Technology and sanity?
This section will be a bit vast in scope, technology here means pretty much anything software/hardware, and I just want to do things to feel more in control and retain as much sanity as possible related to any technology. That could mean creating something, hosting something someone else made, or maybe even removing something that I don't actually need?
I want to take back my time.
I want to have dead simple solutions to my own technology problems.
I want to own the things I care about.
I want to minimize the effects of enshittification on my life.
I want to share back what's good.
I did some research, and it seems like the current (2026) best way to obtain more privacy and control in the mobile/smartphone area is to buy what is currently the best supported android phone for "alternative OSes" (which ironically is the Google Pixel). I got a fairly good deal on the used market, the flagship models are absolutely not required to get a snappy experience these days. It's fairly affordable!
Currently I've installed GrapheneOS, a very privacy respecting phone OS. You can find good FLOSS alternatives to all the usual apps (at least for the apps I used) on the F-Droid store + via apk distributions on github (utilities like Obtanium exist to make this easy + check for new releases).
Navidrome is a lightweight, fast, and feature-rich music server. It allows me to listen to my own music collection in peace.
I have also started collecting physical music CD's again, you get good quality audio, and CD's take up "not too much" space. In the future I might drop the plastic cases for a folder, but for now the plastic is nostalgic and part of the appeal! fun!
Spreadsheets repeatedly come back as a really handy piece of software, useful for short data testing / exploration / just a place to dump some numbers and toy around with them (and not even really commit to keeping the experiment for later...) I'm positive there's a good simple solution out there. Something I can link to and share with others.
I'm increasingly worried about malicious code being run as the current user on my development machine. Especially now in the age of LLM's running code left and right (even when you have it set to ask you before every command it runs, the risk is there). When I work on stuff I have a few secrets needed (often in the form of a .env file in a repository). I realise I don't need to have these secrets in plain text at all times (for all repos!).
An observation is that I usually only touch a small handful of repositories a day, so i should be able to tap my hardware security key once a day for those repos. I think this could help a little bit on anxiety.