I take my office with me back home in my back pocket every day. In the morning It’s on a shelf on my desk as I get ready for the day, emails and chats buzz by before I take it with me again to the office. I want to put it to some additional good use on my quest to reclaim my private personal life, but it’s not that easy.
The amount of information we need to give out to Google or Apple (or Twitter or Facebook) to create an account is shocking, but you wouldn’t even notice. That is until you try to do so without a smartphone. This post is a summary of my experience trying to open alternate accounts that do not lead back to me in any way. Spoiler: this has mostly failed.
Sometimes there’s so much to say there’s nothing to say. At moments like these, it’s best to take a breath, a sip from your cup of tea or coffee, and… start from the end. So welcome to the new home of The Art of Not Asking Why, helpdeskheadesk.net.
When I started researching privacy more seriously, I didn’t know what I was looking at is the face of a forlorn, desolate path that seems to go nowhere. I picked it up as a challenge, and within a few days, it became clear that privacy is, unfortunately, a journey of hard sacrifices to make.
KDE’s Plasma desktop environment has been my go-to on whatever Linux distro I use: Xubuntu, openSUSE, Manjaro, and now Debian. As I keep favoring terminal and Emacs over GUI, Plasma desktop is becoming more of a habit than necessity. I decided to dump KDE altogether and give XCFE another try with a new laptop build. Here’s what I have to say after a couple of weeks.
After almost two months of thinking of the idea, I decided to give up the idea of a newcomer’s wiki to org based on Zettelkasten. I might revisit Zettelkasten in the future, but I don’t want to be bound by arbitrary time constraint of a project.
I’ve received my new Pixel 4a a Friday before last and after a week I can say this with confidence: this is the best smartphone Google ever made. I also hope it will be the last phone I buy from Google.
I mentioned a “back to basics series for org-mod, but I got stuck. I thought this would be a good chance to record webcasts, especially for newcomers, but recording videos turned out to be harder than I thought for various reasons. I gave up for now, after almost 10 failed attempts.1 With this out of the way, I got pulled into another area of interest that seems to be everywhere in org-mode circles these days: Zettelkasten. Something clicked.
It’s been four months since COVID-19 started for me. I’ve been working from home, which means far less exercise than usual, especially with gyms closed in the city. Thankfully, I have a system that helps me to keep somewhat active, and today I want to share it with you.
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