It's Friday afternoon and I'm just sitting down to write this article. I have no idea what this article is going to look like beyond the basic premise. This is likely how it's going to be every week, unfortunately.
A phrase deemed unparliamentary by New Zealand comes to mind: "idle vapourings of a mind diseased". That may well be what this blog turns out to be. I will be writing about my hobbies (Formula 1, cricket, maybe rubik's cubes at times but there's not much happening in that space), putting out some random articles (those of you who follow me on Instagram can read my articles titled "Hubris" and "Is Fatalism Just Escapism In Disguise" from my bio, both of which will invariably be posted here on a week I have no other content to post), or writing about activism.
Ah, activism. I consider myself a supporter of many social causes. Gender equality. LGBT+ ally. Race equality. Animal rights. However, these subjects are not going to feature heavily in this blog, although the undertones will be undeniable. What I hope to make the main focus of this blog is digital privacy.
As I have alluded to in my previous post, I have seen companies - my employers - be rather careless with sensitive personal data (I now realize this is more a question of security than privacy, but I will get into that in a future post). This led to me taking a careful look at my own digital life and consider which companies I have allowed access to what aspects of my life.
One of the steps I decided to take was to de-google my life. If any google service has a reasonably functional and more private alternative (preferably open-source and on-prem) I will use it.
I have begun using ProtonMail and Ecosia Search, and plan on subscribing to Nebula to move away from YouTube. However, a huge point of concern is Google Drive. How do you replace a cloud service? How do you find an alternative for a service whose USP is to allow you to access your files from any device anywhere?
I stumbled upon Nextcloud, which is a cloud application that you can run off of your own computer. So as long as your computer is powered on and addressable by the internet, you have a Google Drive alternative.
Keeping your computer powered on is simple. Having it addressable by the internet? Oooofffffff that's a pain and a half. And actually setting up Nextcloud to work like I want it to? Gods of Olympus, if it were obvious, no company would ever need sysadmins.
The only reason I was able to figure out how to do it was that I already had some knowledge of computers and coding and linux and webhosting and TLS. Put it down to my being a nerd. But that level of involvement essentially makes hosting Nextcloud inaccessible to privacy-focused people who don't even know where to start. You need tutorials to understand the tutorials. When something is missing, you don't even know how to ask a question.
That is the aim I have with this blog. Provide an ELI5 (explain like I'm 5) tutorial to setting up Nextcloud, and other privacy tips. If someone has an actual 5-year-old I can explain these things to to ensure my posts' quality, I would greatly appreciate that.
Actually, no. I cannot write a post on Friday afternoon and have it validated by a 5 y/o by Saturday noon. Which, by the way, is the target upload time for each post. Saturday noon.
Well, there's the aim and there's the target. But like I said earlier, this blog may well turn out to be the idle vapourings of a mind diseased. But it's something I'm going to do and I would love having readers.