While my initial intent in this post was to use bullet points to cover my geek activities in the last couple of days, admittedly, I'm feeling a little zapped from pulling out my whittling knife:

Taking Off Google's Goggles

As referenced earlier, I left Mountain View, California for Geneva, Switzerland to establish a custom domain email and update all of my logins respective to their associated sites along with my password manager.

While I have yet to use a backup solution for media in using some stranger's hard drive (i.e. cloud computing), I am using ProtonDrive's end-to-end encryption for my docs. I've also adopted my phone as a HD for a VeraCrypt volume. On some level, it is curious how we think of "The Cloud" in abstract terms, like there's an ether of electron bits floating around us as a public utility instead of what it is, on a box accessed easily by a bored admin in a business park somewhere.

With a mix of Aurora Store and APKMirror, I tossed my Google crutch aside as it relates to my phone's software and its system administration. It amuses me: on Android, Google Chrome actively blocks my ability to find Aurora's download, but when I run Brave, the browser that's based on the same project as Chrome, I have no problems. Brave is the superior browser anyway!

Site Move

I moved my site from Seattle so that it can catch some rays in Florida, somewhere between Disney World and Daytona Beach. As of yet, I haven't implemented Jekyll, but instead, I dance awkwardly with complete site wipes followed by extracting a compressed file; I just render my site locally and FTP it up as a single file. While (for now) this solution is about as elegant as a sledgehammer, I haven't given a second thought about Cylons—I tend to ruminate with dynamic hosting!

Windows 10 Wipe

On my main box, I returned to 2016 or 2017 with my adoption of Linux Mint 20.2, an OS I've been familiar with since at least 2010. Back then, it irked me when Ubuntu shifted to Unity and I sought a Gnome-based alternative. In context, way back in 2005, I ran Ubuntu's very first release, Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog), on my work boxes. As it relates to 2021 and my motivating factors, there are some philosophical underpinnings that involve words like * locus* —ultimately, it has a lot to do with my peace of mind and lack of trust in Silicon Valley actors.