One of my personal frustrations with the general state of the internet is the reduction of discover-ability of things that I might be interested in, or feel I want or need to support. Early StumbleUpon was a major component of my internet browsing habits in high school, and collections of things that aren’t ultimately referral links seems to dwindle. In the interest of trying to help support the mild corrective force of just being a damn web site again, I’m pointing out a few folks and projects I’m following/supporting and why.
This list is in no particular order, and some people and groups are just interesting, while others are clearly working to improve the world.
Molly White’s Citation Needed
The first I heard of Molly White was as a leader of the rather large hachyderm.io Mastodon instance. I didn’t really learn who she was until she gave a recent interview on Late Night Linux earlier this year. Since then I’ve been following the audio version of her Newsletter, and realized the messages she is broadcasting, advice she provides, and the invaluable journalism and research she performs is exactly what I want to see more of in the world. Its thanks to her writing that I realized concretely the connection I had never really made between my disdain for the current raft of political corruption in the US, and the ponzi schemes that grew out of crypto-currency and blockchain-obsessed financial scammers.
You can find her work, and support that work at citationneeded.news/.
KDE eV
There isn’t much I want to say about KDE specifically, but as a Mac refugee, I have a continual fear that my tools will be taken away from me and replaced with something terrible or nothing at all. I lost most of what made the Mac great as a platform as Apple re-worked the Mac and the majority of their first party software in the early-mid 2010’s, and I still lament the loss of services like Google Reader even earlier than that. While there are more layers than I can realistically keep track off in the stack of software that keeps my computer out of my way, the top-layer of applications and UI tools are all KDE-based these days, so I do a tiny bit to fund their work with a bit more than what would have been the equivalent of buying the regular releases of Mac OS X back when Apple charged for them.
Beyond the KDE Plasma Desktop, and the major KDE components like the Dolphin file manager, and Kate text editor, tools like KAlgebra (a graphing calculator), KMyMoney (a personal finance tool),
You can support KDE work financially at kde.org/donate/.
Well There’s Your Problem Podcast (WTYP)
WTYP is a podcast about disasters (usually tied to engineering, society, and in some senses policy), with slides. The episodes recant details of a disaster with context about how the disaster came about, and who was involved with a humorous bent. The show isn’t for everyone, but its likely to put a smile on the face of people who can relax with the humor and reflect on the disasters without wallowing in the doom.
Their shows are on YouTube at youtube.com/@wtyppod, and they do periodic bonus episodes with a broader set of topics available via Patreon at patreon.com/c/wtyppod.
Main Engine Cut Off (MECO) Podcast
Anthony Colangelo does a favor to anyone who follows rocketry, space news, and space policy by reading basically all of the big news in space, and summarizing it in a set of regular audio shows. He frequently interviews big players in the space arena (NASA administrators, leaders of major companies, leads of major programs and science projects, etc.). As someone in this industry, I find everything Anthony provides useful and interesting, and regularly find myself naturally pulling information he collects when talking with coworkers who are new to the industry, or trying to contextualize why we do or don’t do specific things.
You can find his work at mainenginecutoff.com/. I also highly recommend the show he does with Jake Robinson each week, Off Nominal, at offnom.com/.
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
I view the EFF as what the ACLU would be if it were founded in my lifetime and buy someone who’s world view was shaped by the internet rather than by the newspaper. In many cases they are taking action in spaces I would expect the ACLU to act with the aim of defending the civil liberties of people in the digital age. Like the ACLU they’ve had egregious miss-steps, and they have been reticent to backtrack on some of those miss-steps, but I haven’t really seen an organization that shares the view and general goals of defending the rights of the people in a similar way.
You can read more about the EFF and support them at eff.org.
David Revoy
I should probably do a separate post just artists that are doing particularly compelling work these days, but David takes a particularly special spot because of his commitment to the commons and providing free (libre) access to his works. That wouldn’t be all that compelling if he were just someone releasing “stuff” for the world, but David is two-fold exceptionally talented with a distinct and recognizable artistic style and sense of humor, and committed to sharing his workflow for using historically Linux-unfriendly tools like graphics tablets and drawing displays under Linux. David’s various guides to how he setup his computers were the the original set of guides that I used in 2014 when I stopped screwing around with MacPorts and Linux on-the-side, and dove into making Ubuntu my day-to-day operating system, with a Mac on-the-side.
David’s work is found on davidrevoy.com. His recent “Retaliation” piece is part of why I’m writing this piece today. Reproduced under CC-BY-SA 4.0 below.
PhotoPrism
There is a whole set of tools I let silently run to keep my digital life out of my day-to-day fiddling, and PhotoPrism is one such tool. When paired with a recommended iOS or Android application that will perform regular uploading of photos from a phone, the whole process makes dealing with having a camera in your pocket a no-brainer.
PhotoPrism provides an easy interface for both storing and sorting my photographs, and also makes useful use of machine learning to do facial recognition and subject identification using local computing. If you used iPhoto in the early 2010’s, you’ll find PhotoPrism has all of the major non-editing features. I can browse a map of my photos by location, find photos of particular people, and browse by various tags and dates. Best of all, the storage on the backend is just a directory of photos. If someday the project up and dies, I’m not locked into a database format I cannot recover from.
PhotoPrism’s free tier is more than sufficient to decide if you like the tool for an extended duration, and their subscription for additional features is modestly priced.
PhotoPrism is available for download at photoprism.app.
Last modified on 2025-08-02