Gcam-Services-Provider

. VPN: Mullvad - currently working on setting up my own. Maps: Organic Maps on Android/Open Street Maps on desktop/laptop. Sync: Syncthing - syncing desktop, laptop, a few phones to my home server on LAN only. Notes: Markdown files kept on devices, synced through syncthing. Media: Emby - had issues with Jellyfin, but might revisit in a few months as I have some plans there. Airsonic - music Adblocker: Mullvad + ublockorigin Calendar: Tutanota Analytics for website: C# console app that parses caddy logs and clears logs after parsing. Cloud: Create encrypted mount with rclone and dump backups there when needed. It was a slow process to get here and I am lucky to have friends who followed me on this journey to be honest. The first step came while working for my final project at university and building something around my heavy dislike for Facebook. Once I had to research the subject more in depth I started to realize how wrong I was all these years entrusting troves of data to the highest bidder... I had a friend who had asked me about these things and I am sorry for not listening to him sooner, but I felt that he never went past "bro, you shouldn't trust google!". Which is I think what most of us do. I am trying to have conversations about this with everyone and try to adjust my language to their level. It's good because it highlights how little I know and it works both ways as I have to learn myself a bit more about any given topic. It's quite nice. It's even better to have people who have followed me on this path, moving to devices with no google services at all on them, moving away operating systems and so on. If you think you're stuck, try to get rid of an app or two and see how it goes. Most of them add little to NO value to your life and your tech stack so trust yourself and delete them. It took me about a year to fully get rid of any google related stuff (and I include micro G here to allow me to run stuff like WhatsApp/YT/Gmail/Maps). And I knew it's bad, so I imagine it's a lot harder if you don't think there are risks. Some things are more difficult, but my phone is now a tool that quietly sits on a desk somewhere in the house and I use it to do something specific. It's also reassuring to know it's not constantly feeding off me to send info to whoever is interested in my particular demographic. As an afterword, please, all of you who suggest open source alternatives, also keep in mind that most of these projects have very little financial support. A few dollars, euros, pounds might not mean much to you, but it could make the world of difference for all these people working to keep our data safe and our devices useful. Stop recommending people stuff and starting with "it's free" and phrase it with "it's private and secure...". Start introducing the cost early on. Without our support these alternatives can and will vanish or will morph to attempt to keep themselves alive.

nes). Once you're at this point, you are forced to change your behavior, so the choice goes from "which of these apps should I use as there are SOOOO many of them" to "which apps do I need to add to the phone". After a few months I'm down to: Signal, Fennec, Aegis, Mullvad, Tutanota, Termux, Unlauncher, Gcam port for my phone, Organic Maps, Syncthing. The background is black, the font is red. A big shoutout to all the persons working hard on all of these applications, do support them through donations or any help you can give them btw. To get here I had at a point microG, google maps, YT Vanced, Dropbox and the usual slew of things, but I still kept picking up my phone and scrolling mindlessly. I think this is the first thing you should do. I know people might suggest going outside, watching movies, subscribing to your favorite blogs and other things like that, but the reality is, you need to change the association you make with your phone first. This goes for all your devices btw, not just your phone. It needs to revert back to being a tool that obediently sits somewhere away from you and is picked up to perform a specific task and then put down again. Constant entertainment shouldn't be our goal in general, but I digress. Once you get the change (you can pick up older Pixels pretty cheap used - which is also great for the environment btw!), the next step is to look up 3-4 sources of information (I go with 2 or 3 that lean the same way I do politically and 1 that is the complete opposite) and assign let's say an hour in the morning or one in the evening when you might go through those articles. I afterwards realized that nothing really changes by me going to several places to look up things. It doesn't matter if you read about something on CNN/Fox/The Guardian/The Atlantic/BBC/Al Jazeera, at the end of the day, it happened and 5-10-20-40 different sources will really talk about the same event. Will this event impact you? Probably not. If it does, i'd recommend you look for a source of news that's closes to you geographically, they might have some more localized insight. Chances are if cycling legislation changes in Berkeley, a local website/paper might have more relevant information than Al Jazeera (which, chances are, won't cover that event anyway). So this was the next step, once you start weaning yourself off of the endlessly repeating news cycle, look for something closer to you. Maybe at this point, you can do a quick read over some of the big topics once a week - how's the humanitarian crisis in Yemen? Is there anything you can do to help (pressure your elected officials/gov/etc, join an NGO and help that way)? This is, in my view, essential to being a good citizen. Once that's done, you can check maybe what happened locally, which will, invariably, impact your life to a greater degree than what happens half-way across the world. First of all, congrats you're still here, you're doing well! At this point I check HN a couple of times a day (this is one of those occasions), I look for anything that I'm interested in, try to limit it to 2-3 articles and that's me. This whole process probably took around 5-6 months from start to finish. The slower you go along with it, the better chance things will stick. I feel a lot better now than I did a few years ago when I was one of those people with a couple of screens of apps. I have more time, I look up what I'm interested in, I feel more connected to my local community and my local government. I have time to research a topic I'm interested in with greater focus instead of being devoured by a slew of panic inducing titles or gifs/videos that keep me scrolling endlessly. We (and here I mean most tech/knowledge workers) are stuck in front of screens all day... We should by now have figured out that when they aren't helping you, they are DEMANDING your attention and they give very little in return. So the best mentally healthy apps are those that you don't use. Those that you uninstall and those that give you time back. Sorry for the long rant, hope it helps!