Journal

No coffee for a week? Taking cold showers for thirty days? Ten push-ups a day for a year? How about comitting at least a single line of code every day for five years? I’m in!

In the age of visually stunning graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and interactive designs, there exists a timeless elegance in the simplicity of purely text-based interfaces. From command line interfaces (CLIs) to plain text file formats like Markdown, the beauty of text lies not only in its minimalistic aesthetic but also in the efficiency and clarity it brings to digital interactions.

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.