A dedicated place to share all of our wins! Welcome to our 45th week of privacy & security wins
Now, this only works if you all want it to work. That means:
Don’t be shy! Even the smallest win is something you can share. The more of you who contribute the better it is for everyone
Be positive. Remember we’re all in different places of our journey. Someone enabling 2FA on their first account can be just as excited as someone who figured out how to install Qubes on their new system. Give each other some love!
Join The Weekly Stream
Each 2025-03-07T22:00:00Z@Henry will be streaming on YouTube to share your wins on the Techlore channels. Don’t miss the stream, it’s a great way to live-engage with others and see your comments be featured
Don’t miss the stream 2025-03-07T22:00:00Z Be there, share it around, and let’s get active! Featuring @ArmoredPixels question from last week. Leave your new wins below to have them covered in the next stream.
I have actually started using [Olive Editor | olivevideoeditor.org] for video editing. I wasn’t doing that before because the audio was crap, but it turns out all you had to do is switch the backend to JACK to fix it. Unfortunately it still uses C++, so it sometimes dies with no explanation. I might consider rewriting the whole thing in Rust at some point in the future.
Clarification for previous week’s win (the encrypted folder):
My PC thinks that it connects to a regular SFTP share with a password (and I set it up to automatically do that at boot), but on the backend the server uses the password for the share to decrypt a virtual hard drive, which it provides to the PC
It is completely automatic, I just boot my PC, and I get a network folder in /storage
Two Things
I have Finally Finished Up My Tech Blog At Bear Blogs Welcome To MY Blog | Mohamad2000 Fun Blog
And I’m using Kofi For Income instead of YouTube AD Sense
New to the forum. First off, I want to thank @Henry for his excellent evaluation last week about the politics of privacy. I really treasure the areas of my life where folks from the political right, center and left can find common ground and purpose. Privacy is certainly one of those areas. Well said, Henry!
As for my wins, I’ve been on a mission since January to accomplish the following 3 goals for my wife and I:
Decouple from subscription-based services - reduce $ tiers or go off them altogether when an alternative presents itself.
Harden our digital footprint - replace our decades-old spreadsheet of simple passwords, delete old/unused accounts, remove non-required PI from the rest. Delete auto-payments and payment methods on file.
Reduce tracking avenues - Move away from reliance on Microsoft, Google and Apple in general, exit social media where possible, move to ETE messaging, stop using ISP DNS service.
There are a lot of little wins, but here are my favs:
Moved our Google Workspace email/drive to Proton Duo. We are mostly done with that now.
Moved our Apple/Google photos to Synology Photos (I’ve had a NAS for years but had no idea what it was capable of!)
Moved 10 years of Evernote to Synology Notes on our NAS.
Replaced my iphone 12pro with Pixel 8 Ebay refurbished and installed Graphene OS. Works well so far (did NOT install social apps, I access them all through the Vanadium browser that comes with Graphene.)
Switched our whole family to Signal for our group and solo chats.
Bought a new router and set up NextDNS on it (I just wish Proton VPN played better with that).
Switched my SO over from OneDrive to Synology drive and Synology Photos on both her phone and PC. It was also causing her issues for quite some time, Synology itself is way less in the way.
I’ll check other Synology apps with her and see what we may use (like Synology notes) so she doesn’t lose any data from local apps on her devices
Thinking about buying a cheap single bay Synology NAS for Synolofy drive ShareSync and also a offsite backup location. I’d hook it up at my parent’s house so they would also have their PC backed up. I manually back up the NAS to a external drive but that would be a proper solution.
Got my uncle who would backup photos to Onedrive to now use Filen to do so. (He initially was backing up to Onedrive, he started having frustrating issues with it I’ve used the chance to move him to another cloud provider).
Now for most this might be an odd Choice but I had to use it’s lifetime plan as a bargaining chip so I had higher chances of convincing them so. On top of it’s generous 10 Gigs + 10 More when referring to them (which is what I did to start them at 20 gigs), Again in my opinion makes it for the best bargaining chip among the encrypted cloud storage providers. So while the rest of his files are on Onedrive, at least the photos are stored encrypted.
I could have convinced him to use Ente Photos but on top of it only starting at 5 gigs, There’s no bargaining chip I could use with Ente Photos.
But hey, if it works, it freaking works!
Speaking of, before this I also reinstated their Signal Messenger as they somehow logged out, Maybe after recovering from backup signal didn’t properly login so they had to redo it. But hey I’m able to contact them here now!
Fully committed to self-hosted Immich to replace Google Photos.
It’s been a long time coming, but Immich has come a long way and I’m finally ready to bring my wife on board. And she loves it. More storage, less nagging from Google that she’s running out of space, and still with all the features she loves.
And I set up a backup system, which was the reason why I didn’t adopt Immich earlier. Now I have Borg to backup daily to my NAS, then rclone to sync weekly to Backblaze B2.
After I decluttered my house I went to an electronic waste drop-off to recycle my old hardware(old phones, broken keyboard, etc). It felt good I used encryption on my old Hard Drives before, thanks to my past self! Now I can live comfortably knowing my data is safe even after its end of life!
I still use the GasBuddy website, (force it to desktop mode on a phone and it will work, no app needed,) I just don’t bother with reporting prices anymore.
Welcome to our 45th week of privacy & security wins 
Be there, share it around, and let’s get active! Featuring 
