Over the past few years I’ve been making changes to my technological life. It began a couple of years ago as I started to de-Google myself. Here’s where things stand at the moment:
- Twitter has been deactivated for almost two years to the day. I spend some time on BlueSky, but I’m pretty strict about limiting myself there.
- I spend most of my social media-esque time at Micro.blog for both short and longer-form posts. I’ve also started a second Micro.blog called Tack & Ink designed to write about and share my current research project.
- My newsletter has fizzled out, but I’m thinking about ways I might come back to it. In the meantime, you could subscribe to the Micro.blog newsletters.
- As part of making myself more news-resilient, I’ve shifted most of my news reading to print publications: The Atlantic, The Economist, and High Country News are the primary sources, with the Washington Post and New York Times here and there. The Economist’s The World in Brief is particularly good.
- I’m moving a lot of my stuff out of the cloud. Dropbox has become increasingly less reliable, so I’ve been slowly moving my things to a local hard drive (which I can access on my local network anytime, or sync down to other machines using Syncthing). A few things are stored in Apple iCloud, but it’s not a service I use much for file syncing.
- On services that have become unreliable, I’m also leaving 1Password for Apple Passwords. I don’t quite understand what happened to 1Password, but its reliability, especially its integration in Safari, is incredibly inconsistent.
- I mentioned above my attempts to de-Google myself. A few years ago I migrated all of my email to Fastmail, which I’m very happy with. I also moved all of my calendars to Apple iCloud. This is also undergoing some change: after years as a Fantastical user, I’m going back to the stock Apple Calendar. It does everything I need and, while it has a little more friction than Fantastical, it works well. I pair Calendar with Itsycal for menu bar access.
- DuckDuckGo is my default search engine (again, the great Google decoupling).
- I’m still solidly behind Obsidian for note-taking, but having a fresh look at . . . notecards.
