Brave is a web browser based on the Chromium web-engine influenced by Google The browser is surprisingly free/libre software: licensed under the Mozilla Public license just like Firefox. Before you @ me, this is not like the many, many one sided posts about Brave with a mountain load of FUD. If you’ve been living under a rock — Brave Software (the company behind the browser) takes vanilla Chromium, adds their patches, including privacy-protections and slap a ton of branding....

Free Software is software that respects the user’s freedom $ free 🤔? To someone who is not a programmer, this sounds totally absurd. What the heck is freedom? that these people keep talking about? I thought it meant software — that was free of charge. Respects the user from what? Bullying? Ads? Time? I have no clue what you’re talking about. But to a GNU/Linux nerd this perfectly makes sense 👨‍💻 Huh?...

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’. If I recall correctly it was — an Adobe AIR App that ran locally, and you could share your scratch projects online after you setup a username and password. Yep, flash used to be popular in those days....

I’m preparing for competitive entrance exams. 1.2 Million students write the ‘JEE’ 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 latter half of the year. Good videos take time to produce, something that’s hard to do when you’re editing on a broken [16:8.9956076] display. The videos, feel better in my head :^...

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. Chrome? — your web browser Google flavoured Android + your OEM skin, the OS your phone runs on I’m talking about — 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? — it’s the 2nd biggest search engine after Google Often the only source of video hosting at such a cheap, subsidized rate....

“I trust Mozilla more than Google; but 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....