De-Googling has stalled or backtracked. Overall: the inertia + the fact that I don't care enough is making the cost-benefit analysis on this project fall below threshold
- email
- I tried Proton Mail and FastMail
- Overcoming the inertia of nearly 20 years on gmail is really difficult
- Paying for anything else right now is difficult
- browser
- I switch to Firefox and then Brave for personal tabs. I'm still using Chrome for work. Chrome really is just the superior browser. The DuckDuckGo browser experiment was a bust because they only have a mobile browser and their growth team is overzealous and was popping shit up all the time. So I went to remove it from my home screen for a bit but accidentally uninstalled it and then was like, "Meh."
- search
- I switched to DuckDuckGo in all browsers. I don't feel any difference here so I'll probably stick with this one. Their image search is better from a structural perspective--they link you directly to the image and tend to have less crap mixed into their results. By crap, I mean paid stock photography websites and the like.
- phone
- I can't justify a new phone right now, although my Pixel 4a has been having issues lately which got me price checking, at least. iPhones are SO expensive, but possibly when this thing starts to have more serious issues I'll look at an older generation iPhone. Even refurbished, iPhones are spendy. I might be able to cajole one out of my wireless carrier. I still prefer Android to iOS for a variety of small, uninteresting reasons.
- storage
- My Google Cloud subscription renewed during this period. I'm working on a home server setup on which I could run NextCloud or similar.
- other services
- I still watch a ton of YouTube and I don't see that going away. Since I pay for YouTube I get YouTube Music bundled so I don't see myself subscribing to a separate music service. I do want to get an OSS streaming situation on said home server, if possible. I have a lot of mp3s from back in the day.
Post-hospital Anemia: It's very slow. My hemoglobin finally started going up over week two--from 9 to 10. 13 is the bottom of the normal range. I can tell. I can't ride my bike very far, and then it takes a long time to recover, I have more muscle soreness. I'm tired more often. I get brain fog relatively frequently (or at least now I have something to blame it on). I'm taking liquid iron 2-3 times per day. I think once I'm through this bottle of iron I'm going to try the higher-dose pill form.
The blog redesign...I realized afterward that I was influenced by the new neobrutalism trend in web design, so I revisited the redesign with the idea to really double-down on the neobrutalism, but I quickly decided I was ok with where it was at and didn't want to sink any more time into it. So it is what it is for now.
Reading...I'm currently reading 7 books (one is an audiobook). I was down to about 4 and then some things I'd put on hold at the library a while back came in. The problem is I'm not actually reading any of them (I've even put down the audiobook for about a week and have been listening to podcasts on my commute). I don't know if it's just cyclical, or if I burned out on reading a little bit, or if it's related to the Anemia tiredness, but I need to kick myself in the butt again to get back into my reading habit.
The blog redesign...I realized afterward that I was influenced by the new neobrutalism trend in web design, so I revisited the redesign with the idea to really double-down on the neobrutalism, but I quickly decided I was ok with where it was at and didn't want to sink any more time into it. So it is what it is for now.
Reading...I'm currently reading 7 books (one is an audiobook). I was down to about 4 and then some things I'd put on hold at the library a while back came in. The problem is I'm not actually reading any of them (I've even put down the audiobook for about a week and have been listening to podcasts on my commute). I don't know if it's just cyclical, or if I burned out on reading a little bit, or if it's related to the Anemia tiredness, but I need to kick myself in the butt again to get back into my reading habit.
I'm also entrenched in Google services since a long time and I've started looking into ways to switching to proton services.
My motivation starts with a more philosophical dilemma whether I'm losing my individual freedom (to acta as a free agent in this world) r not. The main motivation for user data collection and analysis is to predict user behavior. This is done at scale, nobody is interested by me personally. However, being a dot on that chart that moves according to their prediction i think to some extent determines my behavior and takes away from my capacity to act freely.
Now let's think about Facebook, Instagram and the other platforms who do that. What else is left for us to be free individuals ?
This surprises me. Years ago i used
Re: Email
> Paying for anything else right now is difficult
Ha so I guess no
PS: I still use
"being a dot on that chart that moves according to their prediction i think to some extent determines my behavior and takes away from my capacity to act freely."
Yes! This is the dilemma.