The Culling

Culling 2022: The daily BookBub newsletter

Today I yoinked another newsletter, BookBub. I did this despite BookBub doing exactly what it sets out to do: Highlight sales on books in genres I’m interested in.

I did this for a few reasons:

  • As a general part of this year’s culling, winnowing out inessential things and clutter from my life
  • My book reading has fallen off a cliff this year
  • I have a backlog of books to read for when I climb back to the top of the cliff
  • The majority of the BookBub recommendations are for unknown authors and my hit/miss ratio with them has left me increasingly risk-averse
  • A corollary to that: Established authors rarely show up in BookBub deals

My inbox has gone from being essentially unmanageable (so many newsletters coming in that I just plain didn’t read some of them) to so svelte I can breeze through it in a few minutes.

I like it.

Here is a cat seizing the day. And the mail.

Even more 2022 pruning: No way, no HEY

Apologies for the terrible title.

I knew the people behind HEY’s email service had controversial opinions on running a business, and I mostly ignored them, because I found HEY does some genuinely interesting stuff with email. But after reading the latest piece from co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson I could no longer in good conscience continue to use the service. I’m paid up until April 23, 2023, so I have plenty of time to move stuff over to another email platform, likely Outlook as I already have an active account with the service, but it’s still going to be a big ol’ bother after having already done this once already moving away from Gmail.

But when you throw in with monumentally shitty people like Elon Musk, you are basically telling me you don’t want my business. So I am done with HEY. And I save $100 a year as a bonus. HEY, that’s pretty nice.

The Culling Continues: Blowing away iCloud Photos

While this is independent of the rather freaky story on MacRumors about corrupted videos and photos from unknown sources appearing on iCloud for Windows, I have still decided to ultimately turn off iCloud Photos. The biggest downside to this is I’ll no longer have photos taken on my iPhone automatically be made available on other devices, which is an admittedly nice feature.

Turning this off also means I’ll no longer have a backup of my photos on Apple’s servers (which may not be a bad thing if the above story hints to the stability and security of their infrastructure), so I’ll need an alternative. Here’s my plan, because I love a good plan and also lists:

  • Store photos in another cloud service. I have OneDrive, and it’s already automatically uploading photos from my phone to its cloud server, so this part is happening now.
  • Store photos in a NAS (local network storage). I’ve had a Synology NAS for awhile and have now set up the Synology Photos app to backup my photos from the phone. I’ll move the photos over in batches (I have…a few) until they are all in place, then will have the app on the phone set to only upload new photos going forward.

Once I have both of the above in place, I’ll delete the photos I have stored in iCloud and then turn off iCloud Photos. This will also make it easier to drop all Apple services save for Apple Music (I’m still paying for 200 GB of iCloud storage), and make it easier to move to a different phone in the future if I decide to do that.

You may be thinking I am souring on Apple–and you would be right! But that is a rant for another day.