• The Tavern needs to be a safe place and comply with the law. In the UK the OSA requires us to know the age of our members and posters, and yet the UK Govt. has not provided a method to do this that is affordable to small voluntary BBS like ours. To that end, all members are safe and secure, we know you must be adults by now. However if you wish to join as a member, please contact us using the form at the [very] bottom of the page and we shall do a one to one verifiaction.

The Union is in a state

First Age

First Age

D&D h@ck3r and Hopepunk
On the morning after the bloated and falsehood strewn State of the Union address by President Trump, I thought I'd reflect on the progress I have made to disentangle my digital dependence on USA tech companies.

I use the Affinity Suite for a lot of my image and text presentation for creative projects. This Windows and Mac application suite has now been straightforwardly enabled on Linux, either through using an AppImage, or a GUI based Wine implementation. Although I can still hope for a native port to Linux, it is more than good enough for me to ditch the Windows PC that I held on to for just this purpose, and switch it to Linux. Microsoft has left my building. My Mrs uses Windows for work and home, but that's fine, this is my struggle.

A satisfying morning adding repos and apps and making my local network USB HDD available to a fresh Fedora Workstation 43. I'll add Affinity Suite as a standard these days. I think the main OS changes, away from USA corporations, that are possible for me right now are complete. Default browser is Zen (Firefox based), search engine is currently DuckDuckGo. I have the Brave browser if I need something Chromium based.

There is more that I can do, at a leisurely pace. The majority of my data is now stored locally on a pair of cheap USB HDDs, one live on the router and accessible throughout home, the other a maintained back-up. The backup is kept in sync by a monthly rsync process, sending changes that have occurred on the main HDD to the backup. I was stunned by the simplicity and power of 'rsync' on the command line. The process isn't ideal, but for the nature of my data, this cadence is more than good enough. A proper NAS is likely this year, and I'll report back on the one I go for and how I find it. Probably UGREEN, but we'll see. In the mean time I plan to further reduce my Google Drive data, though I am already within the 100GB threshold I had set myself.

I have a full local archive of my Google photos, using their takeout service. It came to more than 40GB, reflecting many years of accumulation. I really should have first gone through the cloud based files and deleted the huge weight of pointless ones!

I need to decide if I am going to commit to Proton for an additional email address and cloud space. It would be part funded by the reduction in Google subscription. I also host websites for conventions on Hostinger, and have a domain there with email access. The cost of hosting is covered as charge to the conventions. I think the web presence is useful for the small charge.

I'm evaluating European alternatives to Google Maps. I think that will be a full switch, over the coming months.

Some elements will remain. Sunk cost on the Google phone and HarmonyOS based tablet will keep me for their lifetime. I've already noted alternatives for when the time comes. I really should do something about my bank!

And of course there is this blog. It will probably have to move. It makes sense to migrate the blog by using a Wordpress instance on Hostinger. That feels like a significant effort, but it is a further next step.

Progress then. I feel less entangled, less personally dependent. I was disappointed by the speech given in my name by our Prime Minister at Munich. I have rehearsed the one that I would have given. It is a time of rupture, and despite beneficial and enduring cooperation, we have to recognise that a return to a rules based order with a properly cogent and powerful ally is not a given. For now, I'll do these small things, in one aspect of my life, to give a sense of positive action.

More to come.

Continue reading...
 
Hear hear.
Not sure I am going to do the same given my love of all things Mac and that OneDrive is a family endeavour.
 
So I'm slowly leveraging the Proton account I have.

  • Most of my data is now moved off Dropbox (but I think that I will end up trying to get this down to the free tier as all the common integrations are for it).
  • I've cancelled the Mozilla VPN (using Proton VPN)
  • I'm about to cancel 1Password (they made it easy by doing a 20% price increase) and moving to Proton Pass
  • I have an older NAS to resurrect - if I can't do that then I'll see if the drives are still okay.

The big step is once I start changing all my account logins from gmail to Proton.
 
Also, if you are cancelling services, then make sure you tell them why.

Feedly gone as well now.
 
I’m thinking about leveraging my NAS for more than just Plex. It has around 1TB spare at the moment which would be enough for the family. My concern is security though. The last time I opened it for cloud storage my router was under constant attack from bots. I’m sure there’s a firewall setting I can implement but it’s find g the time to work it out.

I would also need to look at anti-virus in it again (which I don’t have at the moment as everything that I move to the NAS is virus checked in advance).
 
Prompted by the above posts, I took the plunge yesterday and set up Synology Drive (LAN only) on my NAS. Installing the Drive app and setting up users and folders was easy (although I've probably not done it the way a professional would have). The only issue I hit was that the iOS Synology Drive app uses Safari's WebView to access the log in page. Because my NAS is LAN only it doesn't have a security certificate so I had to add manual DNS to my iOS devices so that they could access it. Once that hurdle was leapt it was smooth as silk (apart from the time for uploading and syncing). Next I need to set it up on my wife's devices (Windows, Android, and iPad just to keep me on my toes).

Overall though, I'm pleased at how easy it was. Keeping it LAN only does mean that there are compromises though. Anything I think I (or my wife) think I may need when outside the house will already need to be sync'd. Nothing that can't be solved with either a bit of pre-planning or (in my case) just syncing everything as it's well within my device storage limits.

That means I can ditch Microsoft 365 when that's due for renewal. I will need to get Office 2024 as my wife insists she needs this. I've moved over to LibreOffice though.
 
Actually found a better way of setting up users (most likely the way a professional would have done and (and me too if I'd read a bit more deeply into it!)) so am now reindexing and resyncing onto my MacBook before testing on my iPad mini (which might take a while with 184GB ;) )
 
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