A dramatic photo of clouds I shot over the Fraser River.
I have not just turned off OneDrive on my Windows 11 PC, I have uninstalled it! All of my files, photos and electronic doodads are now stored locally and/or on my NAS, until such time that I choose to store some of them “in the cloud” again. And if I do, that big fluffy cloud will not be floating over the hellscape that forms the current political realm known as the United States.
I ponder, but for now, I’m all local, baby. And you know what? It actually feels kind of good. Not even retro (though it definitely has a retro vibe, as well), just…nice. I never really needed cloud storage before, it was just a perk. And now that it’s gone, I’m perfectly fine with that.
And yet I do. And yet I must, because the machines we use that are “smart” or “advanced” are designed by humans, and we are imperfect, and the devices we make are in our own image.
But in olden times I actually kind of enjoyed hunting down a solution to an issue, fixing it, and basking in the glory of the fix.
Today I just want things to work, so I can look at more cat pics.
A while back, I noticed my Mac Studio getting quite warm, even when idle and with only a few simple programs running. I checked the back, which has a billion holes to blow out generated heat, and it seemed fine. I was puzzled. My solution was to just turn my Mac off and stick to the PC. Switching back and forth is a bit of a pain, anyway, and it gave me time to mull over how Apple’s IOS-ification of macOS is not really a good thing.
Generally, the Mac is just not as fun to use anymore.
Still, I eventually devised a simple plan: I would use a super-strong vacuum to pull out any ingested dust through those billion little holes, then see if the Mac’s high temperature improved (by getting lower). To prep the Mac, I unplugged everything from it, picked it up and DEAR GOD WHAT I SAW WHEN I TURNED IT UPSIDE DOWN.
Normally I take photos of everything, but I think I was so shocked this time I forgot.
You see, the Mac Studio handles cooling with fans that draw air in from the bottom, then blow the hot air out the back. You might be thinking, “How do you pull air in through the bottom when it’s, like, the bottom?” And it’s because the Mac Studio actually sits on a big round foot that is surrounded by somewhat less than a billion holes. It looks like this:
Not mine, my desk isn’t that fancy.
When I turned over my Mac Studio, those holes were covered in a thick layer of dust. If dust could be encrusted, I would describe it as encrusted. It was coming off in clumps.
As mentioned, I was too shocked/appalled to take a photo, but here’s the Swiffer duster I used to take the initial layer of dust off:
I suffer eternal nerd shame for this.
Anyway, today I’m going to try powering on the Mac Studio and see if it doesn’t overheat because actual airflow is happening again.
I saw this blog post linked on Mastodon and Joan Westenberg does an excellent job on summarizing what I am trying to achieve, in part, with what I call The Culling–trying to rid myself of as much reliance on, and use of Big Tech as possible, while understanding it’s impossible to completely escape all of it, unless you go live in a mud hut and hunt squirrels or something.
But the point isn’t perfection. The point is intention.
You don’t have to be all or nothing. You don’t have to make every decision a moral battlefield. You don’t have to sever every tie to every compromised system – and you sure as hell don’t have to do it overnight.
You have to engage. You have to stay aware. You have to keep questioning the default.
For me, I:
Still use YouTube (Google)
Still own an iPhone (Apple), though admittedly it is four generations behind the latest
Still blog on WordPress (whose owner has been on an erratic and misguided crusade over the past year)
And so on
I am glad to be done with Meta, I have no plans to buy future Apple hardware, and I’m dropping all Microsoft products, save for the operating system of my PC (Windows 11) because Linux is not quite there yet. It’s ongoing and it can be a pain, but in the end it gives me clarity and I feel more in control, less spied on and, maybe, just a little more content in a world that seems to want to snatch all contentment away and eject it into space.
I got this in my email this morning. It was titled thusly:
I assume dope still means “awesome” in 2025. I am dope, woo.
Then the body of the email, with further info bits redacted:
Wow, a free t-shirt, for me? I am dope, so I guess I deserve it. I am especially curious how Peter stumbled upon my IG profile, since it doesn’t exist any more. Perhaps he saw it before I had it deleted. Perhaps Peter has access to a time machine and travelled back in time to when the account was still active, and also loaded up on a bunch of t-shirts while back in 2015 or whatever.
In any case, I appreciate having style and being dope, so thanks, Peter.
P.S. I may have categorized your missive as a salty pork-based product that comes in a can.
Scalzi is an eminently reasonable person and given that my Culling™ often has an ethical component to it (I didn’t drop my Microsoft 365 subscription just because the price was going up), I found his take on billionaire boycotts well-articulated.
Vivaldi the browser, not Vivaldi, the long-dead composer, which would be very weird.
As Mozilla changes (or invents) its terms of use and seems to be moving more toward a selling your data/AI nonsense model similar to Chrome, I am looking at alternatives, such as Firefox forks:
Zen
LibreWolf
Floorp
And the one Chromium browser I’m willing to consider:
Vivaldi
Vivaldi has lots of customizability, which appeals to me, but the Chromium part does not, as it is, in some ways, beholden to Google, which runs Chromium as an open source project, and is always looking out for its best interests, which is to bury the internet in ads so it can make billions of dollars from them. Thus, Chromium is bending toward a future where ad blockers and such will be crippled. I’m not opposed to ads, but there are very few sites that run ads in a way that isn’t invasive, resource-hogging and obnoxious. Vivaldi does have its own blocker built-in, I’ll see how well it works.
I’m also considering moving from DuckDuckGo to a non-American search engine, such as Startpage, which I’ve been puttering around with tonight. Basically, I’m upending most of the software I’ve been using for years, because that’s the world we live in now, and I find as I get older, I am becoming more rascally and willing to stand on principles and all that radical stuff.
You may be thinking this is crazy in the age of streaming “all you can listen to” music, especially since I am subbed to Apple Music on the family plan (sharing with my partner). And maybe it is!
But I can only run Apple Music through a browser on Linux and my preferred media player on Windows, which is, er, Media Player, cannot “see” the DRM-addled streaming music downloads of Apple Music, so if I want to listen to something there, I have to provide a local copy, hence downloading a song from iTunes for the first time in years.
On the plus side, it’s DRM-free and fully portable, so I can move it around wherever I like, to any system I want, just like in the olden days of ten years ago.
When I first clicked the Cancel subscription button, it took me here:
From there, I had to keep scrolling to get to judgy I don’t want my subscription button, which lets you actually cancel:
I don’t blame Microsoft for making a pitch to keep me, and this is way easier than cancelling Amazon Prime, as it’s just a bit of scrolling on a single page.
Anyway, in less than a month, I am off the cloud and, uh, on the ground, or some other metaphor I haven’t quite worked out yet. I had used this sub mainly for the OneDrive storage, but Microsoft is a company I’m trying to minimize all contact with (see previous post) and this is one of the biggest steps I can take.
Not in UFOs and aliens that will save us from ourselves, that’s to be determined.
But I do believe in the power of us as individuals to resist big tech, to take back control, and, if incrementally, make the world a better place than it is now.
When I talk about The Culling, it’s not just a list of services or products I’m dropping to save money, it also represents taking away access from giant tech companies that are long past providing a good user experience and simply looking to extract as much value as they can from our personal data (and money from our wallets, if they can get that, too), it’s about regaining autonomy over my digital life and the collective data I’ve put out there since I connected my first 1200 baud modem1I skipped the 300 baud era, I’m not THAT old. to an online service. When I choose to put my photos and pictures on a local drive or NAS instead of “in the cloud”, it’s a decision to deny direct access to my personal files to a tech company that cares nothing for me as an individual except as an entity to be squeezed out of as much money and information as possible, to make it richer, even though it already generates more wealth than it could ever need.
So yeah, it’s also, in a way, a protest of sorts against the unfettered capitalism that has poisoned the western world in particular, where avarice and the constant need for more has perverted companies into rent-seeking, data-pillaging monsters.
I’ve said it before and will echo it again now: There are no more tech good guys when it comes to the big tech companies, if there ever were.
None of these companies truly want to do what’s best for their customers. They just want your money and all of your personal information:
Apple
Google
Microsoft
Meta
And so many others that aren’t quite as big as these four
That isn’t a ranked list, BTW, but if it was, Meta would be #1 with a bullet, as they are quite literally OK with people dying if it gets their platforms engagement. Anyone using any of their services should stop right now–you are enabling one of the most monstrously rotten companies on the planet.
In the meantime, I’m over here, still trying to determine the best new home for my blog, to get it away from WordPress and the control of a single person who has started an unhinged crusade to “protect” it, no matter how many people or companies he hurts or destroys along the way, and reducing my online presence across the board. I read blogs again. I participate on Mastodon, a social media platform that has no ads, no algorithm and no incentives or structure to add either. It’s quieter, it’s nicer, and it’s more human.
We can have a better future, we just need to keep pushing for it, and put in the effort to make the changes we want to see.
I said this to Nic tonight in reference to him checking what people on eBird have reported seeing at a local park where we’re planning to do some birding.
The full question I posed was:
Remember surprises, before the internet?
It’s nice to be able to research things in advance, but I feel we’re losing something by constantly doing that and stripping away all surprise and mystery from…everything. Little things, big things, medium-sized things. Just look it up! No need to imagine, or wonder, just look it up, be as efficient as possible and leave nothing to chance.
I might be turning into a cranky old man, but really, I think I’m just kind of fed up with the way the world is. We’re losing our humanity in ways that we may never recover. But maybe we’re destined to be giant throbbing brains, anyway. How many quatloos would you bet on that?
I rarely open the iCloud program on my Windows PC, but when I have recently, this is what I see:
The circle of coloured dots slowly spins mesmerizingly as it teases that it’s “Signing in…” but it never signs in. Until I go to icloud.com in my browser, relaunch the program, and then it works. I don’t know if this is a coincidence, but it has “fixed” the issue each time.
More quality work from the company devoted to squeezing as much as it can from its customers, because tens of billions in pure profit is not enough. I know I promised not to gripe about Apple as much on this blog anymore, but they make it so easy now.
But I do promise to not gripe as much going forward. For reals. If for no other reason than I use Apple devices increasingly less these days.
