Journal

While I’m critical towards the Signal messenger, I understand that network effects are strong and even though many people would much rather prefer a different platform, it’s not easy to get friends and family onto something better. In this brief write-up, I’ll introduce an alternative Signal client to make using Signal at least slightly less troublesome.

According to my analytics dashboard, there’s a 70% chance you’re reading this on your phone. Maybe at home, or maybe while commuting to work, using your mobile data connection, for which you’ve probably signed up on a mobile contract. A contract for which you had to prove that you are you, likely by showing your national ID or passport. A contract for which you have to pay regularly, probably using a bank account that you also had to identify yourself for upon opening.

As announced back in the update of Q4/2023, I went ahead and ordered a Star Labs StarBook Mk VI with an AMD Ryzen processor to finally replace my previous laptop and eventually my workstation. This is a brief review of the device itself, without going too much into software details.

An overview of privacy-focused, decentralized, open source alternatives to popular non-free spyware instant messengers like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Viber, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and Apple iMessage.

Every time one of my posts on this journal ends up somewhere on Reddit Lemmy, Twitter Mastodon Nostr Bluesky or Hacker News, lots of people seem to be irritated by the site’s URL. Hence, let me do a quick introduction into what’s called Punycode, and why I’m using this domain name.

A while ago I stumbled upon a simple yet surprisingly interesting question on Hacker News, which seemed to have some people (re-)evaluate their current setups and look for ways to improve. Hence I figured that it might be an interesting subject to cover.