How I computer in 2024

Published: at 22:18Suggest Changes

I’ve always been curious about how people use their computers. For instance, I browse forums to learn which applications others choose, ask friends about their productivity setups, and pay attention to what products, computers, and mobile apps people showcase on social media. Over the years, I’ve learned many great practices from others, so at this year’s end, I want to organize my digital toolbox and share it. Although I’ve already listed my hardware devices and commonly used software on my blog’s Uses page.

Table of Contents

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Return to Native Apps

In an era where tools like Cursor claim to enable rapid app development, I’ve chosen what seems like a counter-trend path—returning to native applications. This decision wasn’t made on a whim but rather based on long-term self-observation and careful consideration: if system-provided apps can meet my needs, I no longer seek third-party alternatives.

The convenience brought by this transition has exceeded expectations. For example, the built-in OCR functionality in iOS Camera and Photos apps makes document scanning and text extraction effortless and natural. The deep integration between system-level calendar and reminders enables more efficient time and task management. Meanwhile, Apple Notes not only ensures sensitive information security through end-to-end encryption but also impresses with its performance in document scanning and team collaboration scenarios.

In practice, I’ve found that Apple’s native app ecosystem can elegantly cover most aspects of daily digital life. From map navigation to weather information, from file previews to instant messaging, these basic but essential needs are well met. This integrated convenience is particularly noticeable on mobile devices, bringing an unprecedented smooth experience to daily use.

Returning to native apps has brought other significant advantages. First is improved performance and stability, as native apps typically better adapt to the system and consume fewer system resources. Second is enhanced privacy protection, eliminating concerns about third-party apps collecting and using data. Finally, it reduces maintenance costs, eliminating the need for frequent updates and debugging of various third-party apps while also reducing subscription expenses.

For scenarios that genuinely require third-party apps, I’ve begun prioritizing applications that support Apple Native design standards. These apps not only maintain consistency with the system in interface and interaction but also better utilize system features such as deep AppleScript integration, Shortcuts automation support, Live Activities, Focus mode, and other functionalities, providing a more unified and fluid user experience.

Of course, this return doesn’t mean completely abandoning third-party apps. For specific professional needs, excellent third-party applications remain indispensable supplements. The key lies in finding the balance between native apps and third-party tools, allowing them to fulfill their respective roles, work together, and collectively build an efficient and unified operating environment.

Privacy and Security

In this era of rampant phishing and cyber fraud, personal privacy and cybersecurity have become crucial issues that no one can ignore. Every web browsing session and application usage can leave digital footprints. Therefore, building a comprehensive privacy protection system has become particularly important. In my practice, this system primarily revolves around three core components: DNS-level protection, content filtering, and credential management.

The choice of DNS service is the first line of defense in protecting personal privacy. While in China, I chose to use the open-source EasyMosdns DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) service within the Surge environment. This solution protects user privacy through IP-based encrypted DNS queries, offering not only highly accurate DNS resolution but also effective protection against DNS poisoning. After moving to Lisbon, I switched to NextDNS service. While its query response time may be marginally slower than Cloudflare Public DNS, this slight latency difference is hardly noticeable, and the comprehensive privacy protection features it offers far outweigh this minor trade-off. NextDNS’s rich configuration options allow me to block tracking scripts at the source while effectively filtering advertisements. The free tier of 300,000 queries per month is quite generous for individual users, and the premium plan at just €1.99/month offers exceptional value.

To build a more comprehensive protection network, I installed the Wipr 2 content blocker extension on Safari for both desktop and mobile devices. This lightweight tool not only effectively blocks advertisements but also filters various tracking scripts and malicious code, creating a dual-layer protection system alongside the DNS-level defense. This combination not only enhances the browsing experience but, more importantly, ensures personal data isn’t arbitrarily collected.

In the realm of credential security, I’ve adopted a dual strategy using Bitwarden and Ente Auth. Bitwarden serves as my primary password manager, earning my trust over many years with its open-source nature and robust encryption implementation. Although it supports self-hosting, considering security implications and maintenance overhead, and given my lack of confidence in my technical abilities, I opted for the official cloud service at $10 per year. This not only allows me to securely access my credential vault across various devices but, more importantly, enables advanced features including multi-factor authentication (MFA). Notably, Bitwarden’s integration with Fastmail allows me to generate disposable email addresses for various website registrations, playing a crucial role in protecting personal privacy and preventing spam.

While I use Bitwarden for most MFA needs, I chose Ente Auth to manage certain special authentication requirements. For example, Bitwarden account’s own MFA tokens and second-factor authentication for other critical services. Ente Auth’s unique next-token preview feature brings great convenience in practical use, making multi-factor authentication no longer a cumbersome process. Both tools embrace open-source principles with fully transparent codebases, not only ensuring security through public scrutiny but fundamentally guaranteeing user data privacy.

Productivity Tools

2024 marked a year of breaking through established perceptions in my choice of digital tools. This breakthrough is reflected not only in tool selection but also in the transformation of usage concepts. From note management to writing tools, from information acquisition to automated workflows, each choice was thoroughly considered, ultimately forming a highly efficient collaborative system.

In terms of note-taking tools, I completed the transition from Heptabase to Tana. As a note-taking tool that combines the bidirectional linking flexibility of Roam Research with the structured database capabilities of Notion, Tana has fundamentally redefined my approach to knowledge management. It not only supports traditional outline-style hierarchical recording but also enables structured data management through SuperTags. Its powerful search node functionality ensures convenient and precise content retrieval. Tana’s AI integration particularly impressed me, especially its voice-to-text feature, which makes capturing insights remarkably easy—when ideas flash through my mind, I can simply record them via phone, and Tana AI automatically converts them into structured text.

Although I detailed the collaborative workflow between Tana and Heptabase in July this year, a method that continues to spark my creativity, my deeper usage of Tana revealed that it could fully assume Heptabase’s role in deep understanding. This unexpected realization led to my gradually reduced dependence on Heptabase. Nevertheless, I still deeply admire Heptabase’s design philosophy and hope for its continued development.

In writing tools, this year’s biggest surprise came from discovering BBEdit, a text editor older than myself. This seemingly plain tool provided me with unprecedented “aha moments.” Its value lies not only in its powerful text processing capabilities but also in its deep integration with macOS. Through AppleScript, I automated the complete workflow from article drafting to publishing: including processing Markdown metadata, changing file names, moving file locations, and pushing to GitHub repositories through git commands. It maintains smooth performance when handling large text files, an advantage many modern editors struggle to match.

Using BBEdit not only improved my writing efficiency but unexpectedly prompted me to explore advanced features of Raycast and DEVONthink. Raycast, as a macOS efficiency tool, enables one-click access to frequently used folders and applications through its QuickLink feature. More importantly, using its Script Command functionality, I developed several automation scripts, including creating file Deep Links, enabling one-way linking between local files and Tana, upgrading my local file management approach. Meanwhile, DEVONthink, another long-standing software, plays an increasingly important role in my workflow through its deep integration with AppleScript and seamless cooperation with BBEdit.

Regarding AI assistance tools, Perplexity and Kagi have performed to my satisfaction. The Pro version of Perplexity not only offers more powerful AI model choices, but its real-time internet search capability also makes information retrieval highly efficient and precise. It has played an unexpected role in my life abroad—for instance, while shopping in Lisbon supermarkets, I often photograph products and ask Perplexity about Portuguese product information, helping me make purchase decisions and greatly improving my shopping experience.

Before using Kagi, I never considered paying for a search engine, but the actual experience completely changed this perspective. It not only provides clean, ad-free search results, but its Universal Summarizer feature has saved me considerable time when browsing news and long articles. Features like Kagi Bangs and Kagi Lens significantly improve information retrieval accuracy, while its consistently high-quality and objective search results are particularly valuable in today’s internet environment saturated with SEO-optimized content.

Communication and Reading

This year’s choices in communication and reading continue last year’s focus on practicality.

For email services, after thorough comparison, I ultimately chose to continue using Fastmail rather than migrating to Tuta. This decision stems from rational consideration of practical usage scenarios: while Tuta is known for its robust security, this advantage is often difficult to fully utilize in today’s email communication environment, especially when most communication partners still use mainstream services like Gmail. In comparison, while Fastmail may not match Tuta’s security level, it still far exceeds mainstream email service providers in security while offering significant practical advantages. It supports creating up to 600 anonymous email addresses, which, combined with Bitwarden integration, provides great convenience in managing registrations for various websites and applications. More importantly, it seamlessly integrates with Apple Calendar and Apple Notes, making schedule management and work log synchronization much easier.

For bookmark management, I chose the retro yet sufficient Pinboard. The key to this choice lies in its open API interface, allowing perfect integration into my workflow: whether syncing with DEVONthink through AppleScript or connecting Tana and Telegram channels via N8N, data transfer flows smoothly. Considering the practical value of its full-text archiving and retrieval features, I didn’t hesitate to subscribe to the complete version.

For reading tools, Readwise Reader remains my platform of choice. Although the emerging RSS reader Follow shows promising potential, considering its stability is still being refined, I currently use it only as a supplementary information source.

Driven by multilingual reading needs, I finally purchased Bob Translate, a text translation tool that I wish I’d discovered sooner. By configuring free DeepL API and Groq’s large language model, it provides fast, accurate, and elegant translation services. For more professional translation scenarios, I use Immersive Translate as a supplement. Interestingly, my reading habits have evolved significantly with the change in language environment: while in China, I was accustomed to reading in Chinese-English parallel texts, but after moving to Lisbon, I prefer reading English texts directly, using Bob for word translation only when encountering difficult phrases. Perhaps this transformation reflects not only the natural improvement in language ability but also the important role of tools in adaptive learning.

Storage and Backup

Data storage security and reliable backup remain essential fundamental needs. Although I detailed my specific data storage and backup strategies in Newsletter #92, here I want to focus on sharing the deeper considerations behind choosing these services and how they work together to form a complete data protection system.

As an Apple ecosystem user, iCloud provides me with unparalleled inter-device connectivity. This advantage is particularly prominent in family scenarios—since family members also use Apple devices, through iCloud+‘s family sharing feature, we can easily achieve sharing and synchronization of photos, documents, and other data. This seamless collaborative experience is difficult to match on other platforms and is a key reason why I continue to stick with the Apple ecosystem.

However, iCloud’s weakness in external sharing prompted me to seek a traditional cloud storage service as a complement. Considering actual usage scenarios, I spent two weeks intensively evaluating European cloud storage providers, thoroughly comparing Mega, pCloud, Internxt, Koofr, and icedrive among others. Eventually, German-based Filen stood out with its excellent overall performance. This secure cloud storage service, which employs zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption technology, maintains satisfactory transfer speeds while ensuring high-strength encryption. More remarkably, it sets no limits on file version numbers and transfer bandwidth, making it an ideal file sharing tool.

Filen’s value extends beyond file sharing; it’s also a reliable backup for important data. Its desktop client offers flexible file synchronization options, completing data backup tasks silently in the background. This seamless backup mechanism greatly reduces the mental load of daily use. However, even though Filen’s security is commendable, when backing up important data, I still use encryption tools to encrypt the data before backup.

For building an off-site disaster recovery backup solution, I chose the professional BorgBase service. This choice was based on several key considerations: first, BorgBase is a service specifically designed for Borg backup, perfectly supporting incremental backup and deduplication features, ensuring complete backup history while effectively saving storage space; second, it provides an intuitive web interface for backup status monitoring, equipped with open-source desktop GUI for operations, and supports SSH key authentication to ensure security; finally, BorgBase’s servers deployed across multiple European locations provide me with quality access speeds and low network latency. These professional features make it more suitable as an off-site disaster recovery backup solution compared to ordinary object storage services.

These three layers of protection—iCloud for daily synchronization, Filen for secure sharing and backup, and BorgBase for professional archival storage—form a comprehensive data security assurance system. iCloud handles daily device synchronization and family sharing, Filen takes care of file sharing and routine backup tasks, while BorgBase serves as the final security line, ensuring complete data recovery in extreme situations. Additionally, there’s cold backup on external hard drives (though my backup frequency this year hasn’t been as high, needing improvement next year). This multi-layered backup strategy not only provides sufficient data redundancy but also meets usage needs in different scenarios, providing peace of mind.

Setapp

When facing multiple software subscription renewals mid-year, I discovered that most of these applications were available in Setapp’s library. After recalculating the costs, subscribing to Setapp’s basic package became a natural choice.

Currently, the applications I use through Setapp cover multiple areas including system maintenance, productivity enhancement, media processing, document handling, and AI enhancement. For system maintenance, CleanMyMac and AIDente Pro handle system cleaning and battery management respectively; for productivity tools, CleanShot X, Yoink, and PopClip greatly simplify daily operations; in media processing, Downie and Permute provide comprehensive download and format conversion solutions; for document processing, Marked perfectly complements BBEdit, providing real-time document rendering preview; while in AI enhancement, Superwhisper and BoltAI offer various conveniences.

Self-hosted

As life in Lisbon has gradually stabilized, my self-hosting needs have changed significantly. No longer requiring a 24/7 Surge environment or worrying about IP issues for using AI platforms and payment platforms, I’ve been able to substantially streamline my server configuration: currently maintaining only one Hetzner VPS managed through Zeabur, plus one Oracle free VPS. This simplification not only reduces maintenance costs but allows me to focus attention on truly important services.

On these servers, my self-hosted projects mainly include:

My philosophy for deploying self-hosted services is: lightweight, automated, and reliable. The goal is to provide stable and reliable functional support while minimizing maintenance costs.

Conclusion

Looking back at my digital tool choices for 2024, I clearly see several main trends: first is the return to native applications; second is the continued emphasis on privacy and security; third is the deep integration between tools, weaving independent tools into an organic whole through automation means like AppleScript and Shortcuts.

I hope to continue following this rational and practical approach next year. The focus isn’t on how many tools one has, but on how to make existing tools better serve actual needs and create real value. Meanwhile, I also look forward to exploring more possibilities for improving efficiency while maintaining the stability of existing workflows.

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