Top Tools from Oct 19–25, 2026

A free web page from Ed Jefferson, the London journalist and maker of data interactives, that rebuilds Wikipedia's main page for wherever you are, using only geotagged articles within about a half-hour walk. You type a UK postcode, a town, street or landmark, or coordinates, or let the browser find you, and it asks Wikipedia's geosearch for articles within 2,414 metres in a straight line, about 1.5 miles, falling back to the nearest 25 out to about 10 km where there are fewer and stopping at 500. The page copies Wikipedia's own layout, with a featured article picked daily from the most-read long articles nearby, a Did You Know section built from the opening sentences of nearby articles, nearest and further-afield lists, an OpenStreetMap map, A to Z and by-distance indexes and a random article, and article pages in which only links to other nearby articles stay clickable. Nine Wikipedia languages - English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish and Swedish - arrived the day after launch, and distances show in miles or kilometres. Your place stays out of shared links and out of the site's self-hosted GoatCounter analytics, and the page names the ward and outcode rather than the full postcode so a screenshot does not give your address away, though searches still go to Wikipedia, postcodes.io and Komoot's Photon geocoder. Free, with no account or ads; it is not affiliated with Wikipedia, its own code is not published, and the article text is CC BY-SA 4.0

The October major release of OBS Studio, the free, open-source program for recording, compositing and live-streaming video, published on 23 October. The browser engine behind browser sources and docks jumps from a July 2024 Chromium base to September 2026's; plugins move to a new folder structure, with first-party plugins in a core folder and third-party plugins in the old locations marked Legacy in the plugin manager and, per the release notes, loading until 34.0; sources snap along the whole axis with a visual guide and never to hidden sources; number fields commit on Enter; audio monitoring gets hotkeys; NVENC is enabled on Arm64; Safe Mode no longer starts the WebSocket server or loads third-party plugins; and profiles are checked for missing encoders when they load. Plugins that use OBS's image-file loader need rebuilding for the libnsgif 1.0 update, and Ubuntu 24.04 support ends, with the official deb now built for 26.04. Windows 10 and 11 on x64 and Arm64, macOS 13 or later with separate Apple silicon and Intel builds, Linux through Flathub and the Ubuntu PPA, plus Steam and the Microsoft Store; as of 26 October Flathub has 33.0 while the download page and the PPA still offer 32.2. The project's contribution rules require human-written code and text. GPL-2.0 or later, free, funded through Open Collective, Patreon and corporate sponsors including YouTube, Twitch, Logitech, NVIDIA, AMD and Intel. 78.2k stars as of 26 October 2026

The second major version of DuckDB, the analytical SQL database that runs inside your program, released on 21 October as a long-term-support version with community support until at least October 2027. Quack, its client-server protocol, gains a CONNECT statement that also attaches PostgreSQL and MySQL and pushes queries down to them, and the command line can now serve and connect; reads of Parquet, CSV and DuckDB files from S3 and other object storage become asynchronous; the VARIANT type is fully integrated, shredded VARIANT in Parquet included; and a new PEG parser replaces the PostgreSQL-derived one used since 2018, so extensions can add their own SQL syntax. Also new are triggers, data-modifying CTEs, NEAREST joins for top-k similarity search, nested schemas, JSON editing functions, signed self-hosted extension repositories and an agent mode in the CLI that detects Claude Code, Codex or Cursor and answers in compact Markdown tables, which cut output on TPC-H by 59 percent, while ICU gives way to native time zone and collation support and DuckLake reaches 1.1. Databases created by 2.0 cannot be read by older versions, though existing files stay compatible both ways; single-arrow lambdas are off by default and go away in 2.1; and Intel Mac builds are being phased out. The announcement suggests that mission-critical users test on a shadow system first or wait for 2.0.1 in November. Clients for Python, R, Java, Node.js, Go, Rust, C, ODBC and WebAssembly among others. MIT and free; the code and trademarks belong to the non-profit DuckDB Foundation in Amsterdam, and core development comes from DuckLabs, formerly DuckDB Labs, a subsidiary of Amazon Web Services since August. 42.6k stars as of 26 October 2026

An alpha compatibility layer from Kaleb Simpson of Voltare in South Carolina that runs Android apps on Apple silicon Macs as ordinary Mac apps, with no emulator, virtual machine or Linux kernel, in the spirit of Wine. App code is converted from Android's DEX format to Java bytecode on first launch and runs on a bundled OpenJDK runtime against Mac.apk's own reimplementation of the Android framework; 64-bit ARM native libraries run as they are, with 32-bit ones recompiled ahead of time; and OpenGL ES and Vulkan reach Metal through ANGLE and MoltenVK. Dropping in an APK, split APK or XAPK makes it a separate app in the Applications folder, F-Droid, Aurora Store and the Epic Games Store work inside it, with Touch ID or a password for every install, and each app's data now lives in Application Support rather than inside the app bundle, a change made after launch feedback. Its own stand-in for Google Play Services handles Google sign-in and licence checks but not Play Billing, Play Integrity or apps that need Google-signed services, ads served through its AdMob stand-in never fill, and its compatibility list counts 58 of 71 tested apps working and 10 partly. Game controllers, right- and middle-click and trackpad gestures work. It is not a sandbox, so apps run with your user's permissions, and the README says to install only APKs you trust. Needs macOS 26.4 or later and takes about 280 MB on disk; the notarized download checks GitHub for updates and has no analytics. AGPL-3.0 since the source opened on 19 October, with commercial licences on request, free, with donations through GitHub Sponsors and PayPal; version 1.0.2303 shipped on 21 October. 3.3k stars as of 26 October 2026

A free high-precision scientific calculator for Windows, macOS and Linux, developed by volunteers since 2004 and led by Helder Correia, which came back this year after 0.12 in 2016, with 1.0 and now 1.1 on 20 October from a new official home on GitHub. It works to up to 50 digits with complex numbers, vectors and matrices, more than 140 functions, units and constants, and your own variables, functions and units, in a keyboard-driven, syntax-highlighted display with autocompletion, a formula book, editable history and sessions in tabs, panes or windows. Version 1.1 adds an nth-root function, constant search by name or unit, private tabs that are discarded on close, options to switch off automatic input adjustments and to trim trailing zeroes, and a compact Classic layout beside the default Modern one with a classic keypad, and restores digit grouping while typing, free copying of results and the function-key notation shortcuts, while restoring sessions at startup gets faster. Windows installer and portable ZIP, an Apple silicon DMG and portable ZIP for macOS 14.4 or later that are not notarized, and Flathub or distribution packages on Linux; the Homebrew cask still points at 0.12. Official builds check speedcrunch.org for updates at most once a day. GPL-2.0 or later, free, funded by donations through Revolut, PayPal and Bitcoin

A free browser city-builder from Peter Cai in Boston in which you are an elected mayor and every rezoning or project has to get through filing, public hearings where you trade concessions, appeals, lawsuits and a seven-seat council, paid for in political clout, with reelection every four years and high-turnout groups carrying more weight than their numbers. Underneath runs a simulated economy of residents with ages, incomes and homes and businesses that hire, grow and leave, with land values, rents, jobs, taxes and services feeding into each other; heatmaps, graphs and plain-language explanations show why voters are angry, and a local paper covers your successes and scandals. Four sandbox scenarios run from a 200-resident blank slate to a 300,000-resident unaffordable metropolis, with no campaign or win screen, and the manual is a searchable glossary of 160 planning terms, from accessory dwelling units to writs of mandate. Petitions and letters come from prewritten story arcs fitted to your city. It wants a desktop or laptop browser, works offline after the first visit and keeps saves on your computer, with no account or ads, and sends error reports to Sentry. Free, closed source

A free Mac singing trainer from Daniel Murrell in Cambridge, UK, that listens once to a song playing in Spotify, Apple Music or a YouTube tab, learns the singer's melody, and then shows a scrolling pitch guide and scores you as you sing along to the original. It captures only the music app's audio through macOS process taps, separates the lead vocal with the UVR MDX-Net karaoke model, tracks its pitch with CREPE and draws one bar per syllable with the GAME note model, and fetches lyrics from LRCLIB and re-times them with wav2vec 2.0; learning a song takes a couple of minutes, and on speakers an echo canceller subtracts the song from the microphone. Scoring gives full credit within 50 cents of the singer, ignores octaves and is deliberately easy on beginners, takes are kept so you can track progress, and sharing makes a video of your voice and pitch line without the music. The maker lists noisy backing tracks and notes drawn an octave off as weak spots. Music is analysed in memory and never saved or uploaded; the app sends a Shazam signature of up to five seconds of the song, song details for lyric and cover lookups, and a daily update check, each with an off switch, and has no account or analytics. Needs an Apple silicon Mac on macOS 14.2 or later, as a notarized 356 MB download that is mostly bundled models. MIT, free; version 0.1.0 shipped on 22 October. 314 stars as of 26 October 2026

A free, self-hosted dead man's switch from Peter Bishop, who runs a one-person web studio in regional New South Wales, built so that if a solo developer disappears, the right people are told and clients can keep running. Every week it emails you a link, and you check in by pressing a button on the page, since mail scanners open links; it reminds you after 24 and 48 hours, asks your next of kin whether everything is all right at 72, and at 144 hours, at most 13 days after your last check-in, sends each confirmed contact the message you wrote for them, or at once if your next of kin answer that something is wrong, with false-alarm notices if you turn up later. A next of kin and a technical contact are required, contacts confirm by email before they are ever written to and reconfirm yearly, and you can pause it for up to 28 days. It is not a vault, storing no documents or passwords, it sends email only, and it keeps your SMTP password and messages as plain text in its data folder. It runs on PHP 8.1 or later with no database, writing JSON files, on Apache or nginx with an SMTP account and a cron job every 15 minutes, ideally on hosting separate from the sites it protects, and has a health URL for an outside uptime monitor and a script to rehearse a full escalation. The interval is fixed at weekly in version 1.0, and the maker is looking at longer ones. MIT, free, with no hosted version; installation help is offered through the maker's studio

A free social network for developers where posts are commits and timelines are logs, started on a 48-hour livestream from a JetBrains office on 15 and 16 October by Nuno Maduro, Brent Roose, Matthieu Napoli and Pauline Vos, with Márk Magyar, and run by Maduro's company in Portugal; it passed 10,000 developers on 20 October. Accounts come only from GitHub, which also supplies the profile, and commits of up to 4,000 characters take highlighted code blocks, images, link cards, polls, replies, quotes and threads, can be deleted but never edited, and cannot be plainly reposted. Following, Latest and Trending logs, stars, saved commits, semantic search, an embeddable activity graph, Unix-themed ranks and achievements, and private and group messages with a git vocabulary called remotes fill it out, along with an AI bot that answers questions about the site and translation through DeepSeek. A shell script posts from the terminal by signing with the SSH key already on your GitHub account, a GitHub Action posts on events such as a release, and there is a public read-only JSON API and an Atom feed per user. Nothing goes public until it passes AI checks or an admin queue, and the rules ban engagement bait, AI-written posts passed off as your own and self-promotion. Public posts and search queries go to OpenAI and, through OpenCode Zen, to DeepSeek for moderation, search and translation, private messages are kept out of AI, and your data exports as JSON. A web app installable as a PWA, plus a free Mac app for messages; built on Laravel, React and PostgreSQL and hosted on Laravel Cloud. Free with no revenue so far, and the terms reserve the right to charge later. The README and composer.json say MIT, but the repository has no LICENSE file as of 26 October 2026, which leaves it legally all rights reserved. 560 stars as of 26 October 2026

A Mac app from Noats, Inc., the maker of the Noats meeting-notes app, launched on Product Hunt by Hiten Shah of Crazy Egg and Sam Asante, that shows windows from one Mac, or a whole display, on another Mac as native windows, each with its own Dock icon and Command-Tab entry, while the app keeps running on the source Mac. Resizing resizes the real window, shortcuts pass through, a fluid mode moves a window across at full resolution, files dragged or pasted onto a beamed window land on the other Mac, the clipboard syncs and audio can be switched on per app; the stream runs at the display's resolution and trades sharpness for smoothness as windows move, with frame rate and resolution caps in settings. Connections are direct and encrypted, found on the local network or across locations through Tailscale, with no relay, and window images, input, clipboard and sound never pass through the company's servers, which keep device records and a check-in about once a minute while beaming. A headless Mac mini gets a virtual Retina display and a command-line doctor for setup over SSH, the angle of its launch, which pitched running AI agents on one Mac and using their windows on another, and share links let anyone view, or if allowed control, one window from a browser for an hour to a week. Needs two Macs on macOS Sonoma or later and an account, required since paid plans arrived on 14 October. Free to host any number of Macs and to join share links, with 20 minutes a day of using your Macs from another Mac; unlimited use and sending share links cost 12 US dollars a month, 84 dollars a year or 199 dollars once for Lifetime, and Teams cost the same per person, with 20 percent off from 10 seats. Proprietary; the app has no analytics or telemetry, while the website uses Google Analytics

Johannes Millan's offline-first to-do list and time tracker from Berlin, in development since 2016, with projects, subtasks and tags, a planner and schedule timeline, Kanban and Eisenhower boards, timeboxing, Pomodoro and Flowtime focus modes, break reminders and worklogs, and no account needed. The 19.x releases since September add notes edited in place as live Markdown, multi-select and bulk actions across lists, boards and the planner, two-way Trello card sync, several Google Calendar accounts, numeric priorities, search that finds projects and tags, and a TickTick import, while Redmine and Nextcloud Deck move into plugins beside GitHub, Gitea, Linear, ClickUp and Azure DevOps, with Jira, GitLab, CalDAV and OpenProject built in; user profiles were removed. Data stays on the device and syncs through Dropbox, Nextcloud, WebDAV, an experimental OneDrive option or SuperSync, an end-to-end encrypted beta service that is free for now on servers in Germany and that version 19.2 makes self-hostable on ARM64 too, as a Node and PostgreSQL stack that needs a domain and SMTP; the web app also runs as a single Docker container that keeps everything in the browser. Version 19.3 followed on 23 October with restoring deleted tasks, a won't-do state, p1 to p3 priority shorthand and an opt-in local MCP endpoint for AI assistants. Apps for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS plus a web app; no analytics, with one daily update check on desktop that can be switched off. MIT, free with no premium tiers, funded through GitHub Sponsors. 23.2k stars as of 26 October 2026

A self-hosted household organiser from g33kphr33k styled like a paper kitchen wall planner, built to run full-screen on an old tablet such as a Fire HD and also installable on phones as a web app. It covers shared and personal shopping lists with aisle grouping and a shopping-trip mode; stock in the fridge, freezer and larder with expiry dates and reorder points that add items to the list; a meal planner that sends ingredients to a list and imports from Mealie; a calendar with repeating events, countdowns and a family table of who is doing what; last-done timers, kitchen timers, notes and Open-Meteo weather; and chores that earn points, optionally worth pocket money in 30 currencies, against a reward catalogue. Calendar sync is one-way, a private read-only ICS feed per person plus imports and subscribed ICS overlays, with no CalDAV. Version 1.5, released on 21 October, adds signing out other devices, per-account lockout, single-use TOTP codes, an offline queue, a household time zone and admin-set chore pay, folds sublists into ordinary lists, and has email verify the mail server's TLS certificate, which breaks LAN relays with self-signed certificates until they are fixed. Sign-in by password, magic link, TOTP or OIDC; it is one Docker container on Python, FastAPI and SQLite with nightly backups, for one household, with no account with the developer. MIT-0 according to its LICENSE file, while the README says MIT; free, with no donation link