Nicholas A. Danes, PhD

An average new Dad's approach to training with kettlebells (and other tools) to develop General Physical Preparedness (GPP) at home

2025-11-24T16:15:00+00:00

This is a mirror of the post on /r/kettlebell: https://www.reddit.com/r/kettlebell/comments/1p5kwbm/an_average_new_dads_approach_to_training_with/

Why this post?

I often get asked in comments about how I program my workouts. In order to address these comments, I’ve decided to write this post and outline my process.

Goal

My hope with this post is to better understand why you should program your workouts a certain way, rather than just what. This is not to give you a program to follow but rather how to think about programming. It requires trial and error with workouts. You may have to adjust your workout during the session. If this doesn’t interest you, this post isn’t for you.

Training Background

Since I’m a bit pedantic, I’m going to first contextualize all this with a bit of my training background.

Beginnings (Early 2022 to October 2023)

Early 2022, I was the heaviest in my entire life, and had not done any serious exercise since I was in my early 20’s. Even then, there was no resistance training. I got fed up, and started figuring out ways to dial in my nutrition and exercise (we will focus on the exercise here).

It started with light dumbbells and bodyweight for the first few months, but eventually I stumbled upon kettlebells. They looked fun, took up little space, and were relatively affordable. I tried several different cheap kettlebells on Amazon, only to settle eventually on a pairs of 16 kg, 20 kg, and 24 kg cast irons by late December 2022.

My early exposure to the bells should be familiar to most who visit here: Dan John, Lebe Stark, and Mark Wildman were on my YouTube constantly. Learning the big 6 (clean, press, snatch, swing, TGU, squat) were my primary focus. Learning from Dan John, I tried to focus on his model of the 5 fundamental movement patterns:

Push
Pull
Hinge
Squat
Carry

If you look my most of my posts throughout the first 9 months of 2023, you will see me doing workouts with almost all these movement patterns. It started with mostly kettlebells, but bodyweight and eventually clubs/maces came into the picture.

Despite making progress all the way from a Double 16 kg to Double 24 kg clean & press, my technique wasn’t great. I needed coaching.

Coaching Phase (October 2023 - June 2024)

Starting from October 2023, I hired my first online coach (not going to name names, but iykyk). His first month with me focused on learning where I was at with different exercises, what training goals were, what equipment I had, and how often I could train. Some of these goals included:

5 x Double 32 kg Clean & Press
5 x Double 32 kg Front Squat
Sub 5 min 24 kg snatch test

Working with this coach was invaluable. Learning on your own is definitely possible, but hiring a good coach can accelerate that process, especially when you’re a beginner.

Fast forward over the next year and a half, we added sandbags, played with various cardio equipment , and chipped away at each of my listed goals. My technique kept sharpening with the bells, and PRs kept coming. It was awesome.

But then, in July 2025, my wife had our first child. Progress was achieved by going hard 5-6x week, with 1-2 hour sessions. I knew I couldn’t do this moving forward. I decided it was time to take my own path and apply what I learned from my coach.

Current Phase (June 2025 - Present)

A few weeks before my baby was born, I started experimenting with my own workouts, and are what you can see in my post history since June. I can now talk about my process below.

Training Goals

Before you can set up any programming, you need to ask yourself: what are your training goals? You often hear things like:

I want to get stronger.
I want to build more muscle.
I want to develop “functional strength” (I hate this term, but this post is not about this lol)
I want to develop more fitness
Or all of the above.

If you’re number 5, you basically want to have good general physical preparedness. This means you want to be a more physically capable person with whatever you do outside the gym. That could be a recreational soccer league, playing with your kids/grandkids, or chasing gym PRs for its own sake. The main point is that there isn’t necessarily an underlying sport you have to prepare for, or worry about taking training time with your general goals.

If you have more specific goals, this post is not for you. I’ll just say it again: hire a coach. It’s well worth the time and money investment.

General Physical Preparedness (GPP) using kettlebells, and other weird tools

So here’s the part probably most of you care about. Going to give you some basic parameters to focus on, and you can dial in rep ranges and number of sets based on your training time allows.

Basic template

Below is an overview of my programming process. I’ve done my best to lay it out as checklist, with tips toward the end to organize workouts, as well as examples how I do it with my current lifestyle.

0. How often can you train? How long can you train per session?

For me with my baby, it’s about 20-45 min per session, but high frequency; I try to train everyday, but rest days happen as needed.

1. Pick an intensity that dictates rest periods and rep ranges. This can include:

Strength endurance or conditioning (high reps and/or short rest with submaximal loads)
Hypertrophy (typically 8-12 rep range that puts you close to failure), 2-3 min rest periods
Strength (1-6 rep range, further from failure), 3-5 min rest periods
Power / Plyometrics (shorter rep ranges, higher rest periods to make sure you generate force required for the task)

I try to hit each of these at least once a week, but usually more since I’m such high frequency. You can also modulate which you want to focus on more based on your own goals.

2. Pick an upper and lower movement pattern minimum:

Upper: Push, Pull, and/or accessory (rotation, core, etc) for upper; in practice this could be presses, pushups, pullups, club work, etc.
Lower: Squatting pattern, hinging pattern

Some nuance above can include vertical vs horizontal pushing or pulling, but that can also be very individual.

Lately I’ve been focusing on a handful of movements and trying to do them every week. For example:

Pushing: Push ups, KB press & push press
Pulling: Snatches (pseudo pull), pullups, chin up
Squatting: Double KB front squats, reverse lunges, and Cossack squats
Hinging: KB cleans, snatches, and sandbag picks/shoulders
Other upper body: Club Mills, mace 360s, slam ball
Other lower body: Jumping, Plyos

The exercise pool you choose will depend on what you enjoy and what tools you have!

3. Pick the implements for the movement patterns and intensities above using the equipment you have

For me, I will rotate between clubs/maces, bodyweight, sandbags, and kettlebells. As mentioned above, clubs/maces tend to be more upper body focused, while sandbag work tends to be more lower body focused; kettlebells I use for upper and lower in most cases.

Conditioning work can be its whole can of worms, but I would say reserve a day or two a week to run, ride a bike, etc. to build your aerobic capacity using lower-intensity steady state cardio. Then, use another day to train another energy system in the higher intensity ranges. If you’re unable to do these things above (which I can understand with a baby under 6 months), the kettlebell snatch can be used for some conditioning with good programming. Some good resources include:

Waving Density by u/LennyTheRebel
Kettlebell Snatch for Different Energy Systems by u/bpeezer
Viking Warrior Conditioning by Kenneth Jay
Tactical Barbell II: Conditioning by K. Black

I don’t care if particular lifts progress quickly, but they usually do over time. For example, with a pressing pattern, I could rotate any of the following exercises:

Double Kettlebell Strict Press
Double Kettlebell Push Press
Sandbag Jerk
Dips
Deficit Pushups

All these are pressing patterns, so they all work toward building strength with those movement patterns. Sure it may not be as quick as running a program such as The Giant to build your overhead press, but you will see progress in your press. It also keeps things interesting and fresh, which is a plus!

4. Track your sessions and look for opportunities to PR. PRs create self motivation and you can find them if you create conditions to do so. This can include:

Increase Weight PR
Increased Rep or Set (Volume) PR
Density PR: More reps or sets in the same time period OR same reps or sets in less time

For rep PRs: Going for an AMRAP on one of your lifts on its last set is a good way create rep PR opportunities. Of course, you won’t always PR and that’s okay!

5. If you’re short on time to train, use a combination of super/giant sets, and EMOM-style (Every Min On The Min) intervals.

As a person who gets easily distracted, adding timers to my workouts, even for strength or hypertrophy work has been great. A good rule of thumb is to do every 2-4 min on the min for strength/hypertrophy work, or 30 sec to 2 min for more conditioning or strength endurance focused work.

You can further condense the time to train by combining EMOM-style timers doing super or giant sets. By doing this, you can cut the timer down and just rotate between exercises every round on your timer.

A good example is alternating between an upper and lower body movement. Let’s say I want to do presses and squats for my strength work in the 5-8 rep range. Straight sets would mean doing a set of presses, resting 2-4 min, and then going to my next set until I finish my planned work, moving on to the squats and repeating. Alternatively, you could use an every 2 min on the min timer, and do the following:

Odd rounds: Press
Even rounds: Front Squats

This would roughly give you about 2 min rest between exercises, but the local muscules involved in the previous round would get closer to 3 min of rest per round!

A note about auto regulation

You may noticed that there is no strict rotation between hard, medium or easy days. This is because life sometimes doesn’t prepare you for the workout you plan. Learning to adapt based on your feeling is key.

Generally speaking, I find hard days usually involve either short rest metabolical conditioning or heavier sub 6 rep max workouts. If I planned for one the next day and slept terribly, I will either cancel the workout or scale down the workout to a different intensity range.

Sample week of workouts

Here’s my workouts that I had over the past week to give you an idea of how this maps out in practice.

Monday

Pt. 1: 10 min AMRAP: 5 x Double 24 kg Snatch to Thruster
- 5 rounds done in 9:52
Pt. 2: 60 (30 per direction) x Club Mills for time
- Did 3 x 10/10 in 6:36
All done in 23 min

Notes: Conditioning / Strength Endurance focus due to short time to workout.

Tuesday

1.5 mi / 40 min 29 lb ruck with baby + dog

Notes: Too tired to train, good long walk!

Wednesday

Pt 1.
- 25 x Double 32 kg Clean to Burpee, 10 min time cap
  - Did 5 sets of 5 in 7:30
PT 2. 3 rounds, Double 32 kg
- 5,5,5 x Military Press
- 3/3,4/4,5/5 x Reverse Lunge
PT 3. 2 mi / 1 hour 29 lb Ruck with baby and dog

Notes: Was well recovered from the previous day, so did a heavier metcon to start as a pseudo-warmup that also worked my pushing muscles to prepare for heavy pressing. Pressing was my upper body strength movement, while lunges were my lower body one.

Thursday

1 min on, 1 min off x 10-15 rounds
- Hand switch snatches 16 kg - 20 rpm target

Notes: Back when I wasn’t on parental leave and watching my baby, I would treat this time to go on a run, usually a 30 min tempo. Since this wasn’t an option, I opted for light snatch intervals for a similar effect.

Friday

Pt. 1.
- 4 x 5/5 35 lb Mill to Clockwork Squat
Pt 2: 10 rounds, one round every 1:45
- 1 x Double 32 kg ABC
- Density PR! (Up from 1 round every 2:00 last week)
Pt 3: Mobility work
- 5,6,8 x 32 kg Deficit RDL/Jefferson Curl
- 3 x Back Bridge Holds: 10, 15, 20 seconds

Notes: My baby was very chill after their nap, so I got to squeeze an extra 30 min to do mobility work while they hung out in their playpen. A little personal goal right now is to work toward 30 rounds EMOM of the Armor Building Complex with double 32 kg, so I try to get an EMOM workout with them at once a week. The mill / clockwork squat complex with the club was a nice way to warmup my shoulders and legs.

Saturday

PT1: Warmup (Expressing Power + Plyos)
- 4 rounds
  - 3 x 20 lb slamball slams
  - 25 x jump rope
Pt 2: Strength Endurance / Strength
- 20 rounds, EMOM
  - 1 x 211 lb SB ground to shoulder
PT 3: Cooldown/Technique
- 4x25 Mace 360s w/ 25.5 lb mace
PT 4: 2.3 mi / 1 hour 29 lb Ruck with baby and dog

Notes: Weekends let me train in the garage with my wife home, so I try to focus on things I can’t do in the house. This includes jumping and other power work, which are a great way to get a warm-up and train that in one go, and sandbag training, which my floors would not survive inside dropping them on the ground.

Sunday

Warmup
- 5 x rounds
  - 3/3 x lateral jump over SB
  - 10 x banded 2H 36 kg swings
Strength work
- 4 rounds
  - 3,4,5,6 per leg x 36 kg goblet Cossack squats
  - Dead hangs for time: 20, 25, 30, 45 seconds

Notes: More jumping and power work via banded swings to warm-up. Normally, I wanted to do pull-ups at my vertical upper body pulling movement, but my lats were just fried from the Saturday workout. A compromise was to just do dead hangs instead.

Summarizing the week

Looking over the week, I was able to hit the following training qualities:

Conditioning or Strength Endurance: All 6 sessions
Strength or Hypertrophy: Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday
Power/Plyos: Monday, Saturday, Sunday

Conclusion

A lot of this was rambling, but I hoped this helped with anyone trying to figure out how they want to do their workouts. Being consistent and training hard still are the most important variables you have to make improvements with your fitness, so always keep those first!

Top Albums 2024

2024-12-19T18:19:00+00:00

This is a one-off to my blog. Not sure if I’ll update again soon, but I wrote this post on social media and wanted to mirror it here. We’ll see if in 2025 I start actively blogging again.

My top ten albums of 2024 (in no particular order):

State Faults - Children of the Moon. Probably got the most play time out of anything in this list. Perfect blend of screamo, and melodic post-hardcore.
Favorite track: No Gospel
Bandcamp
Delta - Blue Garden. Math rock with a bit more indie twist.
Favorite track: Glow
Bandcamp
NO MAN - Glitter and Spit. The best hardcore band with the most important political message in our times. Also absolutely wonderful humans.
Favorite track: March of Ides
Bandcamp
Toe - Now I see the Light. The Japanese math rock darlings are finally back.
Favorite Track: WHO KNOWS?
Bandcamp
Alkaline Trio - Blood, Sweat, and Eyeballs. Always a soft spot for this band and the last recorded record with Derek Grant.
Favorite track: Teenage Heart
Envy- Euonia. All their albums lately kind of sound similar, but I still can’t get enough of it. Another banger.
Favorite track: Whiteout
Bandcamp
Flesh Tape - Gargoyle. Very biased here, since frontman Larson is my band mate and friend. I also had the honor of filling on bass for this band for a tour, so I ended up listening to this record a lot. This record deserves more love than I’ve seen. PS: PLAY SUNNY LIVE.
Favorite track: “Sunny”
Bandcamp
Pedro the Lion - Santa Cruz. I always come back to David’s Bazan’s music. I fell off the wagon for a come albums (just not paying attention), but “Santa Cruz” really brought me back.
Favorite track: Don’t Cry Now
Bandcamp
Love Letter - Every Wants Something Beautiful. Quinn Murphy’s vocals have always had a soft spot in my heart, going back to the What Feeds the Fire / Verse days. It’s nice to see them active on the mic. Music is melodic yet driving, and fiercely speaking truth to power.
Favorite track: Misanthropic Holiday or Vacation
Bandcamp
Sabrina Carpenter- Short n’ Sweet. A bit of a guilty pleasure, but @amandakrstic got me hooked. Usually a pop album shows on these lists for me anyways. Not much to say, just catchy and great vocals. Also this lady has the horniest lyrics I’ve heard in pop in a while lol.
Favorite track: Juno

Honorable Mentions

The Hope Conspiracy - Tools Of Oppression/Rule By Deception. Angry. Political. Heavy. Hardcore. A welcome return! Favorite Track: “A Struggle for Power”
Bandcamp
@wearebrutus - Paradise. Only a single released this year, but dear lord what a single. I need to see this band live.
Bandcamp

I Think I'm Back? - Part 1: Health & Fitness Update

2023-01-22T23:51:00+00:00

Hi everyone! So I archived this blog at some point in 2022, but I’ve decided to bring it back. In the middle of 2022, I lost interest in blogging, mostly because I felt I had nothing to write about. Now that has changed. There’s been a lot of changes both with my personal tech and my life in general. In part 1, I’ll start with my personal life.

2022: My Year for Health

2022 could be called the year that I focused on my health. At its worse, around April 2022, I reached my highest weight in my entire life, around 227 lb/103 kg. I had already gotten up in pant and shirt size since the beginning of the pandemic, but feeling like I had to go up in shirt size again. Enough was enough.

March to July 2022

Between March and July 2022, I mostly worked with my brother on a diet and fitness plan. He has a background in exercise science and has long been a health enthusiast. We focused on eating mostly whole foods, and I would work out with him over video calls (we don’t live close) using mostly bodyweight and light dumbbell exercises. Working with brother established consistency, but little progress on the scale and other body weight measurements.

I eventually got to the point where I didn’t need my brother to workout. I bought dumbbells and we even rented a Peloton Bike+ for a few months. The bike rental eventually was returned, but I continued to do the Peloton Strength classes throughout this period (and beyond).

July 2022: MacroFactor comes in and changes everything

Up until July 2022, I wasn’t really tracking my food, so it was hard to know how fat loss was directly going. However, throughout my obsessions with YouTube Fitness, I learned about the app MacroFactor, a macro nutrient tracking SaaS app co-developed by the folks who run Stronger by Science. Unlike other calorie tracking apps, the magic of the app is that your Total Daily Energy Expenditure is a strictly a function of two things you input: (1) Your food calories, and (2) Your body weight. Their algorithm accounts for flucuations due to water weight and you don’t have to obsess over (inacurrate) measurements of calories burned through exercise. From the calibration phase, I was estimated to eat about 3100 calories per day, while still being in a ~300 calorie deficit. From here on, my weight loss started to progress.

September 2022 - Present: Steady weight loss, running and kettlebells

By September 2022, I was down about 13 lb/6 kg (from April 2022), putting my weight from 223 lb/101 kg to 210 lb/95 kg. My diet was mostly locked in thanks to Macrofactor, eating a mostly mediterranean-style diet 80% of the time, while still enjoying all foods in moderation the other 20% of the time. My fitness goals, however started shifting.

I was mostly still doing bodyweight and dumbbell exercises, and designing my own workouts to work out at home. I was capped to about 15 lb/7 kg dumbbells and wanted to figure out how to progress. Enter the kettlebell.

I bought a cheap 30 lb kettlebell on Amazon and began to learn the fundamental exercises for kettlebells:

Swing
Clean
Press
Snatch
Goblet Squat

This started a new rabbit hole for me for my at-home strength training. A personal thanks to the coaches Dan John and Mark Wildman for all their great free YouTube resources on kettlebell training. I now have a small collection of 16 kg x 2, 20 kg x 2, and 24 kg x2 kettlebells and continue training with them to this day.

Back in high school, my personal best 1 mile record was about 5 min 50 seconds. Throughout my fitness journey in 2022, I wanted to eventually be able to run at sub-7 min mile, but hadn’t gotten the ball rolling on running; I finally started in September 2022. The runs started slow and infrequent at first, only focusing on running a mile. I eventually learned that this method was inefficient and that it was better to “run slow to run fast” to build better endurance. I’m now running regularly 15-20 mi (24-32 km) per week. I am also running my first 5K race in May!

Now

After about 8 months of deliberate diet and exercise (I rather say dramatic lifestyle change), I am down to 195 lb/88 kg. I have no plans on slowing down with my fitness goals, and dieting still doesn’t quite feel like dieting. I hope maybe this blog maybe inspires you to find something to drive you to your own health goals. I definitely feel better, more confident and have more energy than I have had in years.

My next blog post will be an update on my tech, and how I completely left the Apple ecosystem (again).

Goodbye iMac, Hello Linux (again)

2022-05-09T14:30:00+00:00

One of least favorite things about my personality is I’m a perfectionist when it comes to things I use on a daily basis, especially with technology. Another thing is I like to minimze the number of devices I need to use to get a particular set of tasks done. This came to a hault again with my relationship with my iMac recently.

Over the past 6 months, I used the 24” M1 iMac as my primary personal computer. It was a fantastic machine and as much as I love macOS and all its integrations with other Apple products, I wasn’t really getting the value out of how much it costed. Today ended up being the day I sold my 24” iMac and am now using a Linux desktop as my main computer.

This all came to a head when I built a new gaming PC, which you can see the specs on my uses page. I installed the recently released Pop!_OS 22.04 and was amazed how much their Cosmic desktop has evolved into its own flavor of GNOME. Key features I’ve enjoyed include:

Built in (optional) tiling window manager
Universal launcher that manages both your applications and active windows, as well as some other spotlight-like features
Extremely great Proton support for Linux gaming. Almost every game I’ve installed with the compatiblity layer “just works.”

Even with just a few days with this computer, I realized how much I missed Linux, despite itself missing a lot of features I love about macOS.

iMac: All fashion, little function for me

The iMac of course had its perks. It had an extremely gorgeous 4.5K resolution display with extremely sharp retina text. Features like Handoff and iMessage on my desktop were extremely convenient. But these perks were overshadowed by what I actually want to do with my computer. My main uses for a comptuer includes

General web browsing - any computer does this well, and I would the say iMac was better in this by the display alone
Recording demos on my drums - I have other Macs n the house that can do this (see below) and technically something like Bandlab would work fine
Playing PC games - MacOS is notoriously limited to mobile, (some) indie and even few AAA games
CUDA programming support - My day job has gotten me interested in learning GPU programming for scientific computing, where CUDA reigns supreme. This wasn’t going to happen on a Mac.
Virtualization/Docker - Sure support has gotten better on M1, but x86 I think will stick around a bit longer and having x86 flexiblity is nice

Two desktop computers seem silly

After using this Linux gaming PC, I really could make this work as my main computer. Sure, I am losing some iPhone integrations, but I would say they are icing but not the cake of my general computing needs. If macOS ever was more competitive in the gaming space again, and had better support for things like CUDA, I would consider it.

I ended up selling it to a really nice gentleman here in Denver for a fairly good price (I lost a little money, but not a lot) and knowing that the computer will have a good home for years to come.

My relationship with Apple continues

Despite having rid of my iMac, I am still quite involved with their hardware, including:

A work 13” M1 Macbook Pro
My partners’ 13” M1 Macbook Pro
iPhone 13
AirPods Pro
Apple Watch Series 5

I may still consider things like my own personal Macbook or an iPad in the future, but I don’t think I can make a desktop Mac my “main” device until the things above change, or my needs change.

I will hopefully be blogging some more about how I’ll be adapting my use of Apple products with a Linux desktop. Until next time…

My de-Googling journey - Part 3

2022-04-21T14:30:00+00:00

This 3rd part of my de-Googling journey was never meant to be written, but it’s been a roller coaster ride of ups and downs since part 2 written back in February 2021. In summary, there was a period of time in the past year that I went back to many Google services. Including, but not limited to:

Google Photos
Google Drive
Google Docs/Sheets
Google Keep
Google Maps
YouTube

This post will update where I’m at with my relationship with Google and the services I’ve replaced them with. Additionally, I will discuss what I’m still using.

Google Products/Services I’ve Left

Smart Phone: Android to iOS

Back in April 2021, I switched from a Galaxy S10e to a iPhone SE 2022; my reasons for this were outlined in this blog post. In summary, I found that the tradeoffs for iOS over Android were worth it. iOS, of course, is far from perfect, but as a US citizen, I rather have some sort of private communication via iMessage rather than resorting to SMS/MMS (which is still so dominant in the US).

Since then, around December 2021, I ended up upgrading to iPhone 13, due to the poor battery life and camera performance of the iPhone SE 2020; I was able to sell the SE 2020 for about half of what I paid used on eBay. It has been a great phone for everyday use, albeit a bit bigger than I would prefer.

Photos: From Google to Apple

Even after switching to iPhone, I went back to Google Photos on and off for a while up until recently. The photo organization and search is really hard to beat with Google Photos, but Apple Photos is slowly catching up, while also doing all this machine learning organization on-device. Additionally, iCloud photos allows me to keep a local backup of my photos both on my Windows and Mac devices, and thereby allowing me to create more backups to other drives and to a cloud service like Backblaze B2.

I eventually would like to try something like a local Nextcloud or Seafile server with a Photo Prism server in the future, but I’m not mentally ready to manage that quite yet.

Cloud Drive: From Google to Apple

I wrote a few months back on how to use Cryptomator with iCloud drive. Since that post, I jumped to Google Drive briefly as my main cloud service, before switching back to iCloud with Cryptomator. Not much else to say here, other than iCloud works “fine” on all my devices. Of course, I don’t consider it a backup and use Time Machine and Backblaze B2 for redundant backups.

Documents/Spreadsheets: From Google to Apple

Google Sheets is a web application that I really enjoy using due to its extremely streamlined mobile application. I use a spreadsheet to manage my daily budget, which involves editing it on my phone when I’m out and about. I did try applications like Collabora Office, the user experience on mobile is quite bad.

For now, I am using the freely included Apple office applications Numbers and Pages, respectively. They work fine for my limited use cases.

Google Keep: From Google to Simplenote

I’ve tried many note taking applications, but my needs are quite minimal. I just want something that can support markdown. I tried applications such as Bear and Standard Notes, but both of these services have a fee to use cloud syncing services. I also tried Joplin Notes, but their electron apps are quite bloated.

I eventually landed on Simplenote, which is owned by the same folks who own Wordpress.com and Pocket Casts; I’m actually writing this blog post on Simplenote! It’s a simple markdown note taking app that supports some basic syncing across devices. You can also export notes to markdown for backups, which is a nice touch too. I’ll probably keep using this for now.

Gmail: Still using Fastmail!

Not much has changed on my email workflow, as I’m still in a long term subscription with Fastmail. My subscription ends in November 2023 and I’ll likely be migrating to the free email inbox provided my domain provider Gandi.net to save on subscription fees.

Chrome: Firefox + Safari

The browser situation is still a mess, but for now I’m switching between Firefox and Safari depending on the device or website. Not really much else to say here, but things are grim currently with the browser market :(.

Google Services/Products I’m still using

YouTube and YouTube Music

Unfortunately, YouTube is inescapable for me, as there are so many creators I enjoy watching that are YouTube only. With iOS apps, there isn’t much workarounds for adblocking, so I’m paying for YouTube premium. I absolutely hate ads on YouTube and Premium also removes them on TV streaming apps. Additionally, a proportion of my subscription fee pays the creators I watch which I appreciate.

Since I’m paying for YouTube premium, I also use YouTube Music for music streaming, since it is included. YouTube Music isn’t exactly a great user experience, but at least I am able to upload my Bandcamp library without an extra fee.

Google Calendar

For a while, I was trying to use Fastmail for my calendar needs, but unfortunately I have so many shared calendars on Google Calendar this was hard to avoid. I still use Fastmail to manage my calendars, which provides a way to manage Google calendars within their web interface.

Google Maps

Even with Apple Maps and OpenStreetMaps (OSM) available on iOS, nothing beats Google Maps for navigation. Apple Maps has taken me on non-optimal routes that has costed me time far too many times to trust it. OSM is something I still need to revisit, as contributing to the maps is the only way it will get better.

Google Smart Home Devices (Nest Hub Max, Chromecasts)

In our home, we have a Nest Hub Max in our kitchen, which has been great to stream music, listen to podcasts, watch Youtube and pull up recipes while in the kitchen. There’s not really a good alternative to this in any other Smart Home ecosystem and this is a compromise we make by keeping it in the kitchen.

I also have some chromecasts plugged into our TVs as it provides a convenient way to cast YouTube videos from my mobile devices by turning on the TV’s using HDMI-CEC. Protocols like AirPlay haven’t been nearly as reliable in my experience, so I will likely keep using these.

Conclusions

De-googling is an ongoing journey, and my hope with this post is that it’s okay to mess up/flounder during your own privacy journeys. Additionally, I think it’s okay to make a compromise, especially if your life is busy and/or others are involved with your decisions.

How is your own de-Googling journey going? Feel free to reach out if you’d like any suggestions from me!

Giving up on Bluetooth True Wireless (TWS) Earbuds (for now)

2022-02-26T14:30:00+00:00

Over the past few months, I’ve been looking for a new pair of true wireless (TWS) earbuds and have pretty much returned every pair I’ve tried. In this post, I will talk about why I started looking for new ones and also why I’m giving up on them for now.

My 1st TWS Earbuds: AirPods 1st Generation

My first pair of TWS earbuds were the 1st Gen AirPods, technically 2nd hand from my partner, given to me in late 2020/early 2021. She had gotten the Airpods Pro and stopped using the regular airpods. They had already been used for a couple years, but were still functional.

Around December 2021, I was getting tired of the poor battery life of my old 1st Gen Airpods, so I decided to sell them off on ebay, since they probably had some life left to them. Then my search for new TWS earbuds began. Before, I go through the onslaught that is my buy and return of many TWS earbuds, let’s take a step back and talk about the pros/cons of TWS earbuds.

Pros and Cons of TWS Earbuds

The biggest perk of TWS earbuds is convenience. Being able to open a case, pop out the earbuds, put them in your ears and they connect to your device is definitely a great QOL improvement. Not having to deal with wires not tangling and breaking also adds to that convenience. Most higher-end TWS earbuds even use Qi wireless charging so even charging them doesn’t require a cable. The whole package of convenience is a strong case for TWS earbuds. However, that convenience does have tradeoffs.

One of the obvious first tradeoffs is dealing with a battery. This means having to charge the earbuds, as well as the case. With this roughly 2-3 year old AirPods, their battery performance was already not great. On average, I would get about 2-3 hours of battery life per charge if I used the mic at all, while about 4 hours if I was just strictly listening. Another consequency of having a battery is that lithium-ion batteries degrade. This becomes particularly important with small electronics such as TWS earbuds. After just a few years, TWS earbuds can no longer can charge, and are incredibly difficult, if not impossible to repair, effectively making them consumable devices. Thankfully, there are companies like The Swap Club (formerly Podswap) who are trying to reduce AirPods out of the landfill by letting you swap your old ones for refurbished units. However, the same cannot be said for other TWS earbuds out in the market currently.

The second tradeoff is maximum theoretical sound quality. Most TWS earbuds use SBC or AAC codecs for transmitting audio. Both of these codecs are lossy, so there is some compression once the audio reaches your TWS earbuds. If you’re listening to a streaming service like Spotify or Apple Music, it’s probably hard to notice and likely good enough if you’re on the go and not critically listening to your music. However, the bigger issue is mic quality. Although audio output can handle something like a 320 kbps mp3, sending audio input doesn’t get the same luxury, resulting in terrible mic quality, even compared to wired Apple Earpods. Regardless of these issues with sound, the convenience makes it worth it for most folks.

The last trade off actually goes back bluetooth. Although bluetooth connectivity has dramatically improved over the years, there are still random issues. From the TWS earbuds I bought and returned, almost all the issues were bluetooth related. I will list the particular issues when I go through the gaunlet of returns I experienced with TWS earbuds.

TWS Earbuds “Wishlist”

Before I go through all the TWS earbuds I tried, let’s go through my. TWS earbud feature wishlist.

Let’s first start with the “must haves”

Replaceable Eartips with a case that is friendly to third-party options, assuming they’re “in-ear” designed
Under $200 USD
Stable bluetooth connection to my iPhone and iMac
- Manually re-pairing is fine, as long as the re-pair process isn’t too cumbersome
Qi wireless charging case (just extremely convenient)

I’d also like these features, but not dealbreakers:

Replaceable ear wing tips to help secure the earbuds in your ears
Active Noise Cancellation
Transparency Mode

With that said, let’s go through this awful journey.

The Gauntlet of Looking for TWS Earbuds

Let’s go through all the TWS earbuds I tried since December 2021 that I ended up returning. All of them had a compromise that I wasn’t willing to put up with. I will try to be brief here:

Anker Soundcore Life P2 Mini ($30 on sale) - I started with Anker Soundcore since I had a great experience with their Soundcore Spirit X Bluetooth Earbuds. I actually still have these earphones, but their microUSB port and slow power on/off make them hard to daily drive. From strictly an audio and connection perspective, I had the best experience with these. These unfortunately had no wireless charging, but the bigger issue was they were very uncomfortable and fell out of the ears. These were the first to go back.
Apple Beats Fit Pro ($199 with Applecare) - Beats has historically gotten a bad rap for producing overpriced bass cannons, but I’d argue things have changed after Apple bought them. I probably did the most research on these TWS earbuds. They have near feature parity as the AirPods Pro: H1 chip, iCloud synced device pairing, active noise cancellation (ANC), transparency mode, spatial audio. However there a couple changes: USB-C instead of lighning for charging (good), no wireless charging (bad), terribly large, cheap feeling case (really bad). Despite all this, I almost kept these. The dealbreaker came back to the fit; the Beats Fit Pro use built-in wing tips to keep them secure in your ears, but these inevitably started hurting my hurts after just a couple hours, despite trying to use them for over a week.
Anker Soundcore Life P3 ($80) - Since I had a good experience with Soundcore Life P2 Mini, but comfort and features were missing, I decided to step up and try their new Life P3 series. The Life P3 series had many quality of life improvements: wireless charging, ANC, transparency mode and a lot of cool colors. When these came in, I was very excited. However one major deal breaker started occuring immediately: the audio kept skipping every few minutes while connecting to my iMac. This very much broke the experience. These had to go, as I didn’t want to play the quality control lottery to see if I got a pair that didn’t have this issue. This pair will give us foresight of what’s to come with Soundcore products.
Anker Soundcore Liberty Air 2 ($37 Refurbished) - I decided to gamble on these since they were so cheap. They had the main features I wanted: wireless charging case, replaceable eartips. However, these had the worst pairing experience by far. I constantly had to re-pair them to my Mac after I had disconnected them. These went back after a few days, despite trying to see if it would get “better”.
Anker Soundcore Liberty Pro 3 ($130 on sale) - I decided to splurge and buy Anker’s latest flagship TWS earbuds. They were reviewed all over YouTube and generally had good reviews. They had all the features listed above and were extremely comfortable to wear. They also sounded very good. On my iPhone, I had zero connection issues. These even had Bluetooth “multipoint” which allows you to connect to two devices simulatenously. However, on my Mac, I would randomly get audio cutting out every issues. It seems that this issue has been reported by other users. If Soundcore fixes this in firmware, I would consider picking these up again.
Apple Airpods 3rd Generation ($150 on sale) - After trying so many Anker Soundcore products, I decided maybe something was wrong with their bluetooth firmware on this generation of their products, and decided to look elsewhere. I remember with the 1st Gen Airpods, I never had any bluetooth issues, so I picked these up. Like the 1st gen, these have an “open” decide so there are no eartips that go into your ear, hence no ANC or transparency mode. However, I got lucky and these actually fit pretty decent in my ears. However, they were still pretty loose fitting. I used these for almost a month, but ran into a few annoyances:
- With Apple audio products, after syncing to your iphone, the devices show up as bluetooth on all your devices that are signed into iCloud. On paper, this is a great convenience sicne you don’t have to re-pair when you switch from one device to anotehr. However, if you are someone who switches between say a Macbook Pro and iMac during work, MacOS tries to “guess” which device you want audio on and will try to get you to connect your Airpods to the device. This leads to a notifciation asking if you want to connect EVERY TIME you switch devices. I could not find a way to disable this, and it was incredibly distracting.
- Another issue came back with bluetooth. When watching YouTube, sometimes one earbud would be quieter than the other. The only repeatable fix was to adjust the volume. I thought at this point that maybe something was wrong with bluetooth on my iMac, but I’ve had no issues with my bluetooth speaker and Soundcore Spirit X listed above.

The Aftermath

For now, I’m stepping away from TWS earbuds. With the invention of Magsafe, it is now possible to listen to music through your lightning port via dongle and charge your phone again. This means I’m able to use wired earbuds such as the original Apple Earbuds, or my wonderful Shure SE215 IEMs. I do miss the convenience of TWS earbuds, but I think I’ll try to be patient for the right sale and hopefully for the technology to get more stable. For now, I’ll just enjoy my wired headphones.

Are you an TWS earbuds user? What experience have you had? I’m not completely opposed to them if there’s a sweetspot between features and price. You can let me know by contacting me!

First post for 2022: A 2021 recap and thoughts for this year

2022-01-21T14:30:00+00:00

Introduction

Hello! It’s already 2022 and I’m not sure what happened to 2021. In this post, I just wanted to reflect on 2021 and what I hope to accomplish in 2022.

2021: Another rough year, but moments of joy

2021 was another rough year. One of the most obvious reasons was the continued effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thankfully, vaccines were distributed this year to the general public, at least in the United States, which helped curb the rates of infection for the greater part of the year. Even with the emergence of the Delta variant, things were starting to feel at least a little more normal. However, come December 2021, the Omicron variant has emerged, causing us to return to our homes regularly once again.

Despite all the issues with the pandemic, I’ve been extremely fortunate. I have a low stress, decent paying job and I have a social circle that I am able to connect with despite the pandemic constraints. I was able to play some live music in the pockets of lower COVID numbers. I also recorded my second full-length album with one of my bands, Faim back in November. In the Fediverse, I moved from Fosstodon to Smallcamp, a much smaller instance, which has made me feel like I have a true internet home (thanks Ru and Ty for bringing me back to the old web).

Some other parts of 2021 were mixed. As seen in this blog, I struggled with my relationship with technology. With hardware and operating systems, I jumped from Android to iOS on mobile and switched between Linux, macOS and Windows on desktop throughout the year, before finally setlling on macOS at the end of the year with my purchase of a M1 iMac. As I’ve gotten older, I noticed my joy with tinkering with technology has dwindled. Now, I just want things to work and want to focus my energy on any things. Because of this, settling on Apple products for daily tech is a sobering compromise. There are definitely things I don’t like about the Apple ecosystem, both from a privacy and usage standpoint, but I forsee myself staying here for now.

In conclusion, 2021 was a mixed bag, but I am still thankful for where I am now. It definitely has framed what I hope to accomplish in 2022, which I’ll list below.

Thoughts for 2022

Here are some thoughts, goals and intentional stagnations for 2022 I’d like to discuss.

Continue blogging as I did in 2021

I don’t really have new goals for blogging in 2021, other than to continue what I’m doing. Having no pressure to produce content is a really nice to be at. I know this means posts are a bit sporadic, but for my mental health I think this is the best approach.

Add analytics back to the site

Despite removing them in 2021, I’ve decided to bring back GoatCounter to the site. I sometimes get random emails about posts and I’m just geniunely curious on how people are finding the site. I think my mental health is in a better place, so I hope I won’t be chronically checking them like I did when I had analytics last time. Of course, anyone is free to view them at ndanes.goatcounter.com.

Get my health in order

As I’ve been in my 30’s, I’ve really noticed that I can’t eat the same way I used to and the weight shows. A focus in 2022 is really getting my health back in order. This includes removing processed foods from my daily life, cutting out snacks and sweets, and exercising regularly.

Decouple my daily headspace from technology [more]

Last year consisted of constantly thinking about technology, whether it be private services, hardware and software choices. I understand that these things can come up as needs arise, but I found this to be incredibly draining for how much I thought about it. One constant thing I’d like to work on this year is to realize that no technology is perfect and there will always be compromises on what we choose to use. At the end of the day, technology should be assist us, not hurt us, but we also can’t have the ideal technology.

Learn some new math

Despite finishing my PhD in 2019 in Applied Mathematics, I haven’t really thought about math in over a year. I’d like to pick up a hobby project at some point this year that couples my interest in applied/computational mathematics and my more interest in web technologies. In particular, I’d like to learn the mathematics behind machine learning. If you have any books or other resources to recommend, feel free to reach out to me!

Conclusions

Thanks for coming along for the ride if you read this far. I have no plans for blogging this year, but I hope to do this again soon.

How I use Cryptomator to provide [more] private cloud storage with iCloud

2021-12-27T15:49:00+00:00

Introduction

Over the past year, I’ve been bouncing between several different cloud storage services and/or sync clients, each with their own trade-offs between convenience, privacy, and pricing. For context, I use cloud storage primarily for easy immediate access of important documents/files. It also acts as a pseudo-backup (I use Backblaze and local drives for true backups with snapshots) in case I can’t access files on one of my machines. My storage needs aren’t too high, hovering around 20-25 GB of true storage needs. However most providers don’t offer plans with this low of storage. For example, Dropbox currently charges $11.99/mo with 2 TB as their lowest tier personal plan, which is more than I need for cloud storage.

That said, here’s a list of such cloud storage and/or sync clients I’ve tried:

Syncthing - Works great, but I like having the cloud as a ‘pseudo-backup’ for my files
Dropbox - As mentioned above, it’s way too expensive. However, I still have this account for collaboration
Google Drive - Cheap ($1.99/mo for 100 GB), but since I use my Google account for things like music collaboration and YouTube, I don’t want all my eggs in one basket in case my account is either randomly compromised or closed
Microsoft Drive - Also cheap, but I’ve had pretty poor experiences with their client on MacOS with my work laptop.
MEGA - Requires trusting their client-side encryption and kind of pricey for my use case (~$5.90/mo for 400 GB storage)
NextCloud (Self-Hosted) - Worked decently when I tried it, but I don’t have a machine to dedicate to it, nor do I want to deal with uptime. Like Syncthing, I also don’t like not having a ‘pseudo-backup’ in the cloud via sync when hosting at home.
NextCloud (paid through Cloudamo) - Pricey at ~$4/mo for 100 GB. I’ve also had random issues with sync conflicts and the servers randomly going down. In addition, Nextcloud has been clunky and slow and their web/iOS apps leave a lot to be desired, which I won’t go into here. Finally, Nextcloud provides an entire cloud ecosystem that I honestly don’t need at all.

In the original first draft of this blog post, I was planning to move to OneDrive using Cryptomator. However, in the midst of writing this post, I discovered that OneDrive will treat Cryptomator encrypted files as a false positive for ransomware . I learned this going through writing the tutorial below. Although users have commented saying their files actually didn’t get deleted, I don’t want to risk it now.

Regardless, if you choose to use a cloud provider that only provides server-side encryption, you’re essentially trusting the provider to: (1) actually properly encrypt the files and (2) not look at your files. Most cloud services don’t even honor (2) at all with their terms of service, so encrypting your files before uploading to the cloud (even with more privacy-respecting services such as Nextcloud) is essential.

Why Cryptomator?

The first step to choose software to provide client-side encryption. There are a variety of client-side encryption options out there and two main alternatives I considered compared to Cryptomator were Boxcryptor or Veracrypt.

Boxcryptor is similiar to Cryptomator, providing encryption of files before uploading to the cloud. However, the software is closed-source and their free tier is limited to two devices, so that was a no-go for me.

Veracrypt is a trusted and well-known open source encryption tool, but requires creating encrypted volumes, where updating the synced files requires resyncing the whole container. I also found Veracrypt not as user-friendly as Cryptomator.

The last option I considered was Cryptomator, an open-source client-side encryption tool designed to encrypt files for cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud and OneDrive. The client also creates a encryped volume (they call it a “vault”) in your desired cloud provider’s sync folder, but files are individually encrypted, allowing for incremental syncing when files are changed. Additionally, Cryptomator’s mobile clients work extremely well and allow you to seamlessly access your encrypted vaults when needed on the go.

Next, I will briefly go over how to make a Cryptomator vault on macOS. This tutorial should be applicable for Windows/Linux and non-iCloud users.

A quick tutorial on how to use Cryptomator

Get Cryptomator

Cryptomator is available on Windows, MacOS and Linux. For Linux users, Cryptomator provides a link to a PPA for Ubuntu-based users, an AUR for Arch Users and a AppImage for others. There’s probably other third-party packagers as well. For this tutorial, I’m using MacOS with homebrew:

$ brew install cryptomator

Setup your first encrypted vault

Open Cryptomator and you should see a window like this:

Click “Add Vault” and you should see this window pop-up:

Next, click “Create New Vault.” The following window should pop-up:

Give a name for your vault. For this tutorial, I called it “Cryptomator_Docs.” Click “Next” and you should see:

If you’re on Windows or Linux, this box may look different. In my case, I’m going to use the default “iCloud Drive” choice and go to the next page.

Next you need to create a password for the vault. I personally generate one using my password manager Bitwarden and save the vault password there. I also recommend generating a recovery key and saving this somewhere other than your password manager by selecting “Yes please, better safe than sorry”.

WARNING: DO NOT LOSE THIS PASSWORD OR RECOVERY KEY. IF YOU DO, YOU WILL LOSE YOUR FILES.

Click “Create Vault” and this will go to the next page:

If you chose to make a recovery key, you should see a list of random words that acts as the recovery key. Save this somewhere! Click “Next”:

You should now have successfully created a vault to store files in. Click “Unlock Now” and you should see:

Upon unlocking, you should see an option to “Reveal Drive”. If you click that, it should open your file manager (Finder in my case).

In macOS, a Cryptomator vault is simply a WebDAV drive mount that you can drag/drop files as normal. When you lock the vault and look at your cloud storage, you will see it just looks like a regular folder, but with all contents as encrypted nonsense.

Conclusions

I believe client-side encryption tools like Cryptomator are a wonderful way where you have your cake and eat it too. It allows you use commercial, Big Tech cloud providers with their large, cheap storage capacities, but still maintain privacy of your documents. Since it is crossplatform, and also has mobile clients for iOS and Android, you can access your files in a encrypted vault on most devices. The only downside is that there’s going to be some small inconvenience of having to unlock the vault whenever you want to access your files. But among a lot of the options, I find that this is a good balance between privacy and usability.

Whoops! Back to Mac already...

2021-12-18T21:22:00+00:00

My desk now (Large Photo)

Introduction

In my last post, I griped about all my issues I was having with macOS and was going to switch over to Windows/Linux with the purchase of a Lenovo Ideapad Slim Pro 7i. Unfortunately, Linux support on this machine was quite terrible and WSL wasn’t going to cut it for my love for the command line use cases. Long story short, I ended up picking up a blue 512 GB 24” M1 iMac that i’m currently typing on now. I just wanted to explain what happened with the Lenovo Ideapad and why I decided to give macOS one more try.

Why the Lenovo Ideapad Slim Pro 7i Failed

Before I talk about my gripes with the machine, I want to talk about the pros, which include:

The display: Dear lord this thing was gorgeous. 14”, 2880x1800 and 90 hz. With this DPI, I was able to run the machine at 200% scaling and the screen was buttery smooth.
Build quality: For a windows machine, this thing was top notch. An all aluminium build, which was almost as nice as a macbook (not quite though).
Windows Hello: When I was using Windows, this was mostly just a convenience thing to quickly unlock the device. That said, I would probably disable this when traveling for security purposes.
The price: I paid $900 before tax and shipping, due to a $200 off sale price. It was hard to find a machine with these specs at this price.

With things working well, I was ready to wipe Windows and go to Linux full time. The first distro I booted up was Ubuntu 20.04. Upon boot, I noticed the screen would go black whenever I moved the mouse. If I moved it enough, the screen would return. Frustrated, I was like “Maybe the kernel is too old for this laptop?” Next, I tried Fedora 35, which only recently came out and is running kernel 5.14, a relatively new kernel. Regardless of the newer kernel, I ran into the same issue. Additionally, I also noticed the laptop keyboard was not registering inputs. I also tried elementary OS 6 with the same result, thinking it might have been just an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS issue.

When looking into how to fix this issue, results were sparse. There were some posts here and there about adding GRUB boot-parameters to fix the keyboard issue, but nothing about the display. Call me privileged, but this is something I haven’t had to deal with on a Linux instal in years. Only being able to run Windows on this machine wasn’t going to work. I returned the machine shortly after.

Back to Mac

While I was going through the month of testing the Lenovo Ideapad, a few other things had happened:

I sold my 23.8” QHD monitor due to preferring a single display setup (and the Lenovo Ideapad’s display was so good), eliminating most of my issues with macOS with external displays
I changed my workflow habits on my work 13” Macbook Pro such as using spotlight more, and better workspace management using virtual desktops

Like Linux, macOS is still a unix-based (or unix-like) operating system with all the benefits that come with it. Sure there is some privacy concerns with macOS, but it’s honestly a balance of convenience and privacy at least from 3rd party companies. With the Ideapad, I just wasn’t going to be able to live with Windows alone.

After much research, I decided to pick up the 8-core GPU, 8 GB variant M1 iMac 24” in blue. With my past experience with the M1 Macs, I knew 8 GB RAM was going to be plenty for what I used it for. The big selling point was the display, as I stare at text most of my day. This alone has been a noticeable improvement compared to trying to use my old QHD monitor. With the great built-in speakers, I no longer have to deal with macOS’s weird issue of volume control not working on other audio devices.

This is my first day on the device, and I have less an mouth to not have buyers remorse. I am really getting tired of computer searching, so hopefully this is over now.

Thoughts on macOS and why I'm going back to Windows/Linux for personal use

2021-11-20T15:49:00+00:00

Introduction

In my last post, I talked about my adventure with various computing devices in 2021. I wish it was over, but unfortunately I am me. I tend to be a tech minimalist and try to own as few devices as possible. My fiance got a 2020 13” M1 Macbook Pro from me as a gift after she finished school back in July. However, this machine was largely collecting dust and I decided to start using it and ended up selling my Thinkcentre that was described in my last post. However, with the holidays coming up and other personal factors, it came time for my fiance to start using her Mac again so I had to start factoring in whether I wanted to stay on macOS by buying another Macbook, or going back to PC.

I have primarily been a Windows and Linux user for most of my computing life. However, as a tech geek I’ve always liked trying new things and see what is across the virtual pond that is macOS. Although I own other Apple devices, such as my iPhone and iPad, there’s something about macOS that always hasn’t rubbed right for me.

In this post, I will go over my history using macOS, what I don’t like and like about it and why I’m going back to Windows/Linux.

My History with macOS Machines

My First Macbook Pro

My first exposure to owning a macOS machine was purchasing a 2009 15.4” Macbook Pro back in 2009, which I believe was running Mac OS X Snow Leopard. At this time, no PC could match the hardware/build quality of the Macbook Pro lineup and it was incredibly well built machine. Despite this, even back then I ran into frustrations with the OS. I ended up selling this machine and picked my first ever Linux machine, a System 76 Sterling Netbook running Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.

A Second Try in Graduate School

Around 2017, I was loaned a 15” Macbook Pro for an internship working as a graduate student researcher. I don’t remember model specifics, but I remember getting frustrated with window management (more on this below) and constantly hearing the fans spin up when doing basic tasks. On my personal machines at this time, I was running Ubuntu or PopOS regularly for all my graduate student research. Having to shift to a MBP for work definitely felt like it was getting in my way a lot.

My macOS usage in the present

Over the years since 2017, I’ve tried various macOS products, including, but not limited to:

2019 13” Macbook Air - returned
2020 13” Intel Macbook Pro - my current work laptop I’ve used since late 2020
2020 M1 Mac Mini - returned
2020 13” M1 Macbook Air - returned
2020 13” M1 Macbook Pro - My fiance’s device and I’m typing this blog post on it now!

Despite all these attempts to use macOS as my daily driver, I have constantly ran into frustrations with the OS. However, before I go into my frustrations with macOS, I wanted to highlight what I enjoy that Windows / Linux do not provide.

What I like about macOS

Apple Apps and Ecosystem

I’ve blogged about the Apple ecosystem in the past, but since that post, I’ve come to learn that you really get the best experience when you dive in completely and use the applications / integrations that Apple provides. The tight integration of macOS with other Apple devices, such as an iPhone or iPad, is unmatched on any other ecosystem. Some of these tight integrations include, but are not limited to:

iMessage, Phone Calls, and FaceTime across devices
Copy+Paste syncing between devices
GarageBand is unmatched as a free audio recording software suite
Handoff is very convenient to continue looking at a browser tab from one device to another
AirDrop to send photos from my phone to the Macbook for a quick post

All these things are great, but unfortunately they don’t outweigh my annoyances with macOS. Let’s dive in!

What I dislike about macOS

Quick disclaimer

I know a lot of the issues I listed below are either niche or have workarounds. For most folks, they will not run into these issues and will have a good experience with macOS. However, for me, for an OS from a company that claims “it just works”, I haven’t had that experience for my use case with macOS. I started daily driving macOS because I was getting grumpy with configuring tech, and macOS ironically was making me do that more.

Display Scaling Headaches

The first thing that frustrates the most about macOS is display scaling support on external displays. Without going to a bunch of scenarios with external monitors, here are the main points:

macOS was designed to look good around 110 PPI for low DPI and looks best around 220 PPI for high DPI, also known as “Retina”. Most, if not all modern Apple Mac devices have Retina displays.
For monitors less than 110 PPI, the UI will look appropriately scaled, but fonts will look poor due to sub-pixel anti-aliasing disabled by default, starting with macOS Mojave and completely removed starting with macOS Big Sur. This makes fonts look quite terrible in the OS on displays that are under 110 PPI if you are too close to the screen.
For monitors between 110 and 220 PPI, you may run into issues with small UI elements. However, display scaling issues get worse depending on what monitor you have:
1. If you own a 4K monitor, macOS does expose the display options to scale the display. However, this still makes fonts look semi-blurry from my experience, especially compared to scaling on a Windows 10 computer.
2. If you own a monitor that is not 4K, say a 23.8” 1440p panel (~122 PPI) in my case, you will get no options for display scaling at all by default. You can lower the resolution, but that defeats the purpose of using a higher resolution monitor. In contrast, Windows looks beautiful at 150% scaling on my 23.8” 1440p monitor. This seems to be a conscious choice by Apple since all their devices have Retina displays, and hence they have no financial incentive to support odd display situations.
3. The situation gets more complicated whether you own a Intel or Apple Silicon machine. With my point in 3.2, if you own a Intel machine with a non-4K display between 110 and 220 PPI, there are workarounds by adjusting system files to trick macOS into thinking your monitor is Retina. The one I’ve tried successfully is the one-key-hidpi I found on GitHub. If you own a Apple Silicon machine, this workaround isn’t supported. Instead, you have to create a dummy 4K display that your monitor can mirror in order to show the HiDPI scaling options. If you are in this situation, the application BetterDummy makes this much easier to manage.

Hence, monitors in macOS are largely a headache unless you own a 4K panel. Even with a 4K monitor and/or the workarounds, I still find the font and UI scaling looks poor compared to using the same monitor with Windows or Linux.

Weird Audio Issues

I’ve had a number of weird audio issues with macOS, especially recently. For my computer “speakers”, I use a Anker Soundcore 2 bluetooth speaker. However, when connected via bluetooth, I started noticing YouTube videos would hang and not play until I disconnected the device. Still not sure why this is happening.

The other annoyance I’ve had is with how macOS handles volume control on sound devices. If your audio device is not bluetooth or the system speakers, macOS does not let you adjust the volume of the device. So situations such as HDMI/DisplayPort audio and my Scarlett Focusrite USB audio interface do not allow for audio adjustment through the volume shortcuts on my keyboard. This is a small quality of life thing, but this is never a problem with Linux or Windows.

Window Management

I know a lot of people love how macOS handles windows through trackpad gestures and spotlight search, but I’ve personally never fully gotten used to it. I’ve tried tools such as Rectangle and Alfred to improve the window management experience, but I still find the OS gets in my way a lot, despite using for over a year on my work machine.

Multi-Monitor Quirks

I recently started trying to use the Macbook Pro 13” display as my main display, with my 23.8” monitor as my secondary monitor for quick glance items. Unfortunately, there has been weird quirks with this setup as well.

First, if you put a full-screen YouTube video a secondary display, the top menu bar vanishes on the primary display. Although this doesn’t break functionality, it feels like an afterthough from a UI/UX perspective.

Second, has to do with virtual workspaces. One suggestion to handle open windows in macOS is to take advantage of virtual workspaces. You can cycle through them by either opening Mission Control (F4 or CTRL + Up arrow key), cycling through workspaces with CTRL + Left/Right arrow key, or 3-finger left/right swipe gestures on the trackpad. However, on the secondary display, only Mission Control works on changing virtual workspaces. I haven’t figured out why this isn’t working my situation, as searching around for this suggests I shouldn’t be having this issue.

Conclusions

Overall, macOS is very polished and good looking operating system and I can see the appeal both for developers and creatives. However, my use case for computing doesn’t necessarily require macOS and my particular set of hardware/computer accessories have made it more frustrating to use. I will miss some of the tight integrations with my iPhone/iPad, but these are more nice to haves than must haves.

I have a Lenovo Ideapad Slim Pro 7i coming in the mail hopefully next week and am very excited to go back to Windows/Linux (my work device is still macOS so I’m stuck there for now). I will likely document my experience in a future blog post so stay tuned!

My Weird 2021 Chronological Timeline of Figuring out my Computing Devices

2021-08-16T15:49:00+00:00

Introduction

In this post, I wanted to reflect on the changes in devices I’ve had throughout 2021. I’ve had many ebbs and flows on figuring out what I wanted to use, based on my use-case, while also trying to balance digital privacy and convenience. This has caused me to switch operating systems on several occasions, and also buy/sell many pieces of hardware (thankfully a majority of which were used products). I don’t plan to go into incredibly detail for any time period, but I will comment what was going through my head at the time. I don’t know if this will actually be useful for anyone, but maybe it would help me understand my own thinking process.

The Timeline

January: I was mostly settled on using a used mini-ITX PC I picked up on Craigslist, exclusively running Linux-based operating systems. For mobile, I was using a stock Samsung Galaxy S10e. Things seemed to be fine at this point, but I was still trying to maximize privacy. Main barriers were: chat/messaging apps and cloud services for file sync.
February: I sold my desktop to switch exclusively to a used Thinkpad X390. At the time, I basically never used the graphics card in my desktop, and I thought I wanted something I could use around the house. I also had bought a used 2018 Mac Mini that I was using for music practice and starting to run an AirMessage server due to giving up getting my iPhone-user friends to switch to something other than SMS/MMS, since I still had a S10e.
April: Despite being able to technically use iMessage on Android through AirMessage, it did not allow you to connect your phone number to iMessage, severely limiting how many people could default message me using iMessage, causing messages to send via SMS/MMS. I was also frustrated with Samsung’s updates and fairly bad privacy situation on Android, so I ended up buying a 2020 iPhone SE, trading in my Galaxy S10e. Despite all the criticism Apple is having right now for privacy, I am still glad I made the switch for practical reasons. At this time, I was growing incredibly grumpy with technology and just wanted things to work; it seemed like Apple products were the best balance in trade offs between privacy and convenience.
May: Decided to start shifting toward an Apple ecosystem and ended up selling my Thinkpad X390 on eBay. I basically broke even with probably a small loss if I actually did the math. I was now just using my 2018 Mac mini as my main personal computing device. I got a “taste” of the ecosystem due to owning an iPhone, using my partners’ old AirPods and enjoying the seamless integration between devices. However the 2018 Mac Mini I had only had an 8th Gen i3, 128 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM, so it felt sluggish compared to my previous devices. I started looking into the new M1 Mac devices.
June: Bought a 2020 M1 Mac Mini base model from Costco, due to their great 90-day return policy. I thought this was probably the best way to see if I could continue using MacOS as my main platform for personal computing. The computer was blazing fast and I definitely remember thoroughly enjoying it. Because of this, I sold my used 2018 Mac Mini on eBay.
July/August: Since I was having a good time with the M1 Mac Mini, I decided to go all in and return the Mini to pay for a base model 2020 Macbook Air. It felt nice having a device I could use both for my desktop and laptop needs.

However, the one thing missing in all of this was gaming support, which MacOS has severely limited support and there were a handful games that were coming out recently that I wanted to play, that weren’t particularly demanding. I also started determining my audio recording woes were not caused by software, but rather my recording setup. I ended up picking up a used Thinkcentre M75q-1 that I had planned to use as a HTPC and for indie gaming. However, as I continued to use it, the Macbook Air went unused. That lack of use combined with wanting to not waste money, I ended up returning the 2020 Macbook Air and started using the Thinkcentre exclusively as my main computing device.

Conclusions

I am still using the Thinkcentre as my main computing device, while rocking an iPhone. I’m hoping this is where I can settle at least for the time being, because I am quite burnt out on figuring out what operating system to use on a daily basis. It’s really nice to be able to use Linux again and in an ideal world I would be able to access everything I need on a Linux-based OS. I know that’s not practical, but I am okay with the tradeoffs, at least for now. Moving forward, I think the only thing I’m possibly purchasing in the future is some kind of laptop, probably another Thinkpad, albeit a less powerful one since I don’t need it to be my main device. Thanks for suffering through my indecisiveness!

How I [mostly] avoid the Apple 'Ecosystem' when using Apple Products

2021-06-16T16:49:00+00:00

Introduction

In recent months, I’ve recently kind of stumbled into using more Apple products, all of which are in the ‘budget’ category:

Phone: iPhone SE 2020 64 GB
- I switched to iPhone back in April. In summary, I moved mostly because of iMessage’s massive adoption here in the United States, and for folks unwilling to switch chat services like Signal or XMPP, I rather message them with something that is end-to-end encrypted compare to plaintext SMS/MMS.
Desktop: Late 2020 M1 Mac Mini (256 GB SSD, 8GB Unified Memory)
- Costco had this on sale for $70 off their normal price. On top of that, Slickdeals forum members found out there was a $50 off $500 coupon circulating online that Costco members could ask for in the chat support. Because of this, I decided to pick one up to see what all the hype was. Hence, with all discounts, I was able to pick up the Mac Mini for $550 ($150 off MSRP) before tax. It’s incredibly snappy and fast computer, despite only having 8 GB RAM. I’m honestly shocked how performant it is given the price I paid.
Tablet: My fiance had a 7th Gen iPad that wasn’t in use, so I decided to start use it for lounging around the house and [eventually] for travel. It doesn’t get too much use right now. It also acts as a second monitor using Sidecar when needed.
Bluetooth Earbuds: Airpods
- This was another hand me down from my fiance, which I don’t think I would have bought. I will admit they’re incredibly convenient. They don’t sound too great, and I hate the fact they’re effectively consumables that might end up the landfill. Thankfully, there’s some programs like Podswap trying to create a way to keep them out of the landfill.

The biggest draw for Apple products is their great design, hardware and integration between their products, often called the Apple ‘Ecosystem.’ In this post, I will describe what that is, and how I try to avoid it, despite using so many Apple products now.

The Apple ‘Ecosystem’: What is it and Trying to Avoid it

If you haven’t heard of the term before, YouTuber MKBHD has a great video summarizing what it is. He defines a tech ecosystem as:

“…So in tech you know an ecosystem is just a community of interacting objects.” - MKBHD, “The 🍎 Ecosystem: Explained!”

In particular with Apple, the ecosystem is defined as:

“So Apple makes a ton of devices: you know, the iPhone, the iPad, the Mac, the Apple watch, the Apple TV, the HomePod, AirPods…but they also make software and proprietary technology that ties them all together: AirPlay, AirDrop, Continuity, iCloud.” - MKBHD, “The 🍎 Ecosystem: Explained!”

He goes on to explain that once they can get you to buy one of their products (he gives the example of the iPhone), then that causes one to buy other Apple products/services since they work so well together.

Why avoid the ecosystem?

Despite the convenience of this tight integration, there are reasons to avoid getting too tied into this ecosystem:

The “Walled” Garden: Let’s say you need/want to use products with different software (e.g. Windows, Android, Linux); you may not be able to access the technologies you need without having that Apple product on hand. Some examples of this include: iCloud Drive, iMessage and up until recently, Facetime. Furthermore, if you decide to switch away from Apple products in the future, it will be much more difficult to make the transition.
Privacy: Despite Apple marketing itself has a “Privacy-first” company and being quite better than say Google or Facebook, they are far from perfect. If you look at their privacy policy, you will see they still collect of a lot of data on you, especially if you rely too much on their integrated services.
Centralized service risk: There have been random stories of people getting locked out of their Google accounts, and the truth is no different here with Apple. Relying on any cloud service to hold your data is in practice a bad idea, especially if you don’t have a backup somewhere else.

Because of these reasons, I want to explain how I am currently avoiding most Apple services, while still using their products.

Apple Ecosystem Services Breakdown

I will breakdown by subsection of the various major Apple services that I currently do and don’t have alternatives for. In my previous blog post, I was also looking too avoid other Big Tech alternatives (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) for similiar reasons that I listed above for Apple’s ecosystem.

iCloud

iCloud is the biggest mountain to overcome since it is the most tightly integrated product across all Apple devices. I haven’t completely disabled iCloud, as some services are actually end-to-end encrypted between your devices. iCloud also deals with syncing contacts, calendar, messages and files if you completely use it. Because of the many moving parts of iCloud, I will have to address components of it individually.

iMessage

In particular, iMessage is one to be particularly mindful of, since messages are involved both with iCloud sync and backups. I will try to summarize the possibilities here:

iCloud Sync off, iCloud Backup off: Encryption keys only stored on device
iCloud Sync on, iCloud Backup off: Encyption keys only stored on device, but Messages can sync across devices. Apple notes this on their iCloud security page:

“If you have iCloud Backup turned on, your backup includes a copy of the key protecting your Messages. This ensures you can recover your Messages if you lose access to iCloud Keychain and your trusted devices. When you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future messages and isn’t stored by Apple” - iCloud Security Overview, End-to-end encrypted data
iCloud Sync on, iCloud Backup on: As shown in the quote above, a copy of your key is uploaded to iCloud for recovery purposes. Hence, Apple has a copy of your keys if you leave iCloud Backup on.

Keeping this all in mind, I still use some of the iCloud sync services. In summary, I have the following still enabled:

Reminders
Notes
Messages (with Backups off)
Home
Health
Wallet
App data

Reminders and Notes will eventually be transitioned once I find a good alternative. Notes suprisingly integrates natively with Fastmail, my email provider.

Phone Backup

Since I’m not using iCloud backup, I simply use the ‘iTunes’/MacOS finder integrated backup solution, which gives me a local backup of my iPhone. They also provide the ability to encrypt the backup, which I also use. That backup is then backed up to an external drive using Time Machine

Email, Contacts & Calendar

Suprisingly, Apple still supports the IMAP, CalDav, and CardDAV standards for email, calendar, and contacts, respectively. On my devices though, I only really use Fastmail for contacts and calendar, while using the web client and their apps for my email.

Files

As mentioned in my last post, I was recently testing my own Nextcloud instance, hosting on my old 2018 Mac mini. I ended up selling this device so I could eventually use a dedicated Linux workstation instead for self-hosting. For now, I am using the 100 GB ‘Basic’ Cloud from Cloudamo and have been extremely happy with the experience, while only costing $4/mo. I prepaid for a few months and will likely revisit self-hosting once that time comes. For backups from the cloud, I am using Duplicati to backup my important files to my 10 GB Fastmail file manager via WebDAV, and also Backblaze B2, encrypted with PGP.

Photos

I was using a combination of iCloud and Google photos for a couple months after switching to iPhone. After being happy with Nextcloud, I ended up deleting my photos from both services completely. I am now using the iOS Nextcloud app for photo syncing from my own. These photos are then able to sync from Nextcloud to my Mac Mini, which I then backup using Backblaze B2 with Duplicati, also encrypted with PGP.

For photo management, I initially tried Photo Prism, which is almost a replacement for Google Photo’s AI facial/object recognition for photo organization, but I will likely revisit when I decide to start self-hosting again. In the meantime, I am using a combination of GNU Image Manipulation Program and Darktable, both FOSS applications, on my Mac mini for photo editing and management.

Facetime

I honestly rarely use Facetime other than with my Fiance. Since it’s becoming cross platform and is end-to-end encrypted, I don’t really mind using it with people I know. Otherwise, I do have Signal and Jitsi Meet as alternatives depending on the person I want to chat with.

Pages/Numbers/Keynote (Apple Office Apps)

Since I only really use spreadsheets (for budgeting), I don’t have much of a need (or an opinion) for a full-fledged office suite for personal use. That said, Apples’ Numbers application feels like abandonware, as their mobile, desktop and web apps all feel incredibly half-baked. I was using Google Sheets instead up until recently. Instead, I am using the FOSS alernatives LibreOffice Vanilla for desktop and Collabora Office for mobile when I need to edit on budget on the go.

Safari Web Browser

For web browsing, I use Firefox on desktop, but Safari on my iOS devices, since ad/content blockers are only available on Safari mobile. Handoff lets me access tabs that are active on my iPhone/iPad, but will open them on Firefox desktop application.

Maps

There is really no good alternative to Google Maps, and that includes Apples’ own Map application. Despite that, I still decided to continue using Apple Maps, with OSMand also installed with preinstalled mapdata in case I run out of data, since Apple Maps still doesn’t support offline map downloads.

Conclusions

In this blog post, I have overviewed the Apple ecosystem and how I try to avoid it, despite using a lot of Apple hardware. I think my setup is quite doable, especially when using Nextcloud and Fastmail with the backends. Sure it takes a few extra steps to setup, but it’s nice knowing that if my Apple account is suddenly closed/locked out, I will be able to access most of my data. Furthermore, I can move and use other platforms with quite ease. If you’re also a person still using Apple products and wanted to reduce your dependency to the ecosystem, I hope this setup helps you figure out your own solution!

Trying Nextcloud by Self-Hosting: Initial Impressions

2021-06-12T00:30:00+00:00

Introduction

Last month, I wrote about switching to iPhone from Android and overall I’ve been really happy with the switch. I’ve been generally been getting grumpy with technology and may have greatly regressed on many of my old privacy goals, for the sake of convenience and features. Some of the pitfalls include:

Switching to macOS as my desktop OS
- iMessage and Phone calls through the OS are unimaginably convenient due to iMessage’s commonality in the United States
- Audio latency and music recording is extremely cumbersome on Linux and I really just need a low-latency recording solution to track my metronome practices on drums. Hence, Garage Band was a perfect fit.
Using more Google services:
- Maps - Apple Maps is fine, but there’s no offline map support
- Photos - As explained in my switching to iPhone post
- Voice - I didn’t use my JMP.chat account enough to justify the monthly cost, but I rarely use the Google Voice acccount even now.
- Drive/Sheets - using a Cryptomator container for sensitive files

Despite all this, I decided it was time to take some action on some of these services, in particular with Google. I have a i3-8100B, 8 GB RAM, 128 GB 2018 Mac Mini that I wasn’t fully utilizing, and was also a bit to slow to use as a daily desktop. Hence, I decided to spin up a Ubuntu Server 20.04 virtual machine using Virtual Box to explore self-hosting my own stuff.

Of all the Google services listed above that I still use, my primary focus was moving away from Photos, since it is a lot of personal data and trust to be put under one provider.

Self-Hosting Background

I’ve only dabbled with self-hosting, all of which occured on the Mac Mini mentioned above. In particular, I was able to spin up and set up Jellyfin behind a Nginx reverse proxy to access it remotely for the first time for a few months back, but at the time I didn’t find a use for it. Because of this experience, I felt a bit more confident in setting things up.

Going with Nextcloud

I’ve previously spoke negatively about NextCloud, given that it has so many features and managing it locally seemed difficult. Furthermore, I tried Cloudamo, a Nextcloud provider, and found the user experience through the web UI incredibly slow. Despite all this, I heard good things about the Ubuntu snap package of Nextcloud, so I decided to give it a try. By going with Nextcloud, I would be able to drop two Google services at once: Drive and Photos.

Overview of How I Self-Hosted Nextcloud

This isn’t meant to be a guide for self-hosting Nextcloud, but I thought I’d give an overview of the steps I did to get it up and running:

Setup Ubuntu 20.04 Server Virtual Machine using Virtual Box with 2 cores, 32 GB storage and 2 GB RAM
- The snap package for Nextcloud is an option during the installer
- Setup Virtual Box Guest addition so I can add external folders on the host machine
Open ports 80 and 443 on my router for the local IP address of the VM
Point an A record of mynextcloudsubdomain.ndanes.com to my public ip address in my DNS settings on Fastmail
Configure Nextcloud following this Digital Ocean guide, stopping before Step 4.
Modify Nextcloud’s config.php file to use a folder on my external drive following this guide
Change Nextcloud’s default ports of 80 and 443 to not those
Setup a nginx reverse proxy for Nextcloud by partially following this guide, skipping the Docker steps
Setup Nextcloud user account, and start syncing files!
Once everything is working, setup backups. I loosely followed Kev Quirk’s Nextcloud guide for using Duplicati with Backblaze.

Impressions so Far

I will breakdown my initial impressions so far in different categories: performance/stability and features.

Performance/Stability

Performance on my self-hosted VM is noticeably better than Cloudamo’s free option. The web UI is noticeable smooth and changing pages loads quickly. The iOS app also navigates smoothly, especially in the photo gallery. So far, it’s been an incredibly good user experience. I should note that I initially had the VM installed on a WD easystire 8TB external drive and obviously saw a noticeable improvement when I moved the VM image to the internal SSD. The bulk of files are still on the external drive and still

Features

The amount of apps that you can install on Nextcloud is sort of overwhelming. For now, I’ve mostly enabled apps that enhance security, such as 2FA using TOTP and U2F and also the mail app just to see if it worked. Some of the apps in the snap package yet, but I’m honestly fine with waiting.

I mainly needed Nextcloud to replace two main requirements: file and photo sync. So far, it has served these purposes beautifully. Since I’m self-hosting, a major perk is not having to use client-side encrypted solutions like Cryptomator, making the files easily accessible by just logging in.

Conclusions

So far, I’m pretty happy with using Nextcloud. Setting it up was fairly low maintenance, and I’m hoping that by using the snap package that updates will also be seamless. I will try to give an update in a few months to see if I end up sticking with it. If I do stick with it, I will finally delete my files off Google Drive and Photos.

What’s missing?

There are a few things that I still need to replace from Google:

Sheets - The mobile app experience is hard to beat, which is my primary use case for it for tracking my budget on the go. I may try to use Nextcloud’s integration with Collabora Office or ONLY OFFICE as a potential solution.
Maps - OpenStreetMaps is a common recommendation, but I still find the experience extremely lacking. I may just reinstall it on my phone and try to be better about contributing to the project
Photos - Although Nextcloud photos gives me the ability to get my photos off my phone and onto a hard drive easily, there are no editing tools, no machine-learning based face/object recognition and the gallery application is a bit lacking. There are many self-hosted alternatives outthere, but all of them seem to be missing a feature or two that Google Photos provides. The best potential candidate I’ve found so far is Photo Prism which I’ll be closely watching.

If you have any other recommendations, please let me know.

Conflating Privacy & Anonymity: A Layperson's Perspective

2021-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

I am by no means a security researcher, expert or professional. Most of this post is my opinion using more higher level concepts about the topic at hand. If there’s something I missed here, please reach out and let me know!

Background

After being interested in privacy issues for the past few years (on/off) and on the Fediverse for the past months, I often see folks conflating privacy and anonymity as the same thing. Although I agree there there is some dependency of one of these to the other, I don’t think it’s fair or practical to combine the concepts.

A 💩 and Imperfect Analogy

I believe I saw this analogy somewhere on Reddit, so I don’t claim to take credit for it, nor do I believe I’m paraphrasing it one to one. But I think a good way to compare these concepts is when you’re using a public restroom bathroom stall (assuming it’s a stall without those gaps in between the panels):

Privacy: The bathroom stall is closed, and someone may have seen you go into the stall, but no one can see what you’re doing in the stall.
Anonymity: There is no bathroom stall walls, but you’re wearing an outfit the completely hides your identity.
Privacy & Anonymity: You enter the bathroom stall without your identity revealed.

To me, privacy is the ability to be able do something without others knowing what you’re doing, while anonymity is the ability is to do something without knowing who did it. Thus, privacy and anonymity is the ability to do something without others knowing what you’re doing and who is doing it.

Some examples

Signal

The most common one I see is when criticizing Signal, the private end-to-end encrypted messaging app, for using phone numbers for registration. Although I have many criticisms of Signal, I do think it’s one of the best privacy-focused messaging platforms, in terms of ease of use and wide availablity.

The claim is that using phone numbers reduces its ability to be private. Using my definitions of privacy and anonymity above, using your phone number means you cannot hide who you are while registering the Signal service; thus the service is not anonymous. However, when you are speaking to folks on the service, which has been shown to have no data to give away, it is extremely difficult to show what you’re doing on the service, i.e. who you are talking to and what you’re talking about.

Mastodon

On the other extreme, I wanted to give an example of someone being anonymous, but not necessarily private. On many Mastodon instances, it is fairly easy to make an account without revealing much personal information at all; it only requires registering with an email account, which there are ways to register an email anonymously. Hence, you use an alias and a throwaway email to join anonymously. However, there are many folks who use an alias on Mastodon, but make all their posts publically available across the Fediverse. In this instance, people know what you are doing, but do not know who you are. Thus, using Mastodon this way is anonymous, but not private.

Conclusions

Not much to conclude here other than saying, I think we need to be clear on our definitions when talking about privacy and anonymity. Security often gets conflated here too, but I think it has a more intertwined role with privacy in many aspects, which I don’t want to try to explain here. I think in some situations, you do need both, but that largely depends on various factors depending on your situation, the software being used, etc. Let me know if I missed something, as these are just my opinions!

I switched [back] to iPhone from Android: Pros & Cons after 4 weeks

2021-05-07T17:10:00+00:00

Background

For my daily mobile device, I was using Samsung Galaxy S10e up until recently, when I traded in for a 2020 iPhone SE. As a FOSS advocate, this may be a bit surprising, but I feel like the trade offs between privacy, usability, and convenience were a major factor for my switch. In this post, I will overview what I felt was missing with Android, why I switched to iPhone and what the pros/cons of switching has been so far.

What caused me to switch away from my Galaxy S10e

Overall, I was pretty happy with my Galaxy S10 and was able to customize what I wanted and enjoy mostly timely updates. However, there were many constraints that I did not like about the device:

Rom Support: Even though the device was carrier unlocked, there is no way to unlock the boot-loader and hence no ability to run third-party custom ROM’s.
- Even if I had a phone with this ability, it seems like custom ROM’s like Lineage OS have many security vulnerabilities due to its unlocked nature and root access.
- Android Phones like the Google Pixel devices support ROM’s like Graphene OS which overcome these security issues, with a significant increase in privacy. However, due to the lack of Google Play Services, many apps from the Google Play Store don’t work, which I’m currently not in a place to give up certain apps. In particular, apps related to my day job.
More research on Android vs iOS privacy: In the past, there has been research on how Android phone home significantly more than iOS. More recently, there has been a newer study further confirming that iOS also collects data, although the data size is smaller compared to stock Android. This is a problem from both platforms which hopefully can be changed in the future.
Messaging apps in the United States: In my immediate friend/family circle, I would say ~90% of them own iPhones. This means that most people I know use iMessage as their primary instant messaging platform. Because of this, many people are highly resistant to installing third-party chat apps at all. Common third-party apps that people were willing to use were a downgrade in privacy: Discord, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. I was thankfully fortunate to have a subset of my friends use Signal, but there were still some people unwilling to switch. This means that people that weren’t on Signal or XMPP (my other chat platform I primarily use) were messaging me with SMS/MMS, which is worse, both from a usability and security/privacy perspective. Even being able to use iMessage with ~90% of my contacts would be a significant upgrade in privacy due to iMessage’s end-to-end encryption. However, I do recognize that iCloud backups are end-to-end encrypted but Apple has the keys, but I don’t believe Apple is data mining these backups, at least according to their privacy policy. I know it’s not a perfect solution, but it is an improvement overall in privacy by making this decision to consider an iPhone.
Signal Crypto Announcement: The catalyst to switch away from Android was Signal’s announcement to integrate cryptopayments into the app. This raised red flags with folks in the security community and I felt that I needed a backup option in case something went wrong with Signal in the next few years. I still don’t like the decision that Signal made, but I am still using the app as a backup chat platform. That said, this announcement was really the catalyst to want me to switch away from Android.

My experience with iPhone

Previous Experience

Back in 2017, I bought the original iPhone SE for similar reasons mentioned above for iMessage. However, back during these times, I felt iOS was a lot more locked down due to no ability to set default web browser or email apps, and requiring iTunes for local backups and music syncing. I eventually switched back to Android by buying a Google Pixel 3 in 2019, which I loved for its camera, but hated for its hardware issues. Even after an RMA, I still had software issues with the Pixel 3. Those hardware issues led me to trade-in for a Galaxy S10e which I was using up until switching to the 2020 iPhone SE 2020.

Pros

1st Party Apps are great

Most of the 1st party apps on iOS are great. In particular, Apple Music, Maps, Files, iMessage, Facetime and Camera apps I use on a regular basis and thoroughly enjoy the UI/UX experience.

3rd Party Apps are (also) great

iOS apps, compared to Android, generally feel more polished and less buggy. Even for the Google apps I still have to use, I find them more polished compared to Android. I recognize this is due to its walled garden approach, and only having to support few devices compared to the Android ecosystem. Some of my favorite FOSS apps on iOS include:

Tofu Authenticator
Bitwarden
Cryptomator
Firefox

Long-term updates

iOS has historically been shown to have longer software support than their Android counterparts. This means the device is generally more secure for a longer period of time, increases its long term value, and theoretically means less upgrades. Though I generally am bad about keeping devices and I need to work on this.

Cons

Syncthing Support is Limited

In a previous post, I gushed about how much I Love Syncthing. While I still love it, I unfortunately had to stop using it when I switched to iPhone. There is a third-party app called Möbius Sync which uses Syncthing, but currently doesn’t support photo syncing due to how the iOS filesystem works. Because of this, I am temporarily using Google Drive with Cryptomator and Google Photos until I find a good alternative for photo backup and file sync.

No Headphone Jack or USB-C

My previous Android phone still had a headphone jack, which feels like a losing battle these days. I also have to carry a lightning cable for charging, but this is more an inconvenience than a deal breaker. I hope that Apple decides to switch to an open standard in the future.

Background Photo Sync

Photo sync in general on iOS seems to be severely hamstringed in any third-party apps. All this means is that one has to remember to open those apps reguarly to sync photos, but again this is also an inconvenience than a deal breaker.

XMPP Clients are awful

I was a huge fan of the Conversations XMPP app on Android. Everything worked and it had clean, simple UI. However, iOS XMPP clients are another story. All the clients I’ve tried (SiskinIM, Monal, ChatSecure) all have their issues. I’ve found SiskinIM to be the most stable, but I still have issues with push notifications in group chats. I hope this improves in the future, and I will be trying to financially contribute to some of these XMPP client projects.

Conclusions

Overall I am happy with my switch to iPhone. I miss certain things about Android, but it’s nice having something that mostly just works and I am able to talk to most people in my day-to-day life with a more private chat platform. I will hopefully give another update in the future, but we’ll see how this journey goes. I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed any FOSS friends who are reading this, but I think we all have to figure out what we’re willing to put up with for privacy and unfortunately there’s no perfect solution.

How I Cleaned up my Digital Photo & Video Collection

2021-04-15T15:21:00+00:00

Back in October 2020, I was using Google Photos for my digital photo & video management and sharing platform. I still believe Google Photos is probably the best photo management application out there, in terms of features, UX and pricing. However, the privacy implications of using the service are unfortunately hard to ignore.

One criticism of the Google Photos app is how to delete old photos/videos. I think the application feels sluggish in the regard. Also, I felt like Google Photos was enabling my digitally hoarding a lot of photos/videos over the past decade or so due to their unlimited storage option (up until recently). Because of this, I felt like it was finally time to sort through and clean up my collection. This post will outline the general guidelines on how I did this and is not intended to be a guide. As a end result, I went from approximately 50 gb to 9 gb of photos/videos by going through this process.

Step 0: Google Takeout

Of course the first step is getting my photos/videos out of Google using their takeout service. The process is fairly straight forward; they provide a checklist of all their services that provide a data export. Once you request the export, you wait until you receive a email link to download the collection as a compressed file.

When you download the compressed file, you will find the photos are organized with a particular hierachy based on EXIF data by date. Additionally, you also see JSON files for each photo that provide EXIF metadata. I personally ended up deleting the JSON files by recursively finding them and deleting them. I don’t have the exact script/command I used to do this, but you can do something similar in bash by using something like this.

Step 1: Import to Photo Manager

Next, I started looking for a photo management application and ended up going with GNOME Shotwell since I am on a Linux operating system, and found the app to suit all my basic needs of managing photos/videos.

Step 2: Go through all photos/videos (the hardest step!)

This step took me several months to complete. Over the past few months (approximately October 2020 to present), I would randomly open Shotwell and go through my photos to delete. My criteria for deleting was loosely based on the following:

Is the photo too blurry?
Do I have multiple “similiar” photos?
- Dog photos! Of course I kept some of them :D
- Photos of landscapes, parks, and museum exhibits
Will I ever reference or share this photo again?
- Sold used items
- Receipts outside warranty/return policy
- Referencing photos from chats with friends/family
Does this photo bring up a “bad memory”?

A similar process was also applied to my videos as well. A majority of my photo/video size was reduced during this step.

Step 3: Optimize those files!

WARNING: Make a copy or backup of your photos/videos before attempting anything in this section. If you don’t like the end result (like overcompressing) or you change one of the commands incorrectly, you won’t be able to recover the original photo/video.

JPEG

Since most of these photos were taken from smartphones and were usually JPEG files, I decided to optimize how much space they were taking up. There are a few different CLI tools to do this, but I decided to use jpegoptim, which allows for easy batch processing. By default, jpegoptim uses a lossless optimization algorithm to optimize files, and will skip files that results in a larger file size. Optionally, you can add lossy compression which is what I did. I ended up finding a bash script on the Arch Forums that allows you to run jpegoptim recursively to apply to every subdirectory of photos you want to optimize. I made the following modification for 90% quality and progressive jpegs only:

jpegoptim --max=90 --all-progressive *.jpg

If you have PNG files too, there’s a similar tool called optipng. I ended up converting the few PNG files I had to JPEG using imagemagick instead. With jpegoptim, I was able to see about a 22% reduction in total file size of my photo collection.

MP4

For my video files, I decided to use ffmpeg to optimize the files by converting them to H.265. I found a reference on Stack Exchange to convert an mp4 using H.265 using ffmpeg.

Prior to running this, I ended up moving all my videos to their own folder using find (reference here):

find . -name \*.mp4 -exec mv "{}" /path/to/Videos \;

Then, batch converting can be done using the following script:

#!/bin/bash -x
for i in *.mp4;
  do name=`echo "$i" | cut -d'.' -f1`
  echo "$name"
  ffmpeg -i "$i" -vcodec libx265 -crf 28 "ffmpeg_converted/${name}.mp4"
done

where the original form of this bash script was found here. I got roughly a 50% reduction in file size with not much loss in quality by doing this!

Conclusions

I am extremely happy with how many photos/videos I was able to get rid of by going through this process. I am still trying to figure out where to host my photos for syncing and sharing in the future, but hopefully I can find a good option soon. If you have any recommendations, feel free to contact me and let me know!

Moving site back to Fastmail

2021-03-12T22:11:00+00:00

EDIT (2021-05-26): I ended up moving back to Netlify again. It’s currently on GitHub, but I would like to transition to something else for the future. Managing app passwords for ftp was becoming a pain.

Back in January, I decided to rehost this website with Netlify. Although this has made things incredibly convenient, I sort of didn’ve love the fact I was relying on GitHub to maintain my website. Ultimately, I decided to move back to the static hosting option using my email provider, Fastmail.

My complains from before were that only FTP and WebDAV were supported for file transfering when hosting my site with Fastmail. To fix this, I decided to make a simple bash script using ncftp to allow push updates to the FTP server without having to use a GUI client. The main command looks something like:

ncftpput -u $USER -p $PASSWORD -R $HOST $DESTINATION_PATH $ORIGIN_PATH

I stored this command in a bash script called ftp_fastmail_upload. If I was successful, you are reading this blog post from me using that script!

To utilize the FTP script for a one CLI command deploy, I use the following set of aliases:

# alias to build jekyll site under _site
alias jb="bundle exec jekyll build"
# alias which calls a script to upload files to Fastmail server from _site
alias fm_ftp="bash /home/ndanes/scripts/ftp_fastmail_upload"
# alias which combines the two aliases above
alias deploy_site="jb && fm_ftp"

Now that I can deploy my site without using GitHub, I’m considering moving my website repo elsewhere. I may go back to Codeberg, but ultimately I haven’t decided.

I Love Syncthing

2021-03-11T19:53:00+00:00

There are variety of file syncing options out there, with the most popular ones being Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, and Microsoft OneDrive. Although the pricing for all these services have very affordable prices (per GB), there is one thing they all have in common; they presume trust on the provider to keep your data safe and respect your privacy. Whether it be a distgruntled employee, poor privacy policies, and/or a data breach, your data’s destiny isn’t just yours.

Although there are client-side encryption solutions like Cryptomator (which I do use for some use-cases) and Veracrypt that can be used with any of the cloud services above, I find these solutions quite tedious to use on a daily basis. Alternatively, there are end-to-end encrypted cloud services like pCloud, Mega, and Tresorit, there is still an issue of trust regarding governance (especially with Mega), and the trust of client-side encryption (with the exception of Mega). I’m also incredibly cheap and will only pay for services if absolutely necessary (e.g. privacy).

As a final alternative, there is the well-regarded open source alternative NextCloud. But on the outside, the service seems like it offers way more features than I would ever need. Furthermore, running one in a VPS can get very expensive for higher storage capacities, and I don’ve want to deal with managing one locally.

I’ve tried various combinations of cloud service and client-side encryption software but I ultimately settled on a very simple, powerful piece of FOSS software: Syncthing. Next, I will talk about why I love Syncthing and how I use it on a daily basis.

What is Syncthing?

To start things, let’s start with the description from the official website:

Syncthing is a continuous file synchronization program. It synchronizes files between two or more computers in real time, safely protected from prying eyes. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, whether it is shared with some third party, and how it’s transmitted over the internet. Source: Syncthing

Basically, Syncthing is a decentralized filesyncing service without the dependence of a cloud server. It gives you granular control on how, when and which files are synced.

Why do I love it?

I love Syncthing simply due to its simplicity, ease of use and trust model. As a overview, here is how you generally use it:

Install Syncthing on your local machine (e.g. desktop)
Install Syncthing on another local machine (e.g. laptop)
Add the device ID to each device
Choose a folder to share on one of the machines (e.g. desktop).
- The syncthing client will detect the folder and ask you to add it to your machine
Files start syncthing!

Some other notable features include:

File versioning on a device-by-device basis
- Various versioning options, including number of versions, how long to keep, etc.
Syncing prioritiziation options (random, small files or large files first, etc)
Syncing can go one-way (receive or send only) or two-way
User-friendly Web UI
(Optional) Local and Global Discovery
- Allows you to sync your files anywhere!
- Discovery can be dynamic or through a static IP
Encrypted file transfers using TLS
Very Cross-Platofrm
- Supports Linux, MacOS, Windows, Android, and more!
- iOS support is limited

Since Syncthing is decentralized, you can decide where you can put the files, controlling the trust completely since you can choose to use it only on computers you have access to.

How I use Syncthing

I don’ve claim to be an expert with Syncthing and/or networking, and that is not my goal here. I would describe myself as an intermediate-to-advanced Linux user who doesn’t mind tinkering with things to get them to work. There are some great advanced guides on Syncthing, one of which I can recommend created by Lawrence Systems. For now, I will describe my very basic setup on how I use Syncthing. For a basic guide, you can take a look at their Getting Started guide.

My “home” server: 2018 Mac Mini

There are various ways to setup Syncthing, but for me it made the most since to have one centralized “home server” for which all other devices synchronize with. In my use case, I chose use to my 2018 Mac Mini, since it is always on for me to use AirMessage on my Android Phone. Setting up Syncthing on a Mac is as simple as downloading and installing the DMG file from their GitHub. From there, you can access the GUI client by typing http://127.0.0.1:8384/ and start setting up your other devices.

With all my files synced to a centralized “server”, I do need to manage some sort of backup solution. To do this, I use Duplicati with with Backblaze B2, which uses GPG for encryption, to backup my important files and photos.

Syncing to my Android Phone

Since I ditched Google Photos, I needed an alternative way to manage my photos. It turns out, that Syncthing’s Android app is treated as a first-class citizen. You gain access to the very familiar Web GUI, as well as its own native interface. On my Android phone, I pointed a few important directories to sync to my Mac Mini:

Android Backup - Stores configuration and backup files for things such as NewPipe, Aegis OTP, Signal, etc.
Docs_Sheets - Stores spreadsheets (Collabora Office) and markdown files (Markor) that I want to be able to edit on the go
DCIM - My phone’s default location for photo storage

I allow syncing to go both ways, so if I delete a photo on my Mac Mini, it will delete on my phone (which is why I have a backup solution!). Additionally, the following folder from my Mac Mini is synced to my Android phone:

Music - My MP3 collection (mostly from Bandcamp and Google Music purchases)

Syncing to my primary laptop

The last piece of the syncing setup is my laptop. My laptop only communicates with the Mac mini, using a originally named folder called Sync which holds my photos, documents, music and other important daily files. On the Mac mini, it also has a folder called Sync, where the items from my Android phone are also synced. This effectively lets me only have to sync one folder between my laptop and Mac mini.

Conclusions

I am very happy with my file syncing setup. It is very managable, and easy to setup, as well as maintain. Although there are more feature-rich privacy-respecting options, I like the simplicity Syncthing provides for my file syncing needs. I highly recommend it if youaboutre looking for a way to sync your files without depending on a third party.

CSS Cleanup: No more Minima theme dependencies!

2021-03-10T00:50:00+00:00

Back in January, I did a CSS clean up on my website and mentioned that I was still using the default Jekyll Minima, but would have liked to remove my dependency on it.

Today for some reason found me the motivation to do so, and hence the site youaboutre seeing now no longer depends on the Minima theme in my Gemfile at all!

In its place, I am using a combination of CSS snippets from the previous setup, as well as large chunks of the John Doe CSS file to build my theme. I will likely change this in the future, as it looks about 90% the same as my previous site with the Minima base. Overall, it’s nice to not have to go over so many SCSS files to update the website, which I consider a win!

If you notice any glaring omissions on the design of the site that I missed, please let me know!

Goodbye Theme Journal...and other random thoughts

2021-03-05T05:48:00+00:00

I haven’ve blogged in a while and I decided I needed to just dump my thoughts about various things that has been occupying my time. Although I am not participating in #100DaysToOffLoad, this blog is very much in spirit of that style of writing.

Quitting my Theme Journal

After missing two weeks in a row of updating my Theme Journal, I’ve decided to abandon it entirely and also remove it from my site. My reasons why are below.

Mental Health

2020 was a really hard for me mentally, which I won’ve go into detail here. Even though 2021 has been better so far, it has still been a very hard for me to find motivation on personal projects. I thought the theme journal would motivate me to break out of this shell. Thinking about this theme journal has become more of a chore than a introspective exercise. In some cases, I feel guilty for missing it so many weeks in a row.

Reducing Decisions

This is somewhat related to mental health, I’ve recently been going through an self-evalulation on how many things I want to have to check on a daily or weekly basis (more on this below). This clearly became something I didn’t find valueable anymore.

A digital journal was a mistake

I think I would have had more success if I had gone the paper route for this theme journal. At the time of starting my Yearly Theme, I thought a digital one using markdown would be sufficient. I’ve been using a pen and paper notebook for work and find it incredibly useful to track tasks and keep my thoughts organized. Furthermore, I find myself rediscovering how much the creative and habit-forming process comes from just putting pen to paper. I may revist this in the future, but I will let myself decide that when the time comes.

Overall, I’m happy with trying this process and maybe I’ll try again in the future once things are more normal!

Digital Minimalism: Cutting Excess Accounts

I’ve recently been going through a sort of re-evaluation with online accounts through various aspects including, but not limited to:

Personal Finance
Abandoned & Unused Accounts
Instance-Hopping in the Fediverse

Some of these decisions are at odds with privacy & security, while others are definitely in favour of it. I will summarize the big changes below.

Personal Finance

Toward the end of February, I realized I had credit card, banking and investment accounts scattered across several institutions. To alleviate some of this, I was using YNAB to consolidate looking over accounts and also budgeting my expenses. As much as I loved YNAB’s zero-sum budgeting model, it was hard to justify its ~$84/year price when the service doesn’t seem to give you much more than access to their account. After closing some unused accounts and consolidating my investments, I was able to comfortably cancel my YNAB subscription. I am now using a fairly basic LibreOffice spreadsheet to manage my finances, using zero-sum budgeting. It was reduced my security risk from breached accounts and less revolving credit cards, which is also a bonus.

Abandoned & Unused Accounts

In addition to consolidating my finance accounts, I’ve been also randomly been looking for more accounts to delete that I no longer use. My old Gmail emails, as well as my password manager Bitwarden as been particularly useful for finding these old accounts. I believe I am finally at a point to delete my Microsoft account, but we will see if I end up doing it!

I [tried] changing Fediverse instances

About a week ago, I decided to switch from Fosstodon to a Math-focused instance called Mathstodon. As some of you know, I have a background in applied mathematics and missed thinking about it on a daily basis, as my day job isn’ve particularly math focused. I ended up aliasing and moving my Fosstodon account over to Mathstodon, as I didn’t want to manage another Fediverse account (I have a Hometown and a currently disabled Pixelfed account as well). I thought that I was following a good amount of Fosstodon users to keep me engaged in that instance. However, after a few short days, I noticed that local timeline was very quiet and the benefits I thought I found with the federated timeline initially disappeared quickly. I know the Fediverse theoretically allows you to follow anyone on any instance, but the practical matter of curating that list is someting I didn’t want to deal with. I ended up moving back to Fosstodon and deleting my Mathstodon account. I’m hoping I don’t consider this again and rather try to better evaluate how I view the local timeline. I am also going to keep my eye on folks on both Mathstodon and scholar.social in order to stay in the loop with my interests in math and scientific research.

Conclusions

It’s late here and I’m done rambling. Thanks for reading! Hopefully I will have something more constructive written next time.

My de-Googling journey - Part 2

2021-02-21T18:58:00+00:00

Back in December 2020, I wrote a blog post documenting my de-Googling journey. Since then, I’ve made enough significant changes to justify an update. Most of these updates are good; however I do want to point out some regressions as I’m trying to find a balance between privacy, usability and mental bandwidth to make changes in my life. This post will focus only what I’ve changed since my last post, so if you need more context, feel free to read it first!

Positive Changes

In this section, I will highlight what changes I consider to be a net positive for moving away from Google.

Google Drive: Syncthing + Backblaze B2

I have officially stopped paying for Google Drive as my sync and backup solution for personal use (more on this below). As alternative, I now sync my important files via Syncthing to a Mac Mini I have at home that acts as the central server to sync files to my phone and laptop. A subset of these files (photos, sensitive documents, etc) are now encrypted and backed up using a Backblaze B2 bucket. I personally use Duplicati to manage the encryption and scheduling these backups. I also have a second B2 bucket for backing up my home directory on my Thinkpad X390 in case my system borks randomly using duplicity with my GPG key. Although it’s not a completely FOSS solution, I don’t mind since I’m able to encrypt locally and automate the process.

I should note that I still have my Google Drive account, as I do manage some band stuff through my personal Google account. I don’t see this going away in the foreseeable future.

Google Voice: JMP.chat

I have ported my Google Voice number to JMP.chat, an XMPP-powered VOIP and SMS/MMS service. I started using the service via their free-trial and was extremely impressed on the service, as well as the customer support. I am now paying $2.99/month to continue using the service. I mostly use it for visual voicemail, voicemail forwarding and for giving my number out to strangers. For this use case, it works perfectly and I am extremely happy. To send/receive calls, I use Linphone. To manage SMS/MMS (as well as my XMPP account messages), I use Conversations.

Google Wifi: Linksys Velop

I swapped my Google mesh wifi system to a Linksys Velop Wifi-5 mesh system for my home networking needs. I was able to pick up a 3-pack used locally and have had no major issues with it. It is nice being able to access my router settings on the web browser again.

Gmail: More Accounts Moved!

I am continuing to transition old accounts from my Gmail into my Fastmail account, deleting unused ones in the process. I believe I have moved most of the important ones, but I’m sure there are others I need to sort through. In particular, any Bitwarden login/password that has my Gmail account has the login. I am taking my time with this, as it is not a fun process.

Neutral Changes

Although I have made some positive changes, there are some where I am away from Google, but haven’t found something that completely makes me happy as an alternative.

Search Engine “Hopping”

I have mostly stopped using Google search, but I have found myself hopping between the following search engines:

Bing - Owned by Microsoft, but gives you rewards that you can donate to charities
DuckDuckGo (DDG) - Mixed success with search results
Ecosia - Uses Bing
Startpage - Contextual searches (e.g. weather, conversions) are not as good as Google or DDG
Okeno - Similar to Ecosia, but not sure how they fetch results

As of now, I’m mostly using DDG and Bing, depending on the search. I’m not sure what to settle on at this point. I still use Google for work as these other search engines unfortunately just aren’t as good.

Switching from Standard Notes to Markdown Files via Syncthing

I think Standard Notes is a great application, but my mental bandwidth just didn’t want to have to login to another account whenever I setup a new system. To fix this, I moved all my notes to my Syncthing “Sync” folder using Markdown files. I can then edit the notes on my computer using vim/nvim or Mark Text, and use Markor on my Android phone. So far, this has worked well for me.

Web Browsers: Firefox everywhere!

Despite Mozilla’s questionable practices in recent years, there is no good browser alternative that meets the combination of usability and privacy, while also not being Chromium based. Thankfully, Firefox has a great add-on/extension library and many the default privacy settings can be disabled. I am now using Firefox with Sync on all my devices.

Regressions

Unfortunately, I did have a few regressions on my de-Googling journey, which I will note here!

Google Play Store

Once I was able to switch away from Google Voice and Wifi, I tried signing out of my Google account and only using Aurora Store to keep my Play store apps up to date. However, the user experience was a little frustrating with auto-updates. Additionally, I still had a couple paid applications I wasn’t able to access without being logged in. I eventually caved and switched back to using it. As long as I’m using my Galaxy S10e, I don’t see myself switching away from it for the time being.

Google Maps

In my last update, I was trying to use a combination of OSMAnd~ and Google Maps Go for my navigation needs. However, I found the UX for both of these still poor, so I ended up switching back to the regular Google Maps navigation app on my phone. Hopefully, this will improve over time as more people contribute to OSM.

Google Chrome

Recently, Firefox decided to remove installing web apps on their browsers. Although chromium-based browsers on Android have the ability to create Progressive Web Apps (PWA’s), they are not able to be integrated into my app drawer, unlike standard Google Chrome. Hence, I do use Google Chrome on my phone, but only for PWA’s. I also use Google Chrome on my laptop to stay logged into my Google account whenever I need to access it.

Conclusions

I feel like I have made a lot of progress on my de-Googling journey, removing my explicit dependence on them for my data. The elephant in the room are the other big companies: Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. I will hopefully try to address my dependence on those companies in the future, although they are not as bad as Google’s. Hopefully this provides some options for folks who are also on their own de-Googling journeys!

My Favorite GNOME 3 Extensions

2021-02-13T19:36:00+00:00

I have a tried a variety of Linux desktop environments, but I always find myself coming back to GNOME 3. GNOME 3 was a [controversial] change when it was first released, but the ability to use extensions has somewhat alleviated the situation for a lot of GNOME folks.

That said, I have become quite familiar with the workflow of GNOME shell, even to the point where I don’ve feel need to install extensions such as Dash to Dock, Dash to Panel, or the Applications Menu. GNOME’s global search is excellent and once you get your workspaces setup, it’s quite easy to switch between them. To add to this, I recently have been running GNOME 3.38 on Fedora 33 using Wayland and have been pleasantly suprised how polished the UX has been. With all that said, I still use a number of GNOME extensions that I will recommend in this blog post. Let’s go!

AppIndicator and KStatusNotiferItem Support

Link to extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-support/

Back in Gnome 3.26, Legacy AppIndicator icons were removed from the default shell. Unfortunately, some applications (only Dropbox for now) I use still support this. This simple extension just puts them back on your top bar. Nothing else to say here!

cpufreq

Link to extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1082/cpufreq/

A simple extension that shows your current CPU frequency. It also do things such as change CPU power profiles (e.g. balanced, performance, power saver), disable/enable frequency boost, set minimum/maximum CPU frequency and number of activate CPU cores. Requires root to work.

Dark Mode Switcher

Link to extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2314/dark-mode-switcher/

A simple extension that allows you to quickly toggle between the light and dark versions of GNOME’s default themes, Adwaita. Depending on the time of day and lighting conditions, I like the ability to easily switch between light and dark modes. Unfortunately, this extension doesn’t work with other themes, but thankfully I am a big fan of Adwaita.

Extended Gestures (requires Wayland)

Link to extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1253/extended-gestures/

By default, GNOME 3.38 gives you a 4-finger swipe up/down to switch between workspaces, at least on Wayland. This extension allows you customize the 3-finger gesture options. Currently, I have my 3-finger swipe left/right to be back/forward (like on Firefox), and 3-finger swipe up/down to be my “Activities Overview.”

Freon

Link to extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/841/freon/

Provides a app indicator for viewing various hardware temperatures. It shows options for NVIDIA/AMD gpu options, but I can’ve currently test that unfortunately.

GSConnect

Link to extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/

An implementation of KDE Connect for the GNOME shell, a program that allows you to access features on your Android phone. Provides an app indicator natively within the shell. My favorite features include clipboard sharing, media control and notifications from my phone such as AirMessage. My only issue is that sometimes my notification replies on AirMessage don’ve send, but overall I find it be a very useful extension.

OpenWeather

Link to extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/750/openweather/

Provides a weather app indicator on the top bar of GNOME shell. Uses OpenWeather map since DarkSky is no longer available. I just like the ability to quickly glance and gauge the current weather.

Sound Input & Output Device Chooser

Link to extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/906/sound-output-device-chooser/

Normally, to change your output/input sound device, it requires either opening the activies overview and typing “Sound” and selecting the sound settings, or uing the top-right dropdown and selecting “Settings” to get to the sound settings. This extension just lets you switch detected sound devices directly from the top-right bar menu.

Conclusion

Although I don’ve use too many extensions, these are my favorite by far. I will be curious on what will happen to the GNOME 3 extension ecosystem once GNOME 40 releases, which I am very excited to try in Fedora 34! If you have any other useful suggestions for extensions, let me know by contacting me!

Ditching GoatCounter: Do I really need analytics?

2021-02-12T15:53:00+00:00

Disclaimer: I have no relationship with GoatCounter other than using their service and briefly contributing to the developer on GitHub sponsors; opinions are my own!

This morning, I decided to remove the Privacy-respecting analytics service GoatCounter from my website. There are a few reasons for this: (1) website performance and (2) for my mental health in terms of intentionality. I should note that I absolutely have no issue with GoatCounter in principle and my reasons are largely personal.

Website Performance

Javascript (JS)

Initially, I had been using the javascript version of GoatCounter. The benefit to do this was very detailed analytics, which includes:

Pages that were visited
URL Referrer
Browser
Operating System
Screen Size
Country (and State/Providence) of Origin

This was awesome! Since, it allowed me to see what pages were being viewed, allowing me to interpret what people were interested in. However, as someone who cares about website accessiblity and keeping my website as lean as possible, I found that GoatCounter’s ~2.5KB (compressed) size was a little too high for my tastes.

No-JS Option

I decided to experiement with GoatCounter’s No-JS option of website analytics, but you lose a lot of data. This method works by adding a small 1x1 pixel on your website that can see when people load your website. However, you lose my favorite feature of the analytics: seeing what pages people visit.

In addition to this, unfortunately, load times for my website were fairly poor due to GoatCounter. even with the no-JS analytics option, I was seeing ~600 ms of latency to load my front page since it was waiting on Goatcounter. You can see the difference with GTMetrix below:

Before (top) and after (bottom) removing the no-JS GoatCounter

Analytics became another point of anxiety

Recently, Matt D’Avella, a “minimalism” YouTuber, made a video on re-evaulating his relationship with “views”/analytics on YouTube Studio, the analytics dashboard for content creators on YouTube. In summary, Matt suggests that looking at these numbers can be a burden on your mental health; with analytics for me, I found this to become true. I found myself checking GoatCounter way too often, even knowing that nothing has changed. This became even more apparent when I switched to the no-JS option, where really the only data point was a new pageview. After seeing this video, I realized I was having a similar relationship with my analytics on GoatCounter. Hence, I decided to remove analytics entirely.

Remembering why I decided to blog

I gained motivation to start blogging due to the wonderful community over at Fosstodon. However, it is easy to lose sight on the original intent of blogging for me, and that is the enjoyment of the writing process. Sure, it’s nice to receive feedback and gratitude for my writing, but I also don’t want to be dependent on it. Analytics, at least at this time in my life, aren’t the best way for me to motivate me to continue blogging. Especially since blogging is essentially just an enjoyable hobby and a carthatic process for me.

Will I bring back analytics?

Maybe? I do think there is a place for analytics on the web, and in particular ones that respect people’s privacy. Google Analytics is still essentially everywhere, so I really hope that alternatives like Plausible and GoatCounter gain more momentum on the web. In particular, I think these analytic services seem perfect for personal blogs like this one!

Maybe when I’m in a better place mentally, in terms of my relationship with technology, maybe I’ll bring one of the analytics services back to my website. For now, I’ll just focus on writing!

Re-evaluating my Theme Journal

2021-02-11T23:21:00+00:00

On January 1, I decided to try a Yearly Theme over traditional New Yearsabout resolutions, with a Theme Journal to track daily progress. After using this system for ~5 weeks, I decided to give an update on my feelings on the Yearly Theme and also how I’m going to change my approach to it.

I still love the idea of a Yearly Theme

I chose my theme as my “Year of Intention,” and for the most part, that resonating theme has allowed me to put that theme in the back of my mind whenever I have been doing anything. Whenever I have catching myself into poor habits, I am able to eventually recoup by reminding my self how I want to live this year more intentionally.

Theme Journal thoughts

I was really good about keeping my Theme Journal up to date for the first few weeks, but it became harder over time. Here are my thoughts on it now and what I’m going to change.

The weekly check-in’s are (mostly) great

I really appreciate checking in with myself every week to determine what I’m doing good, bad and also excelling at by denoting on what I’m proud of that week. Since one of my intentions is with health and weight loss, having a record of my weight every week (and only weighing myself) every week keeps me from over-worrying up plateau’s in the process of typical daily weigh-ins.

However, I decided to remove “screen time” as a metric from my weekly Theme Journal updates. I find that it can be misleading for when I’m on my phone. Furthermore, I also re-evaluated my relationship with Mastodon as not necessarily a bad thing when I spend too much time on it.

The daily themes were not so great

In my Theme Journal, I had a “Daily Themes” section that categorized the following themes on a scale from 1-10:

Partner: Was I good to my partner today?
Friendship: Was I good to my friends today?
Self: Was I good to myself today?
Diet: Did I eat well today?
Finance: Was I good with my finances?
Overall: How would I rate my day overall?

However, micromanaging this and scoring this on a daily basis felt very tedious and didn’ve really feel like it brought much value to my theme. I’ve decided to remove this entirely from my Theme Journal.

Moving Forward

I will continue tracking my Theme Journal, now only on a weekly basis, with only tracking my weight for data. Otherwise, I think the system is a great way to organize an over-arching theme. I will likely revisit my Theme Journal at the end of March, when the first 4th of the year is over.

Switching from a gaming desktop to a Thinkpad X390 for my primary computer

2021-02-06T20:33:00+00:00

An updated overview of my full desk setup (Large Photo). Wallpaper by Mohammad Alizade

This past week has resulted in a lot of computing changes for me, enough to justify a blog post and my thought process of why I made the change. In summary:

I sold my gaming desktop pc (i5-8400, 16 GB RAM, RX 580) to a local buyer on Craigslist.
I bought a used Thinkpad X390 + Thunderbolt 3 Dock from a local seller on Offerup.

Why I sold my desktop in favor for a laptop

I bought my gaming desktop back in September 2020, after my primary desktop was stolen right when I moved back to Denver, Colorado. Even with renter’s insurance payout, I wasn’t able to buy the same equivalent specced computer without having to pay for other things. Hence, I ended up buying used and finding a decent deal on the desktop I was using for the past few months. It had a Intel i5-8400, 16 GB RAM and Radeon RX 580. In comparison, my stolen computer had an AMD Ryzen 3700X, 16 GB RAM, and a Radeon 5700, a much more capable video card that I played games paired with a 1440p 144hz monitor (also stolen). Paired with 1200p monitor, I thought the RX 580 card would be perfect pairing for my monitor resolution.

Owning a gaming desktop, but not gaming

After getting the computer setup, initially running PopOS 20.04 at the time, I setup everything for Steam and found Proton worked fairly well for most games I wanted to play. Of course, it wasn’ve perfect. Some noteable issues:

Configuration required to get Borderlands 2 to properly run
Graphical Glitches with Wolfeinstein 2: The New Colossus
Shadow of the Tomb Raider save file syncing doesn’ve work between Linux and Windows; Proton performance significantly worse than native Linux port

Despite all this and having a playable gaming machine, I just never really ended up really playing.

For context, I used to be quite an avid gamer. I have thousands of hours logged in Dota 2, my primary game of choice due to its social nature as well as a plethora of other Steam titles. However, over the past couple years, every time I’ve tried to get back into gaming by buying a video card or building a gaming PC, the video card ends up collecting dust, leading to the computer becoming a glorified internet browser. The same held true with this lastest used gaming computer. I had given myself about 5 months, including a holiday break, to play games; it never happened! Hence, it was time to re-evaluate my computing needs.

Switching to a Laptop

After some thought, I decided I wanted a laptop again due to its portability once it is safe enough again to travel. I’ve also never been one to like managing more computing devices than I need. I had also bought a used 2018 Mac Mini the prior week and found it fit my needs for a desktop better than the gaming PC. In particular, using the Mac Mini for music via Garage Band, and running a AirMessage + Syncthing server.

Just days after finding a buyer of my desktop, I stumbled upon a Thinkpad X390 on OfferUp. I won’ve go into specifics about price, but the machine was well specced with an i7-8665U, 16 GB RAM, and a 512 GB SSD. In addition, the seller was also pairing it with a Lenovo Thunderbolt 3 dock, which ended up also being compatible with my work Macbook Pro. Win win! I ended up picking up the machine Friday night and have been very happy so far! I’ve owned thinkpads in the past and have always loved their keyboards and excellent build quality. This X390 is no different in that regard.

I initially wanted to try MX Linux but had touchpad responsiveness issues as well as issues with secure boot. Ultimately, I decided to try Fedora 33 due to missing the Gnome desktop enivronment, as well as the upcoming option of using Gnome 40 in Fedora 34. Overall, I’ve been pleased so far!

Digital Privacy, Mental Fatigue and Burnout

2021-02-03T00:39:00+00:00

Over the past year, I have made many positive strides in improving my digital privacy. This includes, but is not limited to:

Deleting my “mainstream” social media accounts:
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Instagram
- LinkedIn
Joining the Fediverse through Fosstodon, providing a community who shares this common interest in digital privacy and learning about new ways to improve it
Switching away from Google products and services
Quitting Spotify in favor of buying music directly
Using Signal as my primary means of instant messaging

However, the more I have gone down the digital privacy rabbit hole, the more powerless I feel sometimes on how much more work to be done, how much work that takes, and what conveniences you lose. Frankly, as the title of this post suggests, I’ve been feeling some decision fatigue and burnout on the entire matter.

A few recent examples of this fatigue/burnout include:

Reinstalling apps on my phone from the Google Play Store, such as Google Maps, since alternatives like OSM just aren’ve good enough for daily use.
Creating a new Reddit account so I can engage in communities like /r/hardwareswap.
Switching to GitHub for hosting this website, due to its convenient website deployment via Netlify.
Setting up AirMessage to communicate with my friends who are on iPhones, since I don’ve have the energy to try to convince them to use an alternative like Signal or XMPP. I even bought a used Mac Mini to setup the server so I could also use iMessage on the desktop when needed.

At this point, I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot with my digital privacy, but I tend to let others’ opinions from people I respect affect my ability to feel validated and therefore feel like I’m not “doing enough.” Furthermore, pretty much no one in my every day life thinks of this as a ethical issue, which I feel that the lack of in-person support makes it more difficult.

Although there is a privacy-minded community through the Fediverse and most people are understanding and nuanced, there can be “privacy gatekeepers” that often can be very off-putting when youaboutre using “X” instead of “Y”.

That all being said, I acknowledge the technical knowledge & interest, as well as economic privilege I have in order to even make decisions that can improve my privacy, whether by using a less convenient alternative or by being able to afford paid services. I just wish this all was all so much easier!

Have you ever felt this way when it comes to digital privacy? How did you overcome it? Were you willing to make compromises for your mental health? Let me know by contacting me!

Web Theme Redesign: Going Monochrome

2021-02-01T19:01:00+00:00

Edit (Feb 14 2020): I decided to make a small update to the website by incorporating colors using Material Design guidelines. If you have issues seeing anything on the site, please let me know by contacting me.

As much as I love Nord Theme, I was growing tired of the color scheme on my web site. I decided to change things up and also simplify the the number of color variables I had in my SCSS files. After reading about readability and accessibility when choosing colors in this article, I decided to constrain myself to a completely monochromatic, gray color scheme.

I really like how it looks so far, but I might fine tune the shades of gray I’m using for the layout. I also asked my friend Lauren Beecher to update my avatar to use my natural skin tone and hair color, which I’ll likely re-add to the site once that’s ready.

Let me know what you think by contacting me.

My 30+ Days using Gentoo Linux: A Newbie's Perspective

2021-01-28T20:51:00+00:00

I’ve been using Linux on/off since about 2009. However, primarily I’ve been a Ubuntu/Debian user, only occassionally trying other distributions such as Fedora. During the 2020 Christmas break, I decided to install Gentoo on my personal desktop as a learning experience. When I was originally planning to write this blog post, I had no plans of moving away from Gentoo Linux as my daily driver. Unfortunately, I was trying to switch from my kernel build from genkernel to a distribution kernel and I ended up breaking my install, unable to get my LUKS partition to decrypt. I really didn’t want to spend time fixing it, so I decided to install Elementary OS 5.1 Hera, as I had it on a flash drive lying around.

Regardless, I would like to talk about my experience, both the positives and negatives. I will preemptively say there is more positives than negatives. Let’s begin!

Installing Gentoo

In this section, I will give an overview of my process when I decided to install Gentoo. Of course, before doing any of this, I made sure to backup my important files both locally and in the cloud. From my perspective, this is the hardest part of the Gentoo experience.

Installing a VM using QEMU+KVM

Before I decided to install Gentoo on baremetal, I setup an installation using QEMU+KVM on my at the time Ubuntu 20.04 install. I followed the AMD64 Guide as closely I could for the installation. Ultimately, I was able to setup the virtual machine with XFCE.

Baremetal Installation

After completing the QEMU+KVM install, I decided I was ready to install it on my actual hardware. Thankfully, I had a spare SSD on hand, so I was able to install Gentoo while keeping my Ubuntu 20.04 install setup in case anything went wrong.

Setting up LUKS+LVM

For my second run through of the installation, I decided I wanted disk encryption for the drive. Thankfully, Gentoo has good documentation on how to set up LUKS encryption with LVM. However, through my experience on running through the documentation, I did find myself having to cross reference the AMD64 Manual as well. Nevertheless, I was able to setup LUKS and boot using GRUB by pointing to the appropriate UUID in my /etc/fstab file.

Deciding on Kernel setup

Most people think you have to customize and setup your own kernel on Gentoo. Of course, in principle this is a good learning experience, but for my first install, I decided to go with the genkernel option. Gentoo also provides distribution kernels (with a binary option) now as well if you really don’ve want to deal with updating your kernel yourself and apparently will also update with Gentoo’s package manager Portage. In retrospect, I wish I went with the distribution kernel during my first setup.

Installing GNOME

For my desktop environment, I initially decided to try GNOME using OpenRC. This took hours, despite having 6 threads on my i5-8400. After all said and done, I was able to enter my desktop environment! The experience with Gnome was largely the same for me without systemd, except I didn’ve experience those random shutdown hangtimes you can sometimes experience with a hanging systemd process.

Learning Gentoo

Portage

The best part about Gentoo is through its package manager Portage. Portage is a source-based package manager where packages are installed through the command emerge You can think of emerge as functionally similar to apt or dnf, but the packages and its dependencies in most cases are built from source. Because most packages are built from source, this allows you to customize compiler flags and dependencies on a package-by-package basis; Portage makes managing how you want to setup dependencies and compiler flags incredibly user-friendly. I’m not going to go into detail about Portage, but I will highlight the parts I used and enjoyed the most about it.

Package USE Flags

One of the most powerful features of Portage was USE flags. USE flags allow you to enable/disable dependencies on all the packages available through Portage. For example, as seen in the XFCE guide, you can build a package without any QT 5 dependencies by passing the parameter to emerge:

$ emerge --ask package-name -qt5

You can even apply this globally by adding the following to the /etc/portage/make.conf file:

.
.
.
USE="-qt5"
.
.
.

Package Keywords

Gentoo is considered to be a rolling release distro, but does not keep bleeding edge packages in the main repository like Arch Linux, for example. By default, it will use the latest LTS kernel and will keep packages held back until they have been sufficiently tested. However, if youaboutd like to use a package version that is no in the main/stable repositories, these are accessible through the use of ARCH keywords. For example, if you’re using a 64-bit x86 system, ARCH=amd64 and accessing unstable packages can be obtained by setting ~amd64 for the desired package under /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords. For example, if I wanted to install Dino, I would create the file /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/dino-im with:

net-im/dino-im ~amd64

If you know what you are doing (or stupid, like me). You can also set this keyword globally in your /etc/portage/make.conf file:

.
.
.
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64"
.
.

Portage will try to keep you from breaking things

When you emerge packages, Portage will check to see what dependencies you need for a package, as well if there is any conficts due to masked packages/dependencies. Similarly, if you want to remove a package, Portage will also not depenencies that other installed packages may need.

However, if you decide to use unstable packages via ~amd64 keyword, things will probably break. I did this shortly after setting up GNOME, and ended up having to re-emerge a lot of packages after breaking my GNOME desktop environment. At the time of this happening, I thought there was just something wrong with GNOME, so I switched to XFCE.

Gentoo Overlays

If youaboutre familiar with Ubuntu PPA’s, package overlays are analogous on a Gentoo system. Overlays are often unofficial, user maintained set of ebuilds that are publically available to other users, typically on GitHub. There are a variety tools that make accessing these overlays easy, such as layman. With these overlays, I was able to access things such as the megasync client, which is normally only available in deb or rpm packages.

Conclusions

Overall, I really enjoyed my time with Gentoo. It was a good learning experience to know how to setup a Linux system only using a tty for setting up drive partitions (with LUKS), kernel install, bootloader configuration, etc.

What I really enjoyed the most about Gentoo is how powerful Portage is as a package manager. It really gives you more control than any other package manager I’ve ever used. This alone is a reason to use Gentoo.

I also really enjoyed Gentoo’s official documentation. For example, compared to other distros I’ve heavily used like Ubuntu, I find Ubuntu’s official documentation extremely lacking, and often find solutions for problems either through StackExchange, StackOverflow and/or the Ubuntu forums.

What I disliked the most about Gentoo was compile times for certain packages. For example, I decided to use an overlay for ungoogled-chromium that required building from source, which would take hours to recompile and update. Of course, binaries for packages like LibreOffice or web browsers are usually available to avoid this.

Another thing I didn’ve enjoy was sometimes package availability. Sure, there was often an overlay that would provide the package, but there was often some trial and error getting certain packages to emerge properly given dependencies and USE flags currently used on my system.

Although Gentoo’s official documentation was very good, when I ran into very specific problems, sometimes determining solutions was a bit difficult through web searches. I’m fairly stubborn when I have issues and I don’t usually like asking for help (which often could have fixed my problems more quickly, I’d imagine). On the flip side, since Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions are very popular, you can typically find solutions for problems fairly quickly.

Would I use Gentoo in the future?

If I didn’ve bork my installation earlier this week, I’d probably be typing this post on my Gentoo installation. However, fixing things issues like this are just not in my mental energy to do so nowadays, especially because my day job I do stuff like this as a daily occurence. Maybe when I have a bigger gap of free time, or if I get a new Linux-friendly machine, I would consider installing Gentoo again.

I’ve heard somewhere on the internet that “Gentoo is a hobby”, and I think for me, that rings partially true. I took the opportunity to install and learn the basics of Gentoo during a holiday break. If I had tried using Gentoo during my graduate school days, I would hate having to take away research time to fix my OS (which would likely not happen if you stay on the stable repositories) or having to wait for important updates to compile. Regardless, I think if you have some free time to get through the initial installation and are able to carefully read documentation, you will really enjoy a Gentoo system. Also, I’ve come to learn more and more that some folks do use Gentoo in a production environment, so I wouldn’t be opposed to recommending it in some situations.

That’s all I have to say for Gentoo for now. As mentioned above, I am currently running Elementary OS 5.1 on my desktop and have really enjoyed the Pantheon desktop environment from a UI/UX perspective, so I will likely stay here for now. Thanks for reading about my experience with Gentoo!

For more insight on Gentoo, I highly recommend you read Hund’s blog post on why they like Gentoo.

Moving Site to Netlify

2021-01-23T12:19:00+00:00

I decided to rehost this website to Netlify. Originally, this website was hosted by my email provider, Fastmail. Although it worked for the most part, deploying updates to the site was a little cumbersome. In summary, my workflow was:

Make changes to website.
Build the site using bundle exec jekyll build
Commit changes via git to my repository.
Open my FTP client (Filezilla) and upload the changed files to Fastmail.
If things looked good, git push changes to my repository on Codeberg.

Although steps (4-5) didn’ve take that long, it became quite tedious since I like to tinker the design and content of this site a lot. In the past, I had used Netlify for static site hosting and remember how easy it was to deploy a static site. I also learned that Netlify supports Jekyll. Now my website workflow looks like:

Make changes to website.
Commit the changes and push to GitHub.
Done!

Unfortunately, the site’s repos are now on GitHub, since there is currently no Gitea support for Netlify. Eventually I’d like to look into possibly self-hosting Gitea and mirroring to GitHub so I can continue using Netlify for hosting.

I’ve repointed the DNS records to Netlify, so hopefully the links and the HTTPS certificates should hopefully propagate soon!

Thoughts from my nearly 5-day break from Mastodon

2021-01-22T17:17:00+00:00

About 5 days ago, I decided to try to take a week off from Mastodon. It’s been nearly 5 days and I’ve decided I’m going to unblock it from my NextDNS account. There are a couple things I noticed in this short period of time.

I missed the community

Most of my immediate friends and family are not nearly as interested in the most common topics on the Fosstodon, the Mastodon instance I have joined. In particular, I miss nerding out on Linux/FOSS software and privacy concerns. Not being able to gain new insights and ideas about how to approach both of these topics I’m deeply interested in has felt a little void in my life this week, especially during a time where it’s difficult to see friends and family. The microblogging timeline, combined with the relatively small community, just allows for so many ideas to be shared and discussed that is hard to emulate in other places. I’m looking forward to rejoining!

My screen habits didn’ve really change

I thought removing access to Mastodon on my computer and phone would decrease my overall usage on both. It turns out it didn’ve. I ended up finding other ways to waste time on both of these devices. Whether it be browsing reddit, researching items I wanted to buy, or setting up iMessage on my Android phone using Air Message (which was actually worth it!), I still found myself wasting a lot of time in front of screens. It seems like a larger problem with my relationship with screens rather than scapegoating it on a particular application.

Conclusions

Taking a break from Mastodon was a good idea in principle, but it made me realize that I need to reevalulate my entire relationship with technology as a whole. I love technology so much, but it’s often at odds with how I spend my time. I will likely revisit this topic again, but maybe introduce some harder constraints on what I can/can’t do on my devices.

Trying to take a week off from Mastodon

2021-01-17T23:25:00+00:00

I started noticing that I have been creating the same compulsive habits with Fosstodon, the only Mastodon instance that I have been actively involved with. Even though I enjoy the community, as it gives me a place to express my nerdy side that I don’ve experience with my real life friends, I find myself constantly opening the website or mobile apps, looking for some sort of response or gratification. These were the same problems I had with traditional social media such as Instagram, Facebook or Twitter. This sort of behaviour is at odds with my Yearly Theme of Intention.

NextDNS's splash screen for a blocked site since adding Fosstodon.

I’ve decided to uninstall all Mastodon apps from my phone and also block fosstodon.org from my NextDNS account, my DNS provider setup on my router and my phone’s private DNS, thereby preventing me accessing the website. I will try to do this for one week and see if my habits change. I will still be reachable if you’d like to contact me and likely will be blogging still if topics come to mind.

Until next time!

What's on my phone? - January 2020

2021-01-15T18:44:00+00:00

I’ve seen a lot YouTube videos showing off their phone setups, so I figured why not write a blog post on what my phone setup looks like currently as a means to “snapshot” my technological life. I plan to do one for my desktop as well soon! As with other facets of my life, I try to be digitally minimal as possible, where each app on my phone stays on it due to its utility. If I find myself not using something for a while, or it starts becoming a major distraction, I will uninstall it. A clear example of this is Tusky, a Mastodon client. I uninstalled the app due to it becoming a major distraction for me. I still access Fosstodon on my web browser to make it a little more inconvenient for me to browse unintentionally.

The Phone

Back of my Galaxy S10e with the DBrand "Swarm" Skin (Large Photo)

My current daily driver is a US Unlocked Samsung Galaxy S10e (G970U1) running Android 10 with One UI 2.5. Unfortunately the US Snapdragon variants of Samsung phones have their bootloaders locked, so currently there is no way to flash roms on these phones, leading to planned obsolesence. I bought this back in March 2020 and have been extremely happy with the hardware, since it includes basic things like SD card expansion, a headphone jack, great camera with unofficial GCam support, and guaranteed updates to Android 11 & 12. Hopefully with a battery swap, I should be able to keep this phone for a few years, assuming I can resist my brain being preconditioned to perceived obsolesence.

The Apps

For my apps, I try my best to use as few Google apps as possible, as I’ve been trying to de-Google my life whenever I feasibly can. Although I do install some apps from the Play Store, I try to use apps from the F-Droid, a free & open source (FOSS) alternative app store, whenever possible. Some alternatives lack features or just aren’t very usable sometimes, unfortunately. If you see a category that isn’t FOSS app and you know a good alternative, please let me know by contacting me!

My Home Screen

My current home screen setup (Large Photo). Wallpaper by Damiano Baschiera

Below is a table summary of the apps I currently use on my home screen!

Type	App	Source
Launcher	Lawnchair	Google Play
Dialer	Google Phone	Google Play
Email	Fastmail	Google Play
Web Browsers	Privacy Browser (Web surfing)	F-Droid
	Firefox Nightly (Accounts)	Google Play
Maps	OsmAnd~ (Main)	F-Droid
	Google Maps Go (Backup)	Google Play
Messaging	Signal (Main)	Google Play
	Conversations (XMPP & SMS/MMS via JMP.chat)	F-Droid
	Google Messages (RCS & SMS/MMS)	Google Play
Notes	Standard Notes	F-Droid
Music	Metro Music Player	F-Droid
Podcasts	AntennaPod	F-Droid
Camera	Google Camera	APK
Money	Ally (Banking)	Google Play
	Chase (Credit Card)	Google Play
	YNAB (Budgeting)	Google Play
	Venmo (Send/Receive Money)	Google Play
	Splitwise (Bill Splitting)	Google Play
One-time Passwords (OTP)	Aegis Authenticator	F-Droid
Weather	Geometric Weather	F-Droid

Even though I think my home screen is fairly organized and minimal, a lot of these apps (like banking) are specific to me only and not things I would recommend to everyone. Many of the Google apps I use, there are just not good FOSS alternatives, at least to me. For example, I used to use Simple Dialer as my dialing app, but I regularly receive spam calls and Google phone is much better at managing/warning me about those types of calls. Furthermore, the UX on the Google phone app is much better than the Simple dialer, in my opinion. For cameras, there is also Open Camera, but the picture quality is poor and requires much more adjustments compared to the Google Camera app, especially in low light. I think if we want folks to switch to more FOSS apps, we need them to be as usable as the non-FOSS ones, or else widespread adoption will not happen. Anyways, of the apps on my homescreen, here are the ones I strongly recommend:

Antenna Pod - I used to be a heavy PocketCasts user until the 2.0 upgrade of AntennaPod came out, and the app received a major UI overhaul. The app is great, and provides gpodder support and local backups which I sync to my desktop using Syncthing. Just a great FOSS podcasting app!
Conversations - A great XMPP client that works extremely well with JMP.chat, an XMPP-powered VOIP service. If you don’ve know what XMPP (formerly known as Jabber) is, it is a chatting protocol that has been around for years, and even powers many chat services that people use everyday! This included Facebook Messenger and Google Chat before both services discontinued that federation (Source: Zoom). I would love to get more people using XMPP!
Privacy Browser - An Android WebView powder web browser with privacy in mind by default. Lots of great features, including disabled JavaScript by default, built-in adblocking, per domain settings to toggle JavaScript, Cookies, etc and more! The developer is also on Fosstodon!
Signal/Molly - A centralized end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging app for the masses. Sure it has its problems, but its ease-of-use and barrier to entry are extremely user-friendly. I use this to talk to family and close friends mainly since it requires a phone number. If you don’ve want to use the Google Play version, the APK is available on their website, which is usually is not as up-to-date as the Google Play one, in my experience. There is also a hardened, completely FOSS fork of Signal (Signal is bundled with Google dependencies) called Molly but I have no direct experience with it and would like to test it in the future.
Standard Notes - A nice, simple E2EE note-taking app. It supports dark mode, and the premium version ads lots of cool extensions. Personally, the free version is enough for what I use it for since i just need to take plaintext notes on the go. There is also an option to self-host.
Aegis Authenticator - A one-time password (OTP) alternative to Google Authenticator with a lot more features. My favorite feature has to be the ability to create encrypted local backups (which I can sync to my desktop using Syncthing). The UI is very nice too!

There also a number of apps in my app drawer that I regularly use, but don’ve want this blog post to get longer than it already is. I will mention some noteworthy ones below:

Markor - A simple Markdown/todo list editor. I mostly use this if I need to update my Theme Journal on the go.
NetGuard - An internet firewall to block network access to apps installed on your phone on a per app level using Android’s VPN service. The F-Droid version also allows you to add a hosts file for additional system-wide ad/tracker blocking. This, combined with my NextDNS private DNS over TLS setup gives me fairly good tracking protection regardless of my internet connection.
Syncthing - I have already mentioned it a few times above, but I love Syncthing. It is not a cloud service, but a decentralized syncing service that allows you to sync files between devices without the use of cloud storage. I mainly use it to sync photos, documents and android configuration files to my desktop so I can properly back them up. I plan on making a short tutorial on how I do this in the future!

Conclusions

This has been a non-exhaustive look at my phone setup, which is constantly changing. I plan I trying to do these every few months to see how much they change at all. If you have any other recommendations, feel free to reach out!

Cleaning up the CSS on my Jekyll-powered site

2021-01-13T08:41:00+00:00

Since I couldn’ve sleep and was feeling inspired both by Kev Quirk’s Simple.css Jekyll guide and Thumb’s Classless Jekyll site, I decided to clean up with the SCSS files that can be overridden/modified for Jekyll’s default theme Minima. In particular, I removed every class I could find in the _sass/minima/_base.scss and _sass/minima/_layout.scss files. This required also explicitly removing class declarations throughout my HTML files in _layouts/, which unfortunately there are still class declarations throughout parts of the minima theme base I haven’t overridden and removed yet.

Regardless, I decided to run a GTMetrix test before pushing the new site, which showed my site at 19.9 KB uncompressed. At the time of this writing, I was able to bring it down to 15.4 KB uncompressed; that’s a ~29.2% decrease!

Overall, I don’ve think the aesthetics of the site has changed much at all, as I was able to keep my Nord template and refining my SCSS files. My goal next is likely to get rid of my dependency from the Minima theme during the static site generation, but I’ll save that for another time.

I should really go to sleep now…

Why I stopped using Spotify

2021-01-11T04:49:00+00:00

Spotify is amazing. For a small monthly fee, you can have access to almost all the music ever created by humanity. However, from a practical, ethical and for my case, minimalistic perspective, I’ve decided that I can’t use Spotify anymore. My goal here is not to argue or convince others to do the same, but rather to give my perspective and see if others feel the same. This blog article isn’t meant to be exhaustive for any of the reasons I have, but should be a good starting point for folks to research on their own. I should also remind folks that these are my opinions, and I may be wrong about certain things!

Practical Reasons

Some music is missing!

I mentioned above that not all music is available on Spotify. Sure if you listen to mostly popular music, youaboutre usually fine. But I typically like to listen a lot Punk, Hardcore, Emo and other indie/DIY music, and in some cases arists, especially if they broke up before Spotify, simply aren’t available. For example, The Motorcycle Industry is a band I enjoy a lot but they are still not on Spotify at this date (I ended up finding their records on Bandcamp; more on that later). It’s defintely gotten a lot better over the years, but there is still the occassional missing artist.

The Paradox of Choice

Like I mentioned above, almost all music is available on Spotify. When you have access the world’s music in your pocket, choosing music to listen to can be overwhelming. Having the ability to choose everything implies having no choice; this is often referred as the The Paradox of Choice. As someone trying to live more intently and therefore minimally, it’s hard to make intentional music choices when you can literally choose anything.

[Algorithmic] Curated Playlists aren’ve for me

Spotify provides playlists in two main ways: (1) generated “discovery” playlists based on your past listens, and (2) playlists shared by other Spotify users. In both cases, I’m not usually one to listen to a playlist of different artists. Even back in the CD burning “mix tape” days, I would listen to band’s full length albums from start to finish. This also held true for Spofiy. One of their most well renowned features I really didn’t care for at all.

Opportunity Cost

Depending if youaboutre a student, individual or running a family plan, Spotify will cost you between $5-$15/month. As a person who micromanages every dollar I spend, I see this as an opportunity cost to spend it elsewhere. In particular, that $5-$15 could be used towards actually buying music from an artist who needs it; more on that below!

Ethical Reasons

Bad for Artists

Although Spotify and other streaming services have made it possible for people like me to get unlimited music at very little cost, it has been at the cost of the artists who are on these streaming platforms, especially smaller artists. According to a Visual Capitalist article from 2019, it can take as many as 229 streams on Spotify to earn $1 on the platform; that is approximately $0.00437 cents per song play! The article goes on to say that it would take 336,842 streams for an artist to earn a minimum wage of $1472 per month. Many of the other major streaming services, like Apple or YouTube Music are just as bad when it comes to paying out for streams.

To add insult to injury, the pay-per-stream model incentivizes gaining the system by artists changing the way they write & produce music, and in some cases commiting fraud to take advantage of the pay-per stream model. Conversely, to make matters worse, Spotify recently let artists even take a cut in their royalties in order to gain more exposure on the platform. From a consumer standpoint, it’s only $5-$15/mo for me that could be used to directly support an artist I enjoy.

Privacy Concerns

First, Spotify’s website and apps are loaded with trackers! This is true for both with their iOS and Android apps, with the latter cuplrits being Facebook and Google analytics within the app. Thankfully, the third party trackers should be able to be mitigated with host-based adblockers, but this is not possible with ads and data collect provided by the Spotify service itself.

Many people believe that Spotify is just a music streaming service company, but theyaboutre better interpreted as a data-driven tech company who uses your listening habits to feed into machine learning algorithms, which provide you discovery and recommendations for new artists for you to listen to but also provides that data to advertisers. For example, it uses that data to target ads if you decide to use their app for their podcasting platform and also may suggest you mood-driven music based on your listening habits to keep you listening, which I personally find creepy and scary, especially since music listening to me is very personal. Others agree too:

“I certainly don’t think that they are working with shadowy consulting firms to serve you ads promoting a culture war while you’re listening to music that suggests you might be in a casually racist mood. Nevertheless, I find it depressing that our personal, private moments with music are increasingly being turned into data points and sold to advertisers. “ – Arwa Mahdawi, The Guardian

Alternatives

There a variety alternative options for music listening, so I will briefly discuss some of them here. I’m not going to discuss other streaming services such as Deezer or Tidal for the sake of brevity. If you feel like there’s a good reason to consider them or another service, please contact me and let me know why!

YouTube Music

In terms of privacy, this might be a downgrade compared to Spotify. Google already knows enough about me from years of using their services and I don’ve think I need another service to do so, especially since I am trying to stop using their services. Previously, I was a fan of their Google Play Music app and loved their uploaded music library feature that let you stream your own songs on the cloud, but that service has joined the Google graveyard. Practically speaking, it’s hard to trust Google to keep a service running you like anyways!

Apple Music

Apple Music is actually something I considered. Apple advertises them as a pro-privacy company where you pay to not be the product, and their privacy policy on Apple Music seems to be a bit better, especially compared to Spotify. However, trading in one streaming service with almost all music for another defeats the purpose of my points above about Paradox of Choice and the opportunity cost. I would consider using their service sparingly if I knew I’d be traveling for a period of time (i.e. paying for 1 month). So what do I do instead?

How I (mostly) listen to music

MP3’s!

Yes you read that right! In order to be more intentional with my music, I decided I was going to listen to music on my phone that I own the MP3’s. This means I have a constraint from device storage and financially to prevent a bloated amount of music. Regardless, it’s still less than almost all music! My primary source of MP3’s are currently either bought or downloaded for free (when the artist provides it) from Bandcamp. I also have some MP3’s purchased from Google Music before they shutdown, and Amazon (if they’re not on Bandcamp, but looking for an alternative). From those MP3’s, I listen to my library with Rhythmbox on my desktop, and Metro on my Android phone.

Bandcamp

Usually my starting point now to listen to music is through Bandcamp. It is a wonderful service that allows artists to sell their music in various DRM-free formats (MP3, WAV, FLAC to name a few) where most (currently 85% for digital and 90% for merch) of the revenue goes to the artist. If I like an album, I will usually save it to my wishlist. If I find myself returning to the album over and over again, I usually will buy it. However, with Bandcamps recent Bandcamp Fridays program, I usually wait to buy it bulk so that the music I want goes 100% to the artist!

YouTube: What?

In some cases, there may be an artist I want to listen to that I haven’ve purchased yet and is not available on Bandcamp. In these instances, I usually just listen to it on YouTube (usually not logged into a Google account, with a VPN) on my desktop. I try to resist the urge to go on YouTube music rabbit holes when I’m away from my computer and only have my smartphone.

I find this combination covers most of my music needs, but there are some things I miss about spotify.

Things I miss about Spotify

Obviously, Spotify wouldn’ve be successful if it wasn’t an easy to use and useful service. I will highlight a few things I miss the most about not using it anymore.

Spotify has a good link-sharing system for music discovery between friends. Unfortunately, almost all my friends use Spotify, so I receive these links pretty commonly. I would love to see some sort of Spotify to YouTube link parser, but I don’ve have the time or energy to figure out how to do that in a cool way. If it already exists, let me know!

The Convenience

Ironically, the trade off to intentionality is losing some convenience. If an artist pops into my head that I haven’ve listened to in a long time, it’s usually a little more cumbersome to listen to their music. I see this as a plus and a minus. I think over time I will get more used to this and it won’t be a big deal.

Conclusions

If you made it this far, thanks for reading my thoughts about why I quit Spotify. Will I return to Spotify or use a streaming service again? Maybe. I think if I did, it’s not something I would keep on autopay, and use only for periods I know I’ll be away from my computer for long periods of time. And when I do, I think I will consider Apple Music over Spotify, but we’ll see. If you think I missed something or was wrong about something above, please feel free to contact me and I’d love to chat about it!

My Markdown Theme Journal: Yearly Theme Follow-up

2021-01-08T17:49:00+00:00

On January 1, I decided to try a Yearly Theme over traditional New Yearsabout resolutions. With this goal, it is also suggested to track your progress throughout the year using a Theme Journal, which you can learn more about on the The Theme System website.

Unfortunately, the physical journal was completely sold out when I found out about it, so I decided I would write mine in Markdown and also publish it on this website to keep me on track.

I am plan on updating the website version at least once a week, as my journal section is only tracked weekly. There’s also “Daily Themes” section which I chose to track various aspects of my life that I wanted to loosely quantify how I am doing throughout the year. I usually fill out this table at the end of the day or the next day in the morning. I’m hoping I’ll be able to plot this data over time at the end of the year to see how well I did.

In spirit of my Year of Intention, I am also tracking my weight and my average time per week. This also gives me data I can track over time, but also not psychologically discourage me by checking everyday. This is especially true with my weight, where I know Iaboutll get discouraged when there are weight fluctuations. I hope this inspires others to consider trying this for themselves! Wish me luck.

If you would like a copy of my Markdown theme journal, feel free to contact me and I can send you a template!

A long-winded look into my battlestation

2021-01-03T21:59:00+00:00

I’ve always enjoyed looking at and setting up my desk. Whether it was from various expensive YouTuber setups or scrolling through /r/battlestations, these setups always drew inspiration for myself to improve my own. I hope this post about my setup inspires you in some way as well! Before, I can talk about my setup, I wanted to briefly describe my mindset when it comes to setting up my battlestation.

A “Minimalist” Mindset

The downside of looking at other battlestations can turn into a needless spending trap, so I try my best to be mindful when adding something to my setup. Back in September 2020, I moved back to Denver after living in Albuquerque, NM for almost a year. During that year in Albuquerque, as well as my prior years in Colorado as a graduate student, I had issues holding on to things and had an unhealthy “anti-packrat” mentality, where I would get rid of things compulsively. Now that I am in a better place both financially and mentally, I’ve been trying to be more mindful with technology purchases in general, and trying to curate these purchases intentionally. I believe this is beneficial from a mental, financial and environmental perspective.

Even though I love the principles of “minimalism”, I put it in quotes because it has become a loaded term with a variety of meanings, especially when it comes to technology. To me, minimalism is a consequence of being intentional, which I proposed as my 2021 Yearly Theme. I don’ve agree with the “minimalist” aesethetic being restrictled to Mac only hardware/peripherals with nothing else on the desk. Therefore, my goal with every piece of my battlestation was hopefully chosen with a purpose, without excess, as much as possible.

I should note that many of my battlestation choices had to be purchased recently due to my house being broken into right when I moved back to Denver in September. This includes my main peripherals, monitor and desktop PC. With that said, let’s take a look at my desk and my PC!

My Battlestation

An overview of my full desk setup (Large Photo). Wallpaper by Damiano Baschiera

Summary

Type	Item
Desk	Ikea Arkelstorp
Router	Google Wifi (replacing eventually)
USB-C Dock Station	Kensington “The Task Master” USB-C Dock Station
Lamp	Ottlite W5 LED Desk Lamp with Qi Wireless Charging
Work Laptop	2020 Macbook Pro 13”
Laptop Stand	Lvyinyin Vertical Laptop Stand
Headphones	Takstar Pro 82
Monitor Stand	Hastings Home Bamboo Monitor Stand
Monitor	Asus ProArt PA248QV 24.1” 75 Hz (1920 x 1200)
Webcam	Logitech C920S HD Webcam
Speaker	Insignia 2.0-Channel Mini Soundbar
External Drive (Hidden)	WD EasyStore 8 TB
Keyboard	Keychron K2 Mechanical Keyboard (Gateron Red Switches)
Keyboard Wrist Rest	Glorious Gaming Wooden Wrist Rest - Compact (Onyx/Black)
Mouse	Logitech G305
Mousepad	Logitech G240
USB Switch (Hidden)	UGreen USB 3.0 USB Switch Selector
Office Chair	Bayside Furnishings Mesh Office Chair
PC Chassis	BitFenix Prodigy

I will highlight various parts of the setup below!

Desk

The desk itself is an Ikea Arkelstorp which I was able to pick up used on my local Craigslist. There are some imperfections and stripped wood under the drawer, but overall I am very happy with the desk. The size is more than enough for what I need it for both personal and work usage.

Peripherals

An overhead photo of my peripherals (Large Photo)

Keyboard

I’ve always liked using mechanical keyboards and have used a variety of different switches (mostly Cherry Reds/Browns/Blues and Logitech) from various manufacturers (Leopold, Ducky, etc). I ended up narrowing down to the Keychron K2 due to its affordable price, value switches, 75% size, and bluetooth functionality. The keyboard board itself is quite tall, so I paired it with the Glorious Gaming Compact Wooden Wrist Rest for better ergonomics. The keyboard keycaps are not stock, but some cheap doubleshot PBT keycaps from HK Gaming in the Pegaso color scheme. If you end up buying the Keychron K2, I recommend swapping out the stock cheap ABS keycaps, as the typing experience greatly improves.

Mouse

When I used to game a lot more, I always prefered Logitech mices. Hence, the choice to continue using one was no different here. I ended up picking the Logitech G305 due to its great sensor, wireless capability, and replaceable AA battery. Not much else to say here!

Headphones

I used to be somewhat of a pseudo-audiophile, but I always preferred the value headphone options, such as the Audio Technica M40x’s, Senheisser HD 558’s, and the Phillips SHP9500’s. I had owned the Takstar Pro 80’s in the past, and found out that there was an update for them called the Takstar Pro 82. They are incredibly comfortable, sound “good”, and the headphone cable is easily replaceable. You can usually find them for under $100 on eBay.

Monitor Stand Area

Zoomed-in photo of my monitor stand area (Large Photo)

I had an unused Insignia Mini Soundbar lying around in our house and wanted to utilize for my desk without looking cluttered. I ended up finding this Hastings Home Bamboo Monitor Stand on Best Buy’s website which was a perfect fit for my desk. I was then able to put the sound bar under the stand, along with hiding my external drive under it as well.

Monitor

The monitor is an Asus ProArt PA248QV which notably has a 16:10 aspect ratio. I grew quite fond of this aspect ratio when I got my work Macbook Pro and wish it was more widespread with higher resolutions. It simply allows you to see more vertical content, reducing the amount of scrolling you have to do on a webpage or while looking at code. I am not a designer or anything, but the colors on the display are really nice and the 75 Hz comes in handy in the small instances where I do play games. Almost all my USB peripherals are plugged into the built-in USB on the monitor, which means I rarely have to plug into something into my desktop PC that is under the desk.

USB Setup

The UGreen USB switch mounted via command strip behind my monitor (Large Photo)

When I have to switch to my from my desktop to work laptop, I have a UGreen USB switch mounted with a command strip behind the monitor, which is plugged into my mouse, keyboard and webcam. The USB switch itself allows two different options, one plugged into my desktop, while other is plugged into my USB-C dock. Switching to my work laptop simply requires switching the display mode from DisplayPort to HDMI!

My Desktop PC

Front view of my very dirty PC (Large Photo)

My previous stolen PC was a recently purchased HP Omen 25L which was an absolute beast; It had a AMD Ryzen 7 3700X and a Radeon RX 5700. As a replacement, I ended up looking locally and luckily found a good deal on a used ITX system with the following specs below.

Specifications

Type	Part
CPU	Intel i5-8400 Hex-Core Processor
CPU Cooler	Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo
Motherboard	Gigabyte Z370N WIFI Mini ITX LGA1151 Motherboard
GPU	Sapphire Pulse AMD RX 580 8 GB
Memory	Crucial Ballistics DDR4 16 GB RAM @ 2666 MHz
Storage	SAMSUNG MZVLB256HAHQ-000L2 256 GB NVME M.2 Drive (Boot)
	WDC WDS500G2B0B 500 GB SATA M.2 Drive (Secondary)
PSU	Rosewill ARC 450 W 80+ Bronze ATX
Case	BitFeniX Prodigy
OS	Gentoo Linux

Not really much to say other than the PC has been working great for me and I don’ve have any immediate plans for component upgrades. That said, the case itself wasn’t in the greatest condition at purchase and I do eventually plan to move the system into a smaller ITX case.

Side view of my very dirty PC with the side pandel removed (Large Photo)

Conclusions and Future To-Do

Thanks for checking out my battlestation! I feel like it is almost complete, with a few minor things to complete:

Cable Management: This was a glaring omission with this post as I’m currently not happy with where it’s at with my setup.
ITX case: Like I mentioned above, the case that this used system came with is not my favorite. Ideally Iaboutd like to able to pick a small enough chassis to keep the PC on the top of the desk, but it is not an urgent purchase. At the very least, I’d like to thoroughly clean the interior of the case.
New router: this has been on my Now page for a while, but I am currently waiting for a good price on a Wifi-6 router to replace my Google Wifi router. Functionally, the Google Wifi router works great but I would like to look for something more privacy respecting.

Thanks for reading!

2021: My Year of Intention

2021-01-01T19:15:00+00:00

Originally, I was going to write a post for setting my 2021 resolutions. However, I finally read this blog post by @brandon on Fosstodon and decided to give a “yearly theme” (more on this below) a try instead. What reinforced me to try this new approach was that my 2020 resolutions all fell by the wayside. I wanted to lose weight in 2020; I weigh more than I have ever in my life. I wanted to read at least a book this year; I didn’ve. There were probably other goals I forgot about because they just didn’t become important anymore. Ironically enough, prior to 2020, I never cared about New Year’s Resolutions; I always thought they were an arbitrary point of time that allows for an excuse to set goals. However, with everything that has happened this year with the pandemic, I feel like I really need this arbitrary point of time to reset. I’m hoping to change that this year with a fresh new approach.

What is a Yearly Theme?

The yearly theme is an alternative approach to New Year’s Resolutions proposed by the YouTuber CGP Grey (YouTube Link). To my understanding, normally with New Years’ Resolutions, you set highly specific goals, with deadlines throughout that year. Often as we know, many of these resolutions are forgotten or ignored as time passes; it often ends in failure. As an alternative approach, CGP Grey suggests “Yearly Themes” where you focus on an overraching idea which is “Broad, Directional, and Resonant” that allows you to have a trend line you can follow, modify and adapt as your daily goals and interpretation of the theme changes. More importantly, the theme “resonates” with you to keep you engaged and interested while not worrying about the specific goals.

Choosing my Theme: Intention

Choosing a theme was hard. At first, I tried to look for examples on the web and also CGP Grey’s video, but that would likely not be “resonant” with me completely if it didn’t come from me organically. After some brainstorming, I’ve narrowed it down to the Theme of Intention.

Intention has some broad definitions if you look at the web, but to me it means to do or act with purpose; it is the opposite of impulse. So many things we do today come from impulsive tendencies, especially with technology. Below, I will briefly describe how my theme of intention will initially affect my year moving forward.

Intention with Technology

Often many of us pick up our phones impusively to check our social media with no specific goal in mind. The combination of algorithmic timelines and endless scrolling features on many applications and websites reinforce these bad habits. Of course, I don’ve think that doing something purposeless is necessarily unhealthy, but many of these technology tools that give us so much also are generally just bad for our mental health and are psychologically manipulative(See 1, 2) to keep us scrolling.

In 2020, I already made some steps toward using computers and my phone intentionally. That includes deleting many of my personal social media accounts from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. As a replacement, I joined Fosstodon which is a community I’ve enjoyed a lot and has pushed me to try many new things, including writing this blog. However, I do find myself falling into the same impulsive habits with the Mastodon apps and web interface. I also still have an unhealthy relationship with scrolling Reddit, even without using my account anymore.

To mitigate some of this impulsive behaviour, I started leaving “Do Not Disturb” (DND) on my phone all the time; inspiration for this came from a fellow Fosstodoner, @Hund who wrote about using DND on his phone in this blog post. Without any sounds/vibrations (except for phone calls, which are rare), it forces me to pick up and look at my phone to see if I have any updates via message, email or social media. For my computer, I currently only own a personal desktop (and not a laptop), which I think has helped with some intentionality of using my computer. I’ve debated buying another laptop, but I have some time to evaluate that over the next few months.

To replace impulsive phone checking, I purchased my first book in a long time. I’ve always enjoyed nonfiction when I was younger (and before college got difficult), and I hope this is a habit that could stick for me throughout the year. I am hoping if I set a book next to my phone, I will make the right choice and pick up the book instead.

Intention with my physical health

This is a weird one, but part of my issue with gaining weight, is no longer being intentional with my food choices. Since the pandemic, I have not been good about planning what I eat and often just buying junk food. My partner and I have both agreed to meal plan throughout the week so we avoid ordering takeout/delivery, often with processed/unhealthy foods.

The other side of intentional health is exercise. I have no set routine at all with my exercise, other than playing drums a few times a week, which isn’ve enough. I’ve never been good about exercising most of my life, but walking my dogs routinely again feels like a good start.

Conclusion

So in summary, I am planning to try to spend my time this year with intention with many of things I do, with a particular focus on technology and my physical health. I will hopefully write another blog post in a few months (around March) to check in with myself and see how my definition of intention has adapted and whether my trajectory with intention has improved or not. I hope this helps others as well!

My de-Googling journey - Part 1

2020-12-03T18:35:00+00:00

Edited: 01-14-2021

As many more folks in the world seem to feel, many of the services/features provided by “the big 5”, GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) have given us a tremedous amount of convenience, at the cost of our privacy. Among the big 5, I think Google products have always made me feel the most conflicted due to my enjoyment of their services. However, as Chris Wiegman as stated in his blog, I agree that privacy is not a zero-sum game; there are always trade-offs that need to be made between our ability to be productive or improve our lives versus the freedoms we lose. Furthermore, I think incremental improvements are better than no improvements at all and we should not treat changes in our privacy as black and white issues. In this post, I will summarize what I have and haven’t replaced, and my reasoning for those choices. The remainder of this post, will loosely follow the format done by Cassidy James Blaede’s blog.

Complete

Search: Google to DuckDuckGo + Startpage

I have been on/off user of DuckDuckGo for years, but also switched to Bing on/off, simply due to the fact they give you points toward gift cards for using their search engine. However, recently there has been some privacy concerns with DuckDuckGo circulating in some circles, but I haven’t fully investigated it myself.

I am currently using Startpage as my daily search engine, which also has had its criticisms with privacy due to their recent acquisition by System1. For me, it’s about “harm reduction” so I’m fine with using either over Google.

Browers: Chrome to Firefox + Ungoogled Chromium/Bromite

I was an on/off chrome user for years, but I’ve mostly settled into using Firefox on my desktop, with Ungoogled-chromium as a secondary browser and Bromite on my Android phone. I tried Firefox for Android on the past, and just didn’t like the user experience.

Email/Contacts/Calendar: Gmail to Fastmail

I have switched away from my Gmail account in the past, but for some reason returned. I think at the time, I didn’t let the data-mining practices of Google bother me for a period of time, especially when I was using a Pixel 3 as a daily driver.

Back in October, I decided it was time move away again. I owned the domain nicholasdanes.com in the past, but thought the domain name was too long for me to be practical. This time, I purchased ndanes.com through NameCheap and ultimately decided on Fastmail as my email provider. I know there are more privacy friendly options such as Protonmail or Tutanota, but having a transition period with some of my accounts to Gmail makes email management without IMAP conveniently available on Linux was a dealbreaker for me. Additionally, as @celia on Fosstodon pointed out, encryption at rest with our emails only solves part of the problem; if people are still using large providers for email and we are still emailing these folks, then little has changed.

Fastmail also has provided many quality of life features that other providers wouldn’t have given me. First, I can send/receive emails from my Gmail account as I slowly transition things over. Second, I have unlimited aliases through my domain, so I can use example@ndanes.com for example.com, for example, to organize my emails, as well as mitigate issues if there’s a data breach with my account. Third, they provide DAV support for contacts, calendar, and storage. With this, I can sync my contacts & calendar using the app DavX5 on my Android phone. My website here, is also hosted on Fastmail, due to their static html webpage support.

Overall, I’m very happy, and will likely stick to the service at least for a few years and then re-evaluate once my accounts tied to my Gmail are completely switched over.

Notes: Google Keep to Standard Notes

I wasn’t a heavy user of Google Keep; I mostly used it for quick notes, grocery lists, and so forth. I decided to switch back to Standard Notes, which I have used in the past. It is a free and open source note-taking app with end-to-end encryption support of the box. The free version only supports plaintext (with paid features adding a lot of extensions). I tried the paid version and quickly realized I didn’t really need any of the features it provided. They also have an (outdated) F-Droid build, which I hope will eventually be updated. In the meantime, you can either get the apk directly from their website, or use the Google Play version (which I’m doing for now).

YouTube: Newpipe (Android) + FreeTube (Desktop)

I absolutely love YouTube as a content platform. However, when I used to use the YouTube app and website directly, I would waste a lot of time falling into the rabbit hole that is the YouTube algorithm. Thankfully, I found a solution that would allow me to track my subscriptions on both mobile and desktop without relying on my Youtube account.

For mobile, I use NewPipe to manage my subscriptions, and watch videos. Before deleting on my subscriptions on my YouTube account, NewPipe provides a link with instructions on importing your YouTube subscriptions in a JSON file via Google Takeout. For your convenience, here is instructions on their website!

For the desktop, I try to use the app FreeTube. It provides support of import/export the same JSON file from NewPipe, which I can then sync between my devices via Syncthing. It also has support for Indivious, a privacy-respecting front-end for YouTube. However, the app can be buggy and sometimes I have to copy of the video link over to the browser. But overall, I’m okay with the tradeoff.

Google Photos: Syncthing + Backups

For Google Photos, my solution is a little simple but works for now. Like mentioned above for my YouTube subcriptions, I use Syncthing to setup a photo sync between my phone’s DCIM folder and my laptop + desktop. To manage the photos on my desktop, I currently use Gnome Shotwell. For backups, I currently make encrypted backup of my entire home directory (which includes these photos) to an external drive. I also make an encrypted copy of my photos/videos into a Cryptomator container on my Google Drive account using rsync manually with my Google Drive folder on my local machine, provided by Insync, which unfortunately is not a FOSS solution.

Incomplete

Android

Unfortunately, I am currently using a Samsung Galaxy S10e (US Snapdragon) as my daily phone, which has its bootloader locked; this means I have no options for custom roms such as LineageOS. To mitigate Google tracking, I have tried to minimize the number of Google Play apps, turn on NetGuard with host blocking, and favor apps in the F-Droid store. If you also have a phone that can’t install a custom ROM, I also recommend using this Universal Android Debloater script (use at your own risk/I am not responsible if you brick your phone) to remove bloated apps from OEM’s such as Samsung. I won’t go into all the android apps I use here, but I plan to do so in a future blog post.

My eventual goal is to sign out of my Google account and use the Aurora Store once I can let go some of the few Google services I’m still using.

Google Drive

Due to its price and currently only needing less than 100 GB of cloud storage for my personal data, I am still using Google Drive to backup crucial data. As mentioned above, I am currently using Cryptomator to encrypt my data at rest to mitigate this fact. For daily syncing, I still use Syncthing for files I need between devices. Additionally, since I don’t use it for daily syncing, Google Drive does not need to be installed as an app on my phone.

Google Sheets/Docs

For my bands, I unfortunately still use Sheets/Docs (and Google Drive) for collaboration with bandmates, as I haven’t quite made the jump to approach them toward alternatives. Hopefully, this can happen in the future!

Google Maps

Many folks have recommended OSMAnd~ as an alternative to Google Maps, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to rely on it completely. One major issue is the lack of street numbers/addresses that have not been provided by users. I try to contribute street numbers/addreses when I can, but there is an occasional case where I have to use Google Maps for Navigation. I try to mitigate this by using it as a web app on my phone, relying only on Navigation Go from the Google Play store.

Google Voice

I mostly use this for voicemail forwarding for visual voicemail on my cell phone, and text/voice for instances where I don’t want the other party to have my main phone number, such as buying/selling on Craigslist. I’m not sure how to entirely replace this yet, nor if I want to completely.

Google Wifi

Last year, I bought a Google Wifi puck for my house and eventually had to buy a second one when I moved, due to the walls in my new place having poor wifi reach. Replacing this has mostly been a financial constraint, as I’m still waiting for Wifi-6 mesh router prices to go down. Recommendations here are welcome!

Conclusion

If you made it this far, thanks for reading my de-Googling journey so far. Next time, I think I will dive a little deeper on my Android app setup, which will hopefully have more progress by the time I write the post. Of course, if you have any suggestions for some of my choices, I’d appreciate it! Thanks for reading!

Is this thing on? Initial thoughts on Mastodon & social media

2020-11-22T19:45:00+00:00

Hello, random internet traveler! My name is Nicholas Danes. In order to not repeat myself, you can learn more about me here. I have always had an on/off interest in Linux, Open Source, and Privacy. Inspiration to start running this website primary came from the Fediverse instance called Fosstodon in October 2020; more on this below!

Since Summer 2020, I have been slowly migrating away from popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Initially, these moves were motivated by the impulsive behaviour that these websites generate; I’ve always been an anxious person, but the combination of the global pandemic with these websites made me spiral and constantly made me doubt myself as a good person. I slowly deleted these accounts, with the hope I don’t remake them again.

A few months past from initially leaving these sites, I was slowly becoming less impulsive with my smartphone and re-learning about the privacy implications re-enforced my decisions to leave these platforms. However, I still felt I was missing a community. Not being able to see friends/loved ones during these times have obviously made it more difficult. I began looking for alternatives.

I was always aware of Mastodon as a decentralized alternative to Twitter, but the main instance, Mastodon.social always intimidated me due to its sheer size. I began looking for more instances to better suit my needs. I eventually found Fosstodon and decided to join. I’ve always been interested in Open Source software and Linux, so I figured it would be a naturally good fit for me.

The community here so far as been so great and welcoming. When I was a young teenager, I was always involved with internet communities/forums, and joining a smaller instance like this feels like going an earlier form of the internet. What stood out to me most however, were the prevalance of blogs ran by many community members. I’ve enjoyed reading many fellow Fosstodonians’ (I believe it was @kevq where I saw this term) blogs; what a refreshing experience! Below is a list of blogs I’ve enjoyed the most so far:

Hund - Why I’m using Jekyll for this site!
kevq - The most eye-catching personal blog on Fosstodon!
Mike Stone - Great Beard!
Yarmo - A fellow musician and PhD graduate!
Chris Wiegman - Just seems like a nice fellow!

Because of these blogs, that is why I’m typing this now. Who knows if there will be more posts, but we’ll see!