amado1

as you all know, for the last year but especially the last six months i've been really... grieving the old web and the pre-AI slop world. sometime in the last week that shifted to anger as the primary emotion.

i don't like feeling this way.

i don't like what it makes me into with this simmering resentment (it's affecting my sleep too, annoyingly); i hope it shifts somewhere differently soon. but while it is there i've been trying to steer it in the direction of ripping big tech out of my personal "stack" (daily use technology) as something that is controllable and within my power to do. it's something that's been on my personal to-do list to do before i move, something that's increasingly more urgent also given how big tech's censoring NSFW artists specifically (and not revenge porn/AI CSEM for some reason... backwards ass priorities there). but it's also because i am just... completely, utterly fucking done with this forced corpo surveilance slop malware bullshit.

this doesn't include just FAANG (frankly 'G' is the only one i used at any kind of weekly capacity), but I'm expanding my hard requirements into:

* no forced/automatic updates
* no subscriptions
* no spyware
* all open source
* no genAI or cloud-based machine learning; anything critical like local models for live captions must be local and evaluated for narrow use-cases. anything that forces AI gets shotgun'd out of my orbit.

Current task list that i'm powering through:

• get new linux laptop as a wholesale backup/upgrade - done, happened this past month.
  
• test the 3-2-1 offline linux-only backup system - done, works magnificently.
• find alternatives for all google apps - done, protonmail is taking the brunt but frankly that was easier than i thought it would be lol. good riddance to gacha too.
• (technically you could include moving all of my domains onto NFSnet from bluehost inside of the last year)

• delete both long-term google accounts - deleted one already, finished the last sweep of triple checking and changing username/passwords, waiting 3 days for some minor things to get back to me, and deleting the other friday.
• get new phone with GrapheneOS - happening this week; phone just arrived today and with the new laptop i'll also be able to install it.  (while the hardware of the new phone is a google pixel, it's one released from 2023, intentionally right before the AIsloppification. also before the whole android locking-down fiasco.)
• get qbittorent online - learnin' some new skills here :3

eventual tasks: 

• revive my raspi's and install household-wide pi-hole - (with permission from all residents)
• move to self-hosted bsky pds - as perhaps(?) the "general" short form SNS alternative since it can send posts to mastodon users too via bridgy.fed.
• evaluate bazzite as a permanent SteamOS replacement - once when i finish plowing through steam-locked games; i only have 5 more i'm really interested in; the rest of my backlog is ah, cough, homebrew.
• any new-home tech purchases (like a tv screen for my new office, or old bose speakers) will be dumb-only.

honestly... getting there!

also it is a little funny seeing how probably wildly outside the norm my tech habits are lol
once a linux sicko, always a sicko <3

hit another cool milestone with digital independence... 
got all of my (MAGI01, current laptop) files copied on the new (MAGI02) laptop! \o/

yes i'm a eva nerd lol. the steam deck is MAGI03 fwiw.

for context: MAGI01 is the linux laptop i brought in 2022 or so; and i've always backed it up monthly with my trusty ass 1TB western digital hard drive (since 2009(!)) using ubuntu's native backup system.

i've always backed up monthly (never felt the need to backup more than that) but technically i wasn't quite sure in case if a total crash that it was going to restore everything. thankfully as of today i learned that i can use that WD hard drive and simply copy 01's files over onto 02 as easily as one button click via the very same backup system. (and if the backup drive -> copies over to 02, backup drive -> 01 is fine.)

back when i had to send in MAGI01 (two or so years ago?) to fix the chassis when an old battery swelled, i realized that i was kinda out of luck if my main laptop went FUBAR. so since then, i've wanted a backup fully-useable linux so that way the whole workflow is basically identical if one of the two computers ever dies suddenly.  like if 02 dies? i can switch that day back to 01 and keep drawing lol.

it sounds like a lot but the backup process itself is kinda... stupid simple? two button presses, and then i leave it alone for an hour or three (only that long if it's doing a from-scratch backup, which it sometimes does to avoid file corruption, but it takes care of that automatically).

beauty of it is that if the WD backup hard drive crashes; i have and have successfully used filezilla as a backup-to-the-backup file transfer. :3c (using it to move files to the steam deck, which is another linux). so the only way i would be truly up a creek is very literally 3 computers all goes at once (and i have one more old WD hard drive at a grandparent's house in case if there was a fire, so like, not even that).

AND NOTHING'S IN THE CLOUD, it's all offline and i have to manually approve updates, so no forced enshittification, or creepy surveillance data scanning ♥ ~ eat shit big tech lol lmao

next steps: i don't have the mental bandwidth for it right now after the work of the "full scale" backing up, but next month after the monthly (small) backup, i'll take the time to do the long-awaited update & upgrade for MAGI01 since it's hideously outdated lol. little nervous for that but like, this is why i'm taking all these careful prep steps.