Degoogling, Passwords, Misfin, Ham Radio, Haligmonath - ROOPHLOCH 2024

2024-09-06 - [53] 6:20

I decided to participate in ROOPHLOCH this year. While writing this post, I'm currently sitting outside of a bar in my town having a beer. The point of ROOPHLOCH (Remote Outdoor Off-grid PHlogging CHallenge) is essentially to write a post off-grid, using battery power and being outdoors. Info about ROOPHLOCH can be found at the gemini link below by solderpunk. For those viewing the web version of my post here, the link below requires a gemini client to open and almost certainly won't open up in whatever web browser you are using to see this post.

Degoogling

I deleted every part of my Google account (including Google Drive and Youtube) with the exception of Gmail a year and some change ago, maybe a little longer. The only thing I needed to get rid of was my Gmail account, which took me a lot longer to figure out than I would like. Well, I finally found a mail provider that should be a good enough replacement! The mail provider isn't important here, as much as I found a mail provider that handled what I wanted in a free email service without being Google. They have IMAP and POP3 support so I can check incoming email with mbsync and mutt! I probably won't have much need for SMTP with this account.

I'm really hoping to delete my Google account fully within the next 24 hours.

While I couldn't get Quad9 to play nice as a DNS server directly on my router, I have set it at /etc/resolv.conf on my desktop and laptop.

I can't quite get away from Google though entirely... Once a month, I need to pay my phone bill, the company of which seems to only accept "Major" browsers that are based on Chromium. There's also another 2 websites that I only need to use at most once a year for renewing services. I also write a lot of code in Go, which was at least at one point a Google project. The road to getting me to use something other than Go for a lot of projects will be a long one. Maybe sometime in the distant future I can write about "being on the other side" of that.

Passwords

I wrote a post about 16 months ago about my password fatigue of having too many accounts, which you can read at the link below.

There were a few more accounts I was able to delete or abandon comfortably. I am currently down to 18 accounts. That still includes the Google account, so I will be down to 17 very shortly! In November, I plan on deleting my Mastodon account on mastodon.social and not replacing it with anything (for an incredibly similar, yet opposite handed, reason as why I deleted my Twitter account), which will bring me down to 16. At some point, I'll also figure out exactly how to trigger the Jailbreak on power-on of my PS4 with firmware 11.0.0 as well, which will mean I can delete or abandon my Sony account, bringing me to 15.

After all of this, I think my next "difficult goal" will be reducing down to 12 accounts total.

(Park Intermission)

I'm now at a park in town sitting on a bench. Continuing on with this post!

Misfin

I wrote a misfin server and can now be reached at the following misfin address

Misfin is sort of an "Email, but for the smallnet, heavily inspired by the gemini protocol". Now that folks in geminispace are starting to play around with Misfin, I figured I should play around with it as well, which is why I wrote a server from scratch. We'll see how much I end up using it.

The server accepts Misfin B and C messages. For those viewing the web version of my post here, the following 2 links below requires a gemini client to open and almost certainly won't open up in whatever web browser you are using to see this post.

I have some opinions of the spec and how folks are implementing the spec now that I have implemented the B and C specs in a server. It's very likely that the next post will be about that process of implementing the server.

Ham Radio

I GOT MY LICENSE!!! Took the tests in-person on August 15th and passed the Technician and General tests! Maybe at some point I'll play around with Ham radio. I mostly wanted the license because I figured there is the chance it might be useful for me in the future. To me, getting this license is like someone in NYC getting their driver's license. They might not be able to store a car or get a car onto the incredibly packed road, but that license will come in handy if they get far enough away from NYC in the future.

Haligmonath

Happy start of Haligmonath! The new moon cycle (first sliver of the moon is visible) started last night where I'm at. I'll be celebrating ritual tonight rather than last night because I wasn't exactly feeling well last night due to a sporadic sleep schedule due to stress and having to work on the schedule of others to try and contact an electrician.

Future

There are 2 books I actually want to finish. One is "Godel Escher Bach" (GEB), which I keep only getting like 3 chapters into before moving on in life, and the other is one I'm more than half-way through reading, even if it's been over a year of me reading this book... That book is "Look Me In the Eye - My Life With Asperger's" by John Elder Robinson, the brother of Augustem Burroughs, the author of "Running With Scissors". I'm going to push myself to finish the book this month. It really should only take like 3-5 moderately lazy reading nights to finish, but I need to actually commit to finishing the book. It's been a year since I finished a book, which while better than my reading speed of like 10+ years for a single book, is still not what I want. Let's fix that by finishing this book.

I'd really like to find some other folks who might be willing to have a weekly reading group for GEB that haven't finished the book but wanted to. Maybe together, a small handful of folks can finish the book suddenly!

(Public Library Intermission)

Time to upload this, so I went to outside of my town's public library to do so! SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL PUBLIC LIBRARY!!!

Contact/Reply

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