💭 Technology Usage

I have long struggled with balancing privacy and convenience. In an ideal world, I would only use software that is open source and does not track me or have ads. In practice, this is not an easy feat by any means. I have gone through times of attempting to switch everything I use to more privacy conscious and/or FOSS alternatives. Some open source software is great, but some things require so many hoops and a certain level of lost productivity in order to use it over an alternative owned by a company such as Google.

I don't want to make privacy my identity, but I would like to specifically choose better options if they work well for me. If they don't, I will use what does, even if it's a system owned by a large corporation.

For instance, I am once again using Google Keep for notes on my phone. I have notes saved elsewhere, digitally and physically, but for easy notes without the risk of losing them if my phone dies, I will use Keep.

Another thing I've previously tried to abandon, but it's not worth the struggle, is Dropbox and Enpass. I use Dropbox to manage my Enpass vault, and it all just works. I don't want to struggle with nextcloud and keepass or something similar for very little privacy gain. I will use what works.

Because of Dropbox, I've also tended to stay away from Obsidian, but I've decided I would like to use that again for research and getting things down to be filtered into other places (this site, physical bullet journal, physical book of shadows, etc). I think it will work really well for me, and that's what I need, not extra stress of using something subpar or trying to build and manage my own.

I know this may not be a popular opinion amongst the people who read my site, but it is what works for me and I value my time more than my ideals when it comes to what technology I use. That doesn't mean that I will just mindlessly accept whatever is available though. I will always carefully pick what technologies I use. Sometimes I will build my own, sometimes I'll select something FOSS, sometimes I'll go with an application owned by a corporation because it works for me and saves me a lot of time and stress.

Post 029/100 of #100DaysToOffload

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