecture design without any design tools.	Interesting, but is there a real use case?
Mermaid	Generate diagrams from markdown-like text.	Interesting, but is there a real use case?
GoAccess	Quick access log analysis.	private gist notes

Development and Software Engineering

Python

Name	Description	Personal Notes
Google Python Style Guide	Style guide	I use it mostly for the docstring templates.

NO LONGER USING

Name	Description	Why I stopped
atuin	Better shell history	The initial experience was amazing, but after a while I found it annoying. The standard ZSH history features is what I'm sticking to for now.