Pinboard is one of the few apps that I don't mind paying a yearly fee to use. It's a simple, Easy to use cloud-based bookmarking service. Google Bookmarks without the data mining.

It features some interesting social features, including sharing links with your network, and a feed of what's popular. This alone could replace a good chunk of what we use social media for (if only all of our friends agreed to use it).

Personally, I keep all of my bookmarks private. I don't have anyone in my networks. I never look at the popular bookmarks feed. I still find Pinboard to be a nice tool. I can use my own custom tags to organize links.

I can add bookmarks from any device. The website it fast, and I can even expand my search a to include cached version of the site contents in addition to the usual title+tag search.

I've been using it for years, and I'm very pleased. The site has been stable and reliable. It's been compatible with many devices. Check it out https://pinboard.in

#tech #recommendations

A “live USB” is a term used by computer people to describe a USB flash drive that's been configured to contain a full operating system that can be run directly from the drive. This is neat because it lets any compatible computer run the operating system without first needing to install anything.

There are a lot of cool purpose-built operating systems that wouldn't really make sense for general usage, but work great from a live USB, such as:

• DBAN – A tool for securely erasing disks
• System Resuce – A toolkit for repairing or salvaging data from damaged or unbootable computers
• Clonezilla – A tool for imagining drives
• Tails – A security-hardened OS that doesn't store anything

However, carrying around a dozen flash drives is annoying, and the process of keeping all of them up-to-date quickly becomes cumbersome.

On an episode of the Linux Unplugged podcast, I learned about a neat tool called Ventoy.

Ventoy is really great. It sets up a USB thumb drive so it looks like a mass storage device when I insert it into my running computer. I can then drop .iso (or .img, .vhd, .efi and others) files into the drive.

After that's done, if I tell a computer to boot from that thumb drive, I am presented with a menu listing all of those disk images.

Half a dozen live USBs are combined into one, and updating any of .isos is as simple as copying a new file over.

The thumb drive is still usable as a basic data storage device for stashin or sharing files. It's been a great tool, check it out.

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Do you ever want to download a video from a website? I often do. The easiest way I've found is with youtube-dl. This tool will download a video for you, and it supports a lot more than just Youtube. The full list of supported sites is here, it's quite extensive. I have found it quite easy to use. The basic operation is simply:

$ youtube-dl <URL>

It will crawl the page metadata, find the video file, and pull it down for you. You can tell it to download the best quality:

$ youtube-dl -f bestvideo+bestaudio <URL>

If you're concerned about file size, you can ask for the best video with a size constraint. This will download the best quality (audio and video) with a filesize under 50 MB:

$ youtube-dl -f 'best[filesize<50M]'

There are a ton more options, check out the documentation for more info.

I've only used youtube-dl on Linux, but it supports Windows and MacOS as well.

#tech #recommendations