Note: No affiliate links below. It bothers me when people hide them.

Private, Secure Access to Your Stuff From Anywhere

• Link: Cloudflare Tunnels
• Why I like it: Cloudflare Tunnels is easily my #1 this year. Cloudflare now offers a service that lets you create an encrypted tunnel to your self-hosted home services over HTTPS, with firewall and 2FA support - and they provide it for free! I’ve spoken at length about building my own personal apps and serving them from my home infrastructure. With Cloudflare Tunnels, I’ve given each app its own external domain, with a subdomain that requires authentication to access. Let’s say I purchased the domain name shominy.net (from Porkbun, of course). My task manager would live at https://tasks.shominy.net, while an RSS reader would be at https://news.shominy.net. The service isn’t intuitive to set up, but it’s absolutely worth it once you push through the initial pain.

Low-Latency Game Streaming Anywhere

• Link: Moonlight
• Link: Sunshine
• Why I like them: This year’s Monster Gaming PC project was built exclusively for Moonlight and Sunshine. If you have a gaming PC, you should install these immediately. They allow you to stream games from your PC to nearly any supported device, anywhere you have a decent internet connection. My kids stream games in 4k60 to their nVidia Shield connected to the TV, while I stream to my phone with a Bluetooth controller when traveling. Both are completely free and open source, so there’s no reason to pass this one up.

Comfortable, Reliable Controllers for Everyday Gaming

• Link: 8BitDo Ultimate 2 Wireless
• Link: Xbox Core Wireless Gaming Controllers
• Why I like them: The current controller landscape is actually quite impressive. 8BitDo has always made solid hardware, but Xbox really knocked it out of the park with their new Core controllers. Both are inexpensive, packed with features, and feel comfortable and intuitive in the hand. The 8BitDo slightly edges out the Xbox Core controllers thanks to the included charging stand and rechargeable battery. I find their RGB LEDs annoying, but the kids dig ‘em.

Whole-Home, High-Speed WiFi With Built-In VPN

• Link: TP-Link Deco BE63
• Why I like them: When we switched our home internet from Starlink to Frontier Fiber (2 Gbps), our ancient Google WiFi devices couldn’t keep up with the bandwidth. It turns out the current Google devices don’t support it either, which made this a perfect opportunity to drop yet another Google product. We chose the Deco BE63 for the price, mesh support, coverage, WiFi 7, and overall customer satisfaction. I especially like that they can connect to an always-on VPN like Mullvad or Proton, while also supporting a personal WireGuard VPN. This means that no matter where you are, your devices can route traffic through your home internet as if you were there - allowing access to local devices and routing mobile traffic through your self-hosted AdBlock Home or Pi-hole.

Reliable, Self-Hosted Storage With Modern App Support

• Link: TrueNAS Scale
• Why I like it: TrueNAS is my go-to NAS software. Scale supports ZFS for multi-drive redundancy and is a solid solution for keeping your data safe. It’s free and runs on a wide range of hardware - like that old laptop or PC collecting dust in your garage. The move from TrueNAS Core’s FreeBSD backend to TrueNAS Scale’s Debian base was huge, as it enables simple Docker app installations from a large, UI-integrated app catalog.

Versatile Cooking Tools With Zero Cleanup

• Link: Chopsticks
• Why I like them: That’s it. Simple, disposable, bamboo chopsticks. Nothing fancy here. I cook a lot and hate doing dishes. Keeping chopsticks handy is useful for everything from stirring and mixing to frying bacon, grabbing steamer baskets without burning your hands, and even mixing honey into tea. Once you get good with them, they become extensions of your fingers. They’re sanitary, sturdy, and eliminate the need to wash utensils.

Simple, Markdown Note Taking Without Lock-In

• Link: Flatnotes
• Why I like it: Finding the perfect note-taking app was a real struggle this year. I tried everything: wiki systems, notebooks, Obsidian, Joplin, Standard Notes, etc. The goal was something that reads and writes Markdown, stores notes as individual Markdown (.md) files, and can be easily backed up or archived with rsync or similar tools. Flatnotes is exactly that. It’s a shame it took so long to find, but I couldn’t be happier with my note-taking setup now.

A Surprisingly Effective Nap Inducer

• Link: Therabody Smart Goggle Gen 2
• Why I like them: I’m one of the unlucky people who gets migraines with visual auras. If you’re unfamiliar, imagine suddenly going partially blind, followed by black-and-white flashing lights slowly moving across what remains of your vision. After 20-30 minutes, the visuals fade, but you’re left feeling like you were run over by a truck. As soon as I feel one coming on, I put these goggles on and lie down. They massage, vibrate, and apply heat to pressure points while blocking out all light and slowly putting you into a coma. During difficult days spent staring at databases, they’ll knock me out in about 15 minutes. I’m seriously considering making them part of my travel carry-on. Sip some wine, pop in noise-canceling earplugs, and drift into darkness while getting your temples massaged. That sounds considerably better than being part of the chaos that is current day air travel.

Offloading Repetitive Work to AI Assistants

• Link: Cursor
• Why I like them: AI absolutely deserves a call-out this year. My productivity has increased significantly by eliminating manual toil and repetitive work through AI agents. Instead of manually writing the same basic SQL scripts to sift through massive datasets, I can hand that off to an agent while focusing on higher-level problem solving. It’s like having an extremely intelligent intern that turns a team of me into a team of three. Cursor fits right into that workflow. I’ll write scripts and ask AI to fix my dumb human mistakes or fill in large knowledge gaps. It’s not just an intern - it’s also an instructor. That said, there’s a difference between “Look at my script or document and fix errors” and “Write me a document.” Don’t be the latter.