Hello. My name is Peter Schwier and I'm a software developer with a Bachelors in Computer Science. For the last several years I have been a consultant with CGI helping various clients with custom software solutions that they can't get from off the shelf software and integrating off the shelf software with other customized software. For fun I play D&D with friends, read, or play singleplayer computer games. You can contact me at Peter@Schwier.us.
There are several tools I am using that are not very mainstream but I still find them immensely useful.
Syncthing is a file syncronization tool that keeps the files on my devices and does not store them in the cloud. I loose the pseudo backup provided by a cloud copy of my files, but I gain a lot more privacy. On iOS I can use Möbius Sync. However, the developer for the android build of Sycnthing discontinued the project. Seems it was becoming too much effort to maintain the custom UI and update for changing versions of Android. Eventually I will need to switch to running syncthing inside Termux.
KeePass is a local only password manager. It uses an encrypted file on disk to store the passwords. This means that my passwords will not get stolen when a big name password manager gets hacked. On Android I am using KeePass2Android, and on iOS I am moving from Strongbox to KeePassium because of license changes in commercial usage. In both cases the password file is copied via Syncthing.
TiddlyWiki is a browser only Wiki that provides a lot of advanced features. Sure it does not provide the live editing that Obsidian does, but instead it provides an out of the box ability to query and modify the UI that will survive version updates. I use rclone to serve a WebDav instance of my Syncthing folders because TiddlyWiki provides builtin support to autosave back to a WebDav server.
Bazzite is an "immutable" linux distribution based on Fedora Atomic that I use for my SteamDeck and my Framework laptop. On my SteamDeck it looks the same as the default os from Valve, but lets me install aditional software and roll back if a software update fails. My Framework laptop, is probably going to be the last laptop I ever buy, because they designed it to be user serviceable and I can replace the various parts of the laptop myself.
By Role Playing Games, I mean tabletop dice rollers, not computer games. Computer games come and go too fast for me to bother adding here.
My group just finished Storm King's Thunder after playing for about 5 years. Now, several of those years were during and after the Covid lockdown, so they really shouldn't count, but by the calendar start and end dates, yes, 5 years.
We are currently playing through Curse of Strahd with one of the players having swapped over to Game Master and our previous Game Master switching to a player. It is amazing how different the tone of the campaign is between the two.
I have never actually played a campaign with GURPS but I think it could be amazingly fun. Oh well, I have too many of the rulebooks as it is.