It all started from Scratch. Pun intended! The humble beginnings of scratch.mit.edu my first social network! 2016 - 5 years ago I decided to sign up for a scratch account to share the programs I made locally using ‘Scratch 2.0’ iirc - an Adobe AIR app built in flash in those days. I recall the easy - drag and drop interface to build programs with jittery animations and SVG sprites. Sometimes lengthy codeblocks would crash my computer and the JavaScript engine in Chrome (while working with cloud variables) on a 2 Megabytes/s internet plan....

I’m preparing for competitive entrance exams 1.2 Million people write this exam each year & it’s really tough to get a good rank I’ll be focusing more on text posts, back to blogging & learning C++ during the 2nd half of this year. Good videos take time to produce, especially when editing on a broken [16:8.9956076] display. Not that they are well edited lmao, it feels better in my head. Hopefully I’ll cope up with school work during the the course of this year & find pockets of time to make videos....

This post is a reflection on Digital Minimalism on my Phone (FOSS) I wrote exactly a year ago A year ago I yeeted all my apps, disabled notifications, started using FOSS apps in the hope that I spend my time efficiently. After the initial few weeks the ‘FOSS’ and ‘Ad Free’ apps get just as much addictive as the mainstream ones. Although it’s not as toxic / invasive of your privacy....

iPhones and MacBooks are beautiful pieces of hardware that you can ‘rent’ from Apple & that’s about it Why did I specifically use the word ‘rent’? The only thing you ever ‘buy’ from Apple is their marketing Apple devices - natively run their proprietary operating systems. iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS & MacOS. They make is either difficult or impossible to sideload apps (iOS) / run your own OS on the phone - you seemingly ‘paid for’....

2021 is the year I complete my general schooling, plan ahead, learn Python, and catch up on my backlog Because 2020 has taught us that anything can happen at times when we are the least prepared I’m sure we have all heard of ‘New Year resolutions’- So cRiNgY.. ew. This post is not that, two weeks before new years. I plan to dive head first, cold turkey whatever you wanna call it....

Google is probably your search engine. Google Chrome - your web browser Google flavoured Android + an OEM skin, the OS your phone runs on Xiaomi’s MIUI, OnePlus/Oppo/Vivo’s Oxygen OS, Color OS, Samsung’s OneUI, literally anything other than iPhones probably run Android + proprietary Google software. YouTube? your source for video content Often the only source of video hosting at such a cheap, subsidized rate. Not to mention - censorship 😷 and corporate gaslighting with the deadly recommendation algorithm....

“I trust Mozilla more than Google; the problem is Mozilla trusts Google more than you” Google is the default search engine on Firefox. All their app store screenshots feature Google Search. No self hosted F-Droid repo. It’s again Google Play. Google is their primary & only ‘real’ source of income. Ironically their only real competitor. Do they want to promote privacy friendly social media? I see no PeerTube or Mastodon accounts to follow; it’s again Twitter & YouTube....

Whaat? you use Linux? aRe yOu sOme hAcKeR? No, that’s not how I perceive it. People & the media - have confused us with the term hacker. I mean hacking as in a hacksmith someone who is playfully clever. Tinkering stuff, not just computers, hacking as in life-hacks, not breaching security as such, they too are hackers but not the only ones :0 A musician has total control over their guitar, an artist over the paintbrush 🖌 me & (hopefully) you over our computers The flexible/tinker-able nature of GNU+Linux is one of the reasons I use this over Windows, iOS or MacOS....

If you’ve searched for privacy oriented messaging apps Signal tops that list. By now you’ve probably heard about Signal the centralized, navy blue, metadata resistant messaging app, now anchored by an ex WhatsApp co-founder. Signal values great security and it has strong, out of the box client side end to end encryption, plus forced 2fa called Signal PINs Signal out of the box still lacks a bit of polish. When compared to competition like Telegram or Element/Matrix (As of 2020-10-20) No usernames, hiding phone number visibility....

Unless you’re from the USA (the land of free SMS) you probably use a messaging app like WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal Why? You get cross-device-sync, better features, ditch phone numbers as identifiers, huge privacy gains, stickers & share media in an instant! SMS is costly, outside of the US. At least in India - I don’t think I have ever used SMS other than receiving OTP codes, when signing up for some services....