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Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

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Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#141

Post by BrandoElFollito »

klondike_klive wrote: post #125
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #94

Bitwarden. I have an easy way to exchange a huge amount of data (not only passwords) across my family with specific access rights to objects.

Ugh that reminds me I've been promising for ages to migrate all my partner's passwords over from the ridiculously overpriced LastPass. Out of interest, how do you use Bitwarden day-to-day - browser extension?

I used LastPass since it started, I had the opportunity to meet the creators at an event some 20 years ago or more. It was a nice product at that time.

And then it went downhill, with several issues (including a huge javascript block added to each page which was really too slow). It was not aging well as well.

I moved to Bitwarden a few years ago, I self-host the solution but like it so much that I also bought the cloud one just to support the devs.

I looked at at several solutions for password management and BW is by far the one I like the most, especially the ability to create organizations to share vaults and passwords easily.

I use it in Windows (the native client), Chrome, Firefox and Android. It works just great.

the only tiny, tiny thing they could fix is the ability to swipe off the popup that helps you to fill in the info with Bitwarden that sometimes gets in the way of the form (on Android). It is very minor and I will take the opportunity to raise the point on the community now that I think of ot.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#142

Post by SleepilyLimping »

I don't have a family, but self-hosting Actual Budget via Docker helped me provide a budget app for my friends who I converted to YNAB4, and who I didn't want to point to subscribing to "New YNAB" which is less useful.

I like being able to just host things on my Synology NAS, set up usernames for people, and go "here's a reverse proxy'd URL, go nuts." While it makes me responsible for their data in a way, it feels like I'm helping.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#143

Post by tomcam »

stranded22 wrote: post #131
OJFord wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's awful with non-premium TickTick? I've been considering paying just to support it, not aware of a feature or limitation driving me to.

Give it a shot - you’ll see the difference. It is a completely different experience

Objection, Your Honor. Non-responsive.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#144

Post by packetlost »

binwiederhier wrote: post #56
leonidasv wrote: post #54

Kagi, a paid search engine. I accepted paying for it after the trial because every other search engine just sucks or isn't customizable enough in comparison. Not to mention ads and tracking. Kagi results are really, really great. I find it better than Google for technical queries and better than DuckDuckGo for localized queries. Unfortunately, it's not 100% SEO-trash proof, but I can permanently block those domains f…

I tried Kagi for the free trial and I do not share your enthusiasm or positive experiences. I really wanted it to be great, but for the things I search (I am searching mostly extremely technical, and domain specific things), I found myself doing the same search on Google by prefixing !g, and Google nailed it so much more a lot of times. So much so that I didn't even finish the free trial, but went back to Google as m…

maybe it's the industry I'm in or the languages I use, but my experience has been the opposite. Being able to filter out all the SEO gamed crap at the top of the results has been great for me and the results are at least on-par with Google.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#145

Post by sotix »

lloeki wrote: post #87
kstrauser wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My family leaves it on voluntarily at all times. I check to see if my wife’s left work yet to know if I should start dinner. The other day I happen to notice that my grown kid was at a good restaurant and I texted them to be sure to try a certain dish. Another kid texted me yesterday to ask what I was doing in SF; I was running errands with a friend. For us, it’s a fun way to see what each other is up to. The reason…

> My family leaves it on voluntarily at all times. Same. > I check to see if my wife’s left work yet to know if I should start dinner I (we) don't even do that, on purpose. If we want to know, we ask by message or call. > The reason [...] leave it turned on is that we’ve never, not once, used it as a spy device. I agree, it's all about trust. In my mind it's exactly like being a mail server sysadmin: by design you ha…

> we have location-based automations set up in Home Assistant, and by default there's a geocoded location entity per tracked device, which I disabled, relying only on zone enter/leave events, carefully balancing privacy and convenience.

Did you set up location based events in home assistant using iOS devices? I tried to set it up, but it always says that I’m at home, which I think is because I use WireGuard to remain connected to my home network at all times. I tried setting up a separate iCloud integration for location tracking, but it bothered me every hour about entering a 2 factor code. I ended up disabling that integration. Wondering if you have faced this issue and potentially solved it.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#146

Post by kstrauser »

lloeki wrote: post #87
kstrauser wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My family leaves it on voluntarily at all times. I check to see if my wife’s left work yet to know if I should start dinner. The other day I happen to notice that my grown kid was at a good restaurant and I texted them to be sure to try a certain dish. Another kid texted me yesterday to ask what I was doing in SF; I was running errands with a friend. For us, it’s a fun way to see what each other is up to. The reason…

> My family leaves it on voluntarily at all times. Same. > I check to see if my wife’s left work yet to know if I should start dinner I (we) don't even do that, on purpose. If we want to know, we ask by message or call. > The reason [...] leave it turned on is that we’ve never, not once, used it as a spy device. I agree, it's all about trust. In my mind it's exactly like being a mail server sysadmin: by design you ha…

Yep, that all makes sense to me. It really is about trust. We don’t use it to stalk each other. Well, there’s a non-zero chance the kids have used it to see how long it would be until we were home. If I were them, I’d sure I would’ve.

On a small handful of occasions, someone’s been someplace completely unexpected, and we’ve asked them about it. “Hey, you’re in a nearby city. You ok?” “Oh, sorry! I forgot to tell you I’m going to the water park with Joe and Jane.” “Ok. Sounds fun! Have a good time!”

My wife being able to know where I am hasn’t changed my behavior one whit. I assume the reverse is true.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#147

Post by muzani »

gnz11 wrote: post #116
muzani wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an unhealthy hoarder of music too. Went JOOX > Spotify > YouTube Music as far as it goes. YT is great as it includes songs that are only posted on YT (mainly covers), but also you get no ads on the video version of YT. I kind of want to support Spotify as the little guy but they haven't been kind to paying users.

Is Spotify the "little guy"? I like the concept of Spotify and pay for Spotify but their software seems to be getting more unusable with each passing day. Bugs that never get fixed and dark patterns everywhere. Maybe they should focus less on their new "AI DJ" and more on the boring stuff.

It's much littler than Google. I'm still uncomfortable giving my money to Google but yeah, I didn't like the dark patterns and the song suggestions didn't click. It's not as bad as JOOX, which was bad on both. YT music is legit one of the best music apps I've subscribed to though, mostly did it because I was discovering new music for Spotify via YouTube.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#148

Post by OJFord »

stranded22 wrote: post #131
OJFord wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's awful with non-premium TickTick? I've been considering paying just to support it, not aware of a feature or limitation driving me to.

Give it a shot - you’ll see the difference. It is a completely different experience

So you paid for premium for the sake of it in order to decide:

> The non-premium is awful though, you have to sign up for a proper workable product

? Ignorance is bliss, I guess, I'll stay as I am thanks.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#149

Post by kuchenbecker »

decide1000 wrote: post #81
binwiederhier wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried Kagi for the free trial and I do not share your enthusiasm or positive experiences. I really wanted it to be great, but for the things I search (I am searching mostly extremely technical, and domain specific things), I found myself doing the same search on Google by prefixing !g, and Google nailed it so much more a lot of times. So much so that I didn't even finish the free trial, but went back to Google as m…

I had the same experience. I really tried to use Kagi as my main search engine but it just was not good enough for me. I did like the feature where you can exclude domains from the results. It couild work nice as some kind of addon to Google search results. I will give it another try in the future and hope my experience is different. I do like the company and the vision behind it.

Google either finds my results or hides it with SEO spam. Kagi either finds it or doesn't.

In either case I need to re-search, but at least I didn't contribute to adtech and have some control over the results.

Re: Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

#150

Post by runamok »

muzani wrote: post #88
SlightlyLeftPad wrote: post #28

Google photos, I have all devices syncing photos to one place and now I don’t need to worry about did in-law A remember to backup their phone when they inevitably lose it at the grocery store. Arguably the only remotely important thing we have on our phones is photos and maybe chat history but it’s not earth shattering to lose that. Despite having more photos of ourselves than any other generation ever, It’s still so…

Not clear if you use it, but there's a family setting to Google One too at no extra charge. So my wife gets the extra space for the same payment. We use about the same amount of space for photos, so it saved us from each having our own subscription. I'm not sure if this is related to having a YouTube family subscription but it worked seamlessly for us.

Yes! I discovered this recently when my wife hit 95% of her quota. Remarkably fair and nice feature.
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