Kavka

I really like DuckDuckGo, Mullvad VPN and Mullvad Browser. These are great tools that improve my online privacy.

What makes me sad, is the fact that these are tools that should not be needed in the first place. Missing the old Web 1.0 days is not just about nostalgia or about being a retrogrouch (I am!), it's also about online privacy.

25 years ago the most privacy invading form of tracking was a visitor counter in the footer of your favourite website. It's crazy to think about how much things have changed.

The web was such an innocent place not that long ago.

According to some reports Niamh Sweeney, a former senior Meta lobbyist, is set to join the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) as a commissioner in October. Now this might sound like a small role just for Ireland, but Ireland is responsible for regulating all businesses located in Ireland. That includes most of the Big Tech companies operating in European Union from Ireland.

• noyb: Former Meta lobbyist named DPC Commissioner

My initial thought was that this is good news. Who would know Meta's policies better than a former Meta employee, right? That's probably true, but the more I thought about this the more I started worrying that maybe all is not well. Maybe it really is a case where "US Big Tech now officially policing itself".

A nerdy week is coming to an end. I've recently installed Emacs on my computer and try to use it as my main editor.

I haven't really used Emacs since the 1990s. I've tried it every now and then but mostly I've moved on to other editors. Mostly I just use something simple like nano or something more full featured like Visual Studio Code. I think Emacs sits somewhere between those two. I think this time I'm trying to replace nano with Emacs and keep VS Code for coding purposes.

I'm suffering from a severe case of AI overdose. I'm starting to agree with Linus Torvalds that 90% of AI is marketing hype.

Yes, there's a lot of hype. Yes, AI has some good use cases and AI has saved me a bunch of time on some tasks. But still, the hype is just so overwhelming at the moment that I'm starting to think that Linus Torvalds might be on to something.

I guess hype is what always happens when a new tech emerges. Things will settle down and then we'll see what this is really about. AI will change a lot of things, that's for sure. Hopefully for the better.

I'm a huge advocate of online privacy and I've always thought about using Tails linux as my daily operating system.

Tails is not really designed for daily use. If you DuckDuckGo using Tails as a daily driver you'll probably find dicussions saying that it should not or could not be done. Of course it can be done, but if you should depends on your needs and what you use your computer for.

My reason to use Tails is to avoid online tracking and profiling. I know Tails is overkill for that, but I think it works very well. It's liberating to know that everytime you boot up your computer and start browsing the web you start pretty much with a clean state.

I've been using Tails for a few weeks now (outside work) as my daily OS. I'll write a longer post about my experiences later on.

I think Les Chants de L’Aurore by Alcest is one of the best (if not the best!) albums of 2024.

• Alcest

I've got the vinyl version and now I'm listening the FLACs on my iPod classic using Rockbox. It's brilliant! It's funny how music this heavy can sound so classy when it's in French :D

I started using my old iPod Classic again! Using the iPod is a weird mix of nostalgia, convenience and sound quality.

My iPod is a 120GB iPod Classic (6th gen or sometimes referred to as 6.5 gen) from around 2008. This was my main mode of listening to music before I moved on to smartphones and Spotify. I have a pretty decent collection of mp3's (ripped by me from my personal CD collection) and some FLAC files I've bought from Bandcamp or directly from the artists.

Rockbox

I installed Rockbox on the iPod. It's an alternative open source operating system that can play FLAC files and a lot of other formats. The best part is that thanks to Rockbox I can use whatever software I want to transfer my music between the iPod and my computer.

• Rockbox

Rockbox makes me feel that I really own the device. Using iTunes always felt uncomfortable and I don't want to be tied to Apples' ecosystem.

Modding the iPod

If you search the web for iPod Classics you'll soon run into a pretty serious modding scene around iPods. This is super interesting!

My battery is in a pretty bad shape and I think that might be the first upgrade I will make. Replacing the hard drive with an SD or CF card might also be a good idea.

Ownership

We'll see if my iPod will fall permanently into my daily flow of listening to music and podcasts, but so far I like it. There's something liberating in concentrating to listening to music without any distractions.

With Rockbox I feel like I really own the device and that I can do whatever I want with it. Listening to ripped mp3's or FLAC files I feel like I own the music I bought. Using my iPod I'm totally out of reach from Spotify's or Apple's music algorithms.

I'm playing around with self-hosting Supabase. It seems pretty cool!

I had heard of Supabase before but somehow I had totally missed the option to self-host it. It might be a good fit for a new sideproject I have in mind.

• Supabase Docs: Self-hosting

Hey, I'm on Status Cafe! Take a look, it's the coolest, most minimalistic status update site I've ever seen.

• Kavka on Status Cafe

Just some quick refelctions for the end of the week:

• I miss the old Internet

• I miss the human touch on the Internet

• I miss the non-commercial side of the Internet

• I'm suffering from a severe AI overdose

• iSH on iPad is pretty cool

• AI Overdose

I started studying law at the Open University. It's been pretty interesting! All this GDPR and digital rights stuff has got me intrigued and I felt like some formal education might be a good idea.

I had already forgotten how fun it is to learn new stuff and challenge yourself! So far, I've only done one introductory course, but I think I will keep on going.

I think I've got a small AI overdose. At work our internal chat is full of posts from my supervisors made with ChatGPT. There's just too much noise and content. I'm thinking to integrate AI into the chat to create short summaries of those posts. And then we can train the AI some more using the AI generated summaries from AI generated content...

Does anyone else feel like were already pretty deep in the AI rabbit hole?

Welcome to my small nest on the web. This is some kind of a tribute to the smol web movements and a place for me to reflect on things that will need reflecting.