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Privacy and Productivity Tools
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-- Gophed on Tue, Aug 21th
So, it is probably time to make something useful of this
phlog.
There is a small number of topics which I wanted to address
on my personal blog however, being it on my native language,
I don't think I'd get the energy to rewrite them, specially
not using HTML or some fancy Markdown stuff.
The very thing that attracted me the most to the gophersphere
is its simplicity. You are reading my words; BAM, it's simple
as that. No sophisticated software to do it, nothing out of
ordinary, not even bloated browsers, though you may be reading
this from a proxy which allows you to access the gophersphere
from one.
Anyway, let's get to the real thing.
The topic I wanted to address here is... privacy. Or rather,
how and why I actually started worrying about it.
Time and time again, we get bombarded by news talking about
manipulated information and other absurd stuff, all of which,
after thinking about, you see that it's not just nonsense.
When you're a tech savvy guy, you start worrying about this
stuff. And while I'm not an expert, I began taking some
measures to try and minimize the amount of my data that ends
up floating around on the web. Some of those are tools, other
are services. Here is a list of some.
- Protonmail
I mainly ditched my Google and Hotmail e-mails for this one.
It's an encrypted e-mail service. Suits well my most crucial
needs, given that I don't use my email much. And there's also
the plus that there is no spyware looking at the stuff you send
or receive.
it is not perfect, though; this is non-free stuff which may
cost you extra, depending on your usage. Using a client
requires you to install their Bridge thing, which is yet
another JavaScript "desktop" app built using Electron (which
is also a cute name for "headless Chromium"), in order to
open a local port so you can connect to your account.
Some also speculate that it may not be as safe as it seems, but
I'd rather take the risk than being openly spied.
Android app is good.
- LineageOS, OpenGAPPS Pico & F-Droid
This is my Android phone setup.
It seems I could not run away from Google Apps, so might as well
use the most lightweight alternative I may find.
LineageOS is a descendant from Cyanogenmod, which delivers a more
bloat-free experience for an Android user.
OpenGAPPS is the default alternative for installing Google Apps on
custom ROMs, and its Pico variant ensures as less bloat as possible
(for example, I could escape the hideous Gmail and Google Search
apps).
F-Droid is an open app store, built around the idea of supporting
and accepting only Free Software, which means all apps are open
source and libre. A friend told me some apps are not really audited
for malware, though Play Store isn't also the most trustworthy
app store out there.
- Orgzly & Org files
This one is a direct strike on Google Calendar and other
calendar solutions.
It's been about a year now since I switched my entire agenda
management to Org files.
In case you don't know, Org is a special format for storing
notes in plain text -- which reminds me, it's something that suits
well the gophersphere. Org has a lot of integration with Emacs text
editor, which means I also end up using Emacs for more than just
coding. In fact, by using the org-agenda and the calendar buffers,
along with some native alerts on Linux, Emacs and Org have basically
become my main work tools.
As for Orgzly, it is an app for syncing your notes and keeping them
on your mobile phone. when you're AFK, Orgzly will help you.
Remember that whole integration with Emacs I mentioned? Well, Orgzly
is no Emacs, but it does have a nice widget for you next appointments
on your home screen, and also has notifications to remind you of the
stuff you need to do -- you can even reschedule your appointments
from the notification.
- RSS/Atom Feeds & Elfeed
Keeping in touch with news is something hard to do there days. It's
been about seven years since I really watched any TV show, so I
need to find other ways to read the news. And more importantly,
it needs to be bearable to read.
For that, RSS feeds are a good solution, along with their modern
counterpart, the Atom feeds. These basically serve some information
in a XML format which can be parsed by your feed reader of choice.
Now, I've jumped across many feed readers, even used Feedly which,
though it has an elegant interface and also allows me to open my
account on whatever device I want, it still collects some data and
asks all the time about Facebook and Twitter integration (watch out
for those; these innocent buttons send navigation information to
those services, even though you don't have an account on them.
A carefully configured uMatrix browser extension should get rid of
that), and the Feedly app is so fat my (old) cellphone couldn't
keep it open along with my music player.
While I still did not determine a best way to read feeds on mobile,
enter Elfeed. Elfeed is a tool for Emacs which allows you to read
RSS and Atom feeds in a separate buffer window. Has a way to filter
the fetched entries and, if it is an Atom feed, it may even show
you the full information (along with images, if you're using an X11
version of Emacs) so you don't even have to open the website on
your bloated web browser.
Combine Elfeed with Elfeed-Org, and you can safely store your feeds
on portable, human-readable org files.
- Podcasts
Another interesting thing I started doing was listening to various
podcasts. While most are about tech stuff so I can keep in touch
with the new tendencies, I also listen to podcasts about
enterpreneurship, astronomy and even psychology. Must say, this was
a surprise, since I didn't think I could extract so much knowledge
from prerecorded audio shows.
If you're interested, I recommend the libre app AntennaPod. There
are other podcast aggregators out there, possibly even better; for
example, if you're stuck with the Google bloatware from your stock
Android ROM, you can download the Google Podcasts "extension" so
you can follow and listen to episodes. Mind, though, that while my
experience with it was very limited to say this conclusively, it
seems not to allow some basic degree of portability -- which means,
taking your feeds with you to another podcast aggregator (each feed
is basically just XML, just like RSS and Atom feeds; you can export
all your feeds on AntennaPod to an OPML file, which is also glorified
XML). You can always re-subscribe on your new aggregator, but still...
- NewPipe
A cute, lightweight and libre app, which allows you to watch YouTube
videos without having YouTube installed.
It has awesome features such as floating videos and background audio
play, which also includes a playlist, if you're just looking for
listening some music.
Did I also mention it downloads video/audio and allows you to control
the video quality globally and before watching?
This is a blessing for someone like me, which did not have YouTube
installed. Saved me a lot of megabytes.
The only two bad things about it is that I don't think it hides your
traffic from YouTube or from your ISP. Also, there are two versions
of this app (F-Droid only, since it violates Google's App Store
policy), and strangely, the Beta version is much more stable than the
main one.
It seems that the author is looking forward to SoundCloud integration
on the near future as well.
- Twidere
Another nice Android app, this time for microblogging.
Supports a lot of microblogging clients, including Twitter and
Mastodon (yay for SDF's Mastodon instance), and multiple accounts.
At some point, while I still had a Twitter account, it I used both
at the same time.
It is libre and has a lot of advanced features such as filters,
posting the same thing on multiple accounts at the same time, and
other things.
Honestly, even if you only use Twitter, there is just no reason
why you shouldn't use this.
And this is basically it. I might be forgetting a thing or two but, if
I ever remember anything, I'll just create a new phlogpost to share.
If you have any suggestion, you may give me a heads up by getting in
touch, just check my contact info on my gopherhole's index.
