Windows PowerToys is one of the first tools I install on a new machine. I use it so much every day that I need to share how I use it. I’ve been using it for a long time now, but the pace at which good features have been added, it’s edged out most other tools and is #4 in terms of most used tools on my machine, with only the browser (Brave, currently), the editor (Cursor, currently), and Everything are ahead.) ...
This week, I learned: Assisted generation uses a faster LLM to generate text and a better (tokenizer-compatible) LLM to validate it. This makes it faster. E.g. Gemma 2 2b with Gemma 2 27b Power Toys has an Advanced Paste that uses OpenAI to paste as Markdown or JSON! Interest Turing complete languages: find + mkdir, maybe sed and awk Minecraft’s Redstone Circuits Conway’s Game of Life Cellular Automata Rule 110 Magic: The Gathering SQL Excel Rev.ai does a good job of diarization. Cost: 2 cents per minute. Update: 6 Jun 2025. Cost: 0.33c/min Ref
My most-used apps in 2020 were: Everything. Locates files. Like Finder. Fast and brilliant. Chrome. But Edge is pretty good, and I’m using it for secondary accounts. Visual Studio Code. It’s my note-taker, TODO list, outliner, and IDE. Minecraft. I’m addicted. PowerPoint. I use it to make & edit videos, not just slides. Zoom. Thanks to the lockdown. Breakout rooms are great. Mail. It uses under 50MB. Gmail takes 250MB. VLC. It still plays all formats, but I’m looking for a replacement. Seafile. Our private Dropbox. AutoHotKey. The best macro tool, but hard to use. The new utilities I started using recently are: ...