Vivia 🦆🍵🦀

Earlier this year I was given one of those XPS machines with Ubuntu and decided to install Debian on it. The camera driver was so bad - I can’t remember technical details but you can’t simply get it to run on another kernel, it was a mess of hacks to get it to work. I decided I won’t get a camera driver. “We ship a laptop with Ubuntu” does not necessarily mean working Linux drivers.

Yes. https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/device/fp4/release/focal

Get a Pinephone, or a Fairphone with Ubuntu. More privacy and more features than dumb phones.

Well, maybe you are:

• Planning a surprise party
• Leaving a job
• Trying to escape an abusive relationship
• Famous
• Writing a detective novel
• A writer without a publisher
• Searching about an embarrassing medical condition
• Having a crush in someone
• In the closet
• A teenager with controlling parents
• Having a hobby that’s considered embarrassing or childish
• Having a psycho stalker
• Buying a present from Santa
• A reporter who doesn’t want to reveal their sources
• Buying a toilet and you don’t want toilet recommendations for the rest of your life
• Lending your computer to someone, and you don’t want your recommended videos to change
• Under an NDA

… Or maybe you’re talking with someone who’s in one of those categories.

We have to normalise privacy in order to keep these people safe. For instance, it’s a stupid example but it works, if I always use private browser windows, my husband won’t suspect anything when I’m looking for a gift for him.

That’s only the tip of the iceberg and it’s not even touching some bigger problems:

• You can be profiled based on your likes, social media posts, purchase history, etc, and maybe used for election results manipulation, or who knows what else. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it has happened, see for instance Cambridge Analytica.
• Maybe the political situation will change in the future. Oops, now your data is suddenly in the hands of a malicious dictator.
• If you keep a backdoor open to let the “good and trusted” actors in, there’s no way to not let malicious actors in as well.

SlimSocial for Facebook works, it’s just slow.

I use this and you can preemptively create some groups you can share your location to, then turn those on. If this works for you.

Well, it’s a Tuesday so that means I can get fresh fish in my local street market. Nothing much going on otherwise.

I use NextCloud News, it’s super convenient and also syncs between my phone and computer. I use it for reading the news (playing hide and seek with one news site after another when they inevitably disconnect their RSS/Atom support), for the webcomics I follow, and for keeping up with friends’ blogs.

• Two NextCloud instances, one is a RPi4 with a big external HDD which I use for backups, the other one contains everything else, including PhoneTrack. Happy to have a self-hosted privacy-friendly way to share my location with family.
• Email using mailcow.
• Jabber server using prosody. Using it with immediate family and two friends. Still super happy.
• Web server including personal blogs. Currently looking to migrate away from Wordpress into something static without comments.
• pihole
• Half-finished home automation stuff.