My top 10 tools for learning in 2023

Jane Hart is gathering votes again for her annual “Top 100 tools for learning“ ranking. It has been a while since I last contributed, it’s time to pick up this good habit again.

Here is my top 10 for this year (in no particular order):

Microsoft OneNote: although I have tried and tested more “fancy” (Notion style) note taking tools, for me OneNote is still the best note-taking application. The web version is powerful, there are clients for most common platforms, including Mac OS.
Wallabag: a self-hosted “Read Later” web application (or Pocket competitor), that allows you to capture websites via a “bookmarklet”, tag and store them for later. You can self host it, which is a privacy advantage.
WordPress: excellent blogging platform. Administration is a piece of cake, even for non-tech users, with e.g. the auto-update feature.
FreshRSS: I’m still old school, so still using RSS feeds. FreshRSS replaced the Fever app (which was no longer maintained by the author). It gathers hundreds of RSS feeds that would otherwise be impossible to follow.
Microsoft 365: the “swiss army knife” of productivity tools: enterprise-grade e-mail and calendar, SharePoint sites for collaborating or storing knowledge, and OneDrive for personal storage.
Freemind: open source mindmapping tool, replacing my earlier (too expensive) MindMeister
X (formerly known as Twitter): I was hesitating to keep this one on the list. The attitude of their new owner and the fact that Tweetdeck (the only way to filter out corporate BS and focus on the people you want to hear from) became a paying option have put me in serious doubt. Maybe the last year…
Microsoft Teams: my daily hub for “informal learning” and “knowledge sharing” with my colleagues. It remains a bit clumsy and managing the “firehose” of information is not always easy, but I’m learning to like it.
LinkedIn Learning: a very rich range of e-learning courses on various subjects. I like the variation in subjects, approaches, level of detail…
Obsidentify: not a “corporate” learning tool, but if you are interested in nature, this app helps you to identify wild plants and animals by simply taking a picture of them.
Merlin Bird ID: same as above, but this time an app for identifying birds by simply recording the sound of them.

Sonos controller update fails on macOS Ventura

After the installation of macOS Ventura (currently 13.1), the update of the Sonos Controller app would fail systematically with the error message: Sonos update failed – an unexpected error occurred.

This can be resolved by adding some permissions for the Sonos Installer:

  • Open System preferences
  • In the navigation column on the left, select Privacy & Security
  • In the Privacy section, select App management
  • Make sure that the switch is on next to Sonos Installer. This will give the installer the necessary rights to update the app.
Change the setting to ON for Sonos Installer

Add a folder to the dock in macOS

For some reason, I had lost the “Downloads” icon in the Dock on my Mac. It took me a while to figure out how to add it again, a simple “drag and drop” did not seem to work.

This is how:

  • right-click (or CTRL + Click) the Downloads shortcut in a finder window
  • select Add to dock
Add a folder to the doc in macOS

Where is the magnifying glass/bubble in iOS 13?

If you recently upgraded to iOS 13 and your mobile keyboard skills are not those of a digital native (like mine), then you probably miss the “magnifying bubble” of the previous versions of iOS. You could tap your error, and the little magnifying glass showed you the text under your finger, and you could navigate precisely to the error.

In iOS13, the bubble is gone. But no fear, you have a similar (if not better) feature for correcting your texts if you follow this procedure:

  1. Type your text
  2. Press and hold the spacebar on the keyboard
  3. Move your finger from left to right to move the cursor to the error
  4. Voilà !

Microsoft Teams for Mac: login fails with endless loop

I wanted to use the Microsoft Teams app on macOS to login to my personal Office 365 account, but I recently used it to login to my corporate account. That did not work out very well: Teams got into an “endless loop” asking me to sign in over and over again. It looks like Teams has some issues when switching between different accounts.

I got this solved by opening Keychain Access, and deleting the entry called Microsoft Teams Identities Cache. After that, I could sign in to Teams again with the correct account.