I like these things a lot, and I use them myself. Check out the referral links page as well.
I am a passionate investor, and I believe that everyone should have an easy, transparent, and low-cost way to access the stock market. For beginners, or really for every buy-and-hold strategy, I strongly recommend the platform Freetrade .
We both get a free share if you sign up using this link: https://magic.freetrade.io/join/cesare-giulio/5d53e075
This is a very useful free tool to test portfolios against past performance (which is no guarantee of future performance): Backtest.
A Wise borderless account. It gives you a debit card that supports multiple currencies, and you can convert one balance into another with a tap on the screen. It is free to open, and free to use, it only charges for complex operations and to convert one currency into another (and it charges Wise fees on that, which are always among the lowest on the market). In short, you can travel everywhere and use your card in the local currency, without hassles and with minimal fees (less than any alternative, short of meeting locals and exchanging banknotes manually).
You might have heard of this company as “TransferWise”. It’s the same guys, they recently rebranded.
Canva is a fantastic tool that produces very professional-looking graphics for posters, fliers, social media, etc… for free, online. It is built in a very intuitive way, and it is very easy to use. It also has a huge library of content that can be used freely. The free version does enough for most users.
Remove.bg is a website that does what it says, and it does that very well. It removes backgrounds better than any paid software I have ever used.
Streamyard is a fantastic tool, but for live streams or webinars. It does what it is supposed to do, and it does it well. Further, it is built in a very intuitive way, and it is very easy to use. The free version is enough for most users.
Whenever setting up a new (Windows) computer, you can use a link to my recommended Ninite apps installer (or make your own one):
This installs 7zip, Discord, Dropbox, Edge Chromium, Microsoft Security Essentials, Faststone Image Viewer, Firefox Gimp, Imgburn, Keepass2, K-lite Codecs, Malwarebytes, Paint.net, QbitTorrent, Skype, SumatraPDF, Thunderbird, Winrar, Zoom
Not (yet) supported by Ninite, so to be installed separately, I also recommend:
- Potplayer – the best, fastest video player. It used to be VLC, now it’s this one.
- Clementine – a good tool to manage your music library.
- Ccleaner – a good utility to get rid of unwanted files, startup processes, services.
- Everything and Everything Toolbar – search through your files really fast.
- Recuva – recovers most deleted files… and also deletes things you really want deleted.
- FreeFileSync – set up a one-click backup routine (folder by folder) with an external hard drive.
- Calibre – e-book manager for your e-readers (Kindle etc).
- Driver Booster – updates your drivers (this one looks dodgy but I had Microsoft recommend it to me. It works very well)
- PowerToys – an official Microsoft program that adds a few amazing tools to Windows.
- Microsoft Office – you know this one.
- VIM – if you ever need to open big text files, this is the way. It’s also okay for small ones.
- Lossless Cut – a very fast tool to cut-and-paste video files without re-encoding them.
- f.lux – blocks blue light in the evening, which might be useful to sleep better. Anyway, it gave me a much better awareness of what time it is, since it made my screen colour scheme match natural light. It’s honestly pretty great.
I also anti-recommend any antivirus software: Windows Defender (or Security Essentials on Windows 7/XP) + Malwarebytes + Adblocker browser extensions is more than enough to protect your PC. Two Factor Authentication, a password manager and a good habit of keeping regular offline backups also helps a lot.
To browse the internet, I recommend Microsoft Edge for everyday browsing, Mozilla Firefox for important things, Opera for the easy proxy interface and… the Tor Browser can be useful sometimes.
I use the following browser extensions:
- uBlock Origin – the best blocker, by far (ads, trackers, malware, adblocker-blockers,…).
- Ghostery – disables most other trackers.
- ClearURL – autoremoves tracking data from links.
- HTTPS Everywhere – forces the SSL secure protocol wherever available.
- Hoverzoom+ – shows pictures and videos previews. Amazing.
- Pixelblock – disables hidden email trackers.
- Wayback Machine – save any webpage on the internet archive with one click.
- Unpaywall – finds (legal) free versions of papers from DOI links, if available.
Other extensions which are unavailable on official stores are:
- Ad Nauseam – it clicks all the ads in the background, so tracking becomes meaningless.
- Bypass Paywalls – it does what it says on several websites.
I put the Chrome links because more than 64% of the world uses Chrome, and further because these are fully compatible with the new Edge, but every extension is available for Firefox (<5%) as well.
I like cryptocurrencies (not as an investment).
Bitcoin address: 3HykkmwAAMcj8J6s3qmcVE26dJ21ReNEfD
Garlicoin address: GR4npXpU32JmVWpXodwufsTsd8QDFpTVez