Privacy-oriented tech overhaul
After experiencing 20% battery drain on my Macbook M1 in less than 10 minutes when chromium wasn't even running, I'd like to move away from big tech wherever possible. Techwashing and the dire state of the world motivate me to Stop enabling the surveilance state. This means:
- Making my laptop setup with nix and nix-darwin, and wiping my laptop to clear out the crap. Only installing what I need, and feeling free to purge it whenever.
- Harden firefox
- Getting off Microsoft
- Getting off Google.
- Delete Gmail, move all possible accounts to fastmail (check bitwarden, unimportant accounts I can just delete and remake later)
- Export Google maps lists and find a better alternative, probably https://organicmaps.app/ , it has Wikipedia POIs. When it comes to recommendations, I'd rather manage them myself, anyway. I can export and share bookmarks via cloud sharing. For navigation, https://www.magicearth.com/ looks good, and I don't need to pay unless I need offline navigation.
- Getting off Apple.
- Preparing my cloud storage move by filtering out photos and videos I don't want to keep. Delete large videos, then go through photo library with a kind machine gun. This requires answering: what media do I really want to keep as I move through life?
- Moving from icloud to ente ($3.48/month, can share with up to 5 friends) and filen ($3/month if more than 10gb). iCloud is currently $4.49/month for 200gb, but this will give me way more file storage (and be cheaper if I keep my cloud-backed files at less than 10gb)
- Finding an alternative phone and OS. Depending on how https://keepandroidopen.org/ goes, I could get an Android and root it. https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play or microg.org looks promising. My preference atm would be a cheap secondhand Pixel with Graphene (EXIF stripped from photos by default, yummy).
After finding out that apps cannot clean themselves up on my Mac, and that Apple seems to leave heaps of shit behind, I'm keen to use my declarative config to
- Wipe my Mac and reinstall only my declarative config, hopefully with few issues
- If the above doesn't clear up a lot of storage, or I get sick of resetting my Mac, look at Linux based laptops with good battery life