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               Privacy and Productivity Tools
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-- Gophed on Tue, Aug 21th

So, it is probably time to make something useful of this
phlog.

There is a small number of topics which I wanted to address
on my personal blog however, being it on my native language,
I don't think I'd get the energy to rewrite them, specially
not using HTML or some fancy Markdown stuff.

The very thing that attracted me the most to the gophersphere
is its simplicity. You are reading my words; BAM, it's simple
as that. No sophisticated software to do it, nothing out of
ordinary, not even bloated browsers, though you may be reading
this from a proxy which allows you to access the gophersphere
from one.

Anyway, let's get to the real thing.

The topic I wanted to address here is... privacy. Or rather,
how and why I actually started worrying about it.

Time and time again, we get bombarded by news talking about
manipulated information and other absurd stuff, all of which,
after thinking about, you see that it's not just nonsense.
When you're a tech savvy guy, you start worrying about this
stuff. And while I'm not an expert, I began taking some
measures to try and minimize the amount of my data that ends
up floating around on the web. Some of those are tools, other
are services. Here is a list of some.

- Protonmail
  I mainly ditched my Google and Hotmail e-mails for this one.
  It's an encrypted e-mail service. Suits well my most crucial
  needs, given that I don't use my email much. And there's also
  the plus that there is no spyware looking at the stuff you send
  or receive.
  it is not perfect, though; this is non-free stuff which may
  cost you extra, depending on your usage. Using a client
  requires you to install their Bridge thing, which is yet
  another JavaScript "desktop" app built using Electron (which
  is also a cute name for "headless Chromium"), in order to
  open a local port so you can connect to your account.
  Some also speculate that it may not be as safe as it seems, but
  I'd rather take the risk than being openly spied.
  Android app is good.

- LineageOS, OpenGAPPS Pico & F-Droid
  This is my Android phone setup.
  It seems I could not run away from Google Apps, so might as well
  use the most lightweight alternative I may find.
  LineageOS is a descendant from Cyanogenmod, which delivers a more
  bloat-free experience for an Android user.
  OpenGAPPS is the default alternative for installing Google Apps on
  custom ROMs, and its Pico variant ensures as less bloat as possible
  (for example, I could escape the hideous Gmail and Google Search
  apps).
  F-Droid is an open app store, built around the idea of supporting
  and accepting only Free Software, which means all apps are open
  source and libre. A friend told me some apps are not really audited
  for malware, though Play Store isn't also the most trustworthy
  app store out there.

- Orgzly & Org files
  This one is a direct strike on Google Calendar and other
  calendar solutions.
  It's been about a year now since I switched my entire agenda
  management to Org files.
  In case you don't know, Org is a special format for storing
  notes in plain text -- which reminds me, it's something that suits
  well the gophersphere. Org has a lot of integration with Emacs text
  editor, which means I also end up using Emacs for more than just
  coding. In fact, by using the org-agenda and the calendar buffers,
  along with some native alerts on Linux, Emacs and Org have basically
  become my main work tools.
  As for Orgzly, it is an app for syncing your notes and keeping them
  on your mobile phone. when you're AFK, Orgzly will help you.
  Remember that whole integration with Emacs I mentioned? Well, Orgzly
  is no Emacs, but it does have a nice widget for you next appointments
  on your home screen, and also has notifications to remind you of the
  stuff you need to do -- you can even reschedule your appointments
  from the notification.

- RSS/Atom Feeds & Elfeed
  Keeping in touch with news is something hard to do there days. It's
  been about seven years since I really watched any TV show, so I
  need to find other ways to read the news. And more importantly,
  it needs to be bearable to read.
  For that, RSS feeds are a good solution, along with their modern
  counterpart, the Atom feeds. These basically serve some information
  in a XML format which can be parsed by your feed reader of choice.
  Now, I've jumped across many feed readers, even used Feedly which,
  though it has an elegant interface and also allows me to open my
  account on whatever device I want, it still collects some data and
  asks all the time about Facebook and Twitter integration (watch out
  for those; these innocent buttons send navigation information to
  those services, even though you don't have an account on them.
  A carefully configured uMatrix browser extension should get rid of
  that), and the Feedly app is so fat my (old) cellphone couldn't
  keep it open along with my music player.
  While I still did not determine a best way to read feeds on mobile,
  enter Elfeed. Elfeed is a tool for Emacs which allows you to read
  RSS and Atom feeds in a separate buffer window. Has a way to filter
  the fetched entries and, if it is an Atom feed, it may even show
  you the full information (along with images, if you're using an X11
  version of Emacs) so you don't even have to open the website on
  your bloated web browser.
  Combine Elfeed with Elfeed-Org, and you can safely store your feeds
  on portable, human-readable org files.

- Podcasts
  Another interesting thing I started doing was listening to various
  podcasts. While most are about tech stuff so I can keep in touch
  with the new tendencies, I also listen to podcasts about
  enterpreneurship, astronomy and even psychology. Must say, this was
  a surprise, since I didn't think I could extract so much knowledge
  from prerecorded audio shows.
  If you're interested, I recommend the libre app AntennaPod. There
  are other podcast aggregators out there, possibly even better; for
  example, if you're stuck with the Google bloatware from your stock
  Android ROM, you can download the Google Podcasts "extension" so
  you can follow and listen to episodes. Mind, though, that while my
  experience with it was very limited to say this conclusively, it
  seems not to allow some basic degree of portability -- which means,
  taking your feeds with you to another podcast aggregator (each feed
  is basically just XML, just like RSS and Atom feeds; you can export
  all your feeds on AntennaPod to an OPML file, which is also glorified
  XML). You can always re-subscribe on your new aggregator, but still...

- NewPipe
  A cute, lightweight and libre app, which allows you to watch YouTube
  videos without having YouTube installed.
  It has awesome features such as floating videos and background audio
  play, which also includes a playlist, if you're just looking for
  listening some music.
  Did I also mention it downloads video/audio and allows you to control
  the video quality globally and before watching?
  This is a blessing for someone like me, which did not have YouTube
  installed. Saved me a lot of megabytes.
  The only two bad things about it is that I don't think it hides your
  traffic from YouTube or from your ISP. Also, there are two versions
  of this app (F-Droid only, since it violates Google's App Store
  policy), and strangely, the Beta version is much more stable than the
  main one.
  It seems that the author is looking forward to SoundCloud integration
  on the near future as well.

- Twidere
  Another nice Android app, this time for microblogging.
  Supports a lot of microblogging clients, including Twitter and
  Mastodon (yay for SDF's Mastodon instance), and multiple accounts.
  At some point, while I still had a Twitter account, it I used both
  at the same time.
  It is libre and has a lot of advanced features such as filters,
  posting the same thing on multiple accounts at the same time, and
  other things.
  Honestly, even if you only use Twitter, there is just no reason
  why you shouldn't use this.



And this is basically it. I might be forgetting a thing or two but, if
I ever remember anything, I'll just create a new phlogpost to share.

If you have any suggestion, you may give me a heads up by getting in
touch, just check my contact info on my gopherhole's index.

Sayonara.
~ alchemist