Kagi Search: It’s a paid search engine that promises to give better results than Google and friends. Indeed, the search results are a little more relevant, especially when researching technical topics. I made great use of the ability to filter and promote entire domains. However, the pricing doesn’t work for me: $5/month gets you 300 searches, which isn’t enough (I burned through the free 100 searches in a week), and for unlimited searches, you have to pay $10 for a bundle deal that also includes AI stuff I don’t care about. Kagi wants to become an everything app (probably adding email soon), which a tough sell while claiming to be a privacy-focused company. (Same issue with Proton, by the way.)

Fender Studio: Fender, the guitar company, just kind of threw this over the fence in May. It’s a free (but not open source) digital audio workstation, so it competes with the likes of Ardour and GarageBand. But Fender Studio runs on Linux, and quite well at that. On my machine, it supports JACK with minimal configuration and achieves lower latency than Guitarix while doing a lot more. The vendored backing tracks are a bit cheesy but well engineered.

Proselint: It’s a prose … linter, i.e. you feed it your draft blog post and it complains about vague wording and common typography problems like curly vs. straight quotes. I like that Proselint uses regex instead of an LLM, so there’s no creative interference; it’s more like an automated style guide than a chatty editor. But my homegrown typography.py script (I need to upload this to GitHub sometime) enforces a few lesser irks, such as en dashes in numerical ranges, that Proselint lets be, so I’m still using both.