Nerds Against Clutter: My Digital Downsizing Diary

Declutter and letting go.

  • Dropping Discord, Diaspora, Daily.dev, maybe Pixelfed and Mastodon next (done, by March 2024). Too buggy, too noisy.
  • Kissed Google Keep goodbye and embraced Obsidian even more, thanks to the Importer plugin.
  • Trying to escape the WhatsApp surveillance state. I'm axing useless groups left and right.
  • Scrubbing my old web presence. It's like digital housekeeping.
  • Using Syncthing now. Real-time sync across devices without cloud middlemen. Dropbox, you're on notice.
  • Deploying FDUPES for disk decluttering – it's a duplicate file slaughterhouse. Throwing inotifywait into the mix for smart folder monitoring, because who likes manual mess management?
  • Cut down on RSS. I've dropped Wallabag (done by November 2024). I'm still using Miniflux. and Shaarli with their weaknesses. Thinking about it. Bookmarking tools still suck somehow and I can't see a better alternative (yet) for my needs... yuck, so I'm working on my own thing, Tapas. Looking at the market for knowledge and bookmarks management tools, there is room for improvement in how we manage and consume information. Most of the hard work is on you for years with tools that connect to information.
  • Harnessing RSS-Bridge and Miniflux for streamlined info feeds. Using Changedetection for the unRSS-able stuff, i.e to monitor some indexes, lists, legal terms, release pages.
  • My tab hoarding was legendary, now capped at 18 with Tab Limiter. Browser zen achieved.
  • I have been known by my colleagues and partner to keep too many tabs open. My nerves cracked at reading other folks suffering same issue. So I decided to close a number of them, and limit each Window to 18 tabs with Tab Limiter.

Exploring and creating.

  • Blogging's up, but it's a discipline game. Need to turn Obsidian hoarding into public wisdom. Notebooks over phones, knowledge over scrolling.
  • Taming my Brave extension zoo with Context. It's like a digital bouncer for my browser. Funny, now I've more UX/Privacy oriented extensions than tabs.
  • Eyeing Geeqie to outsmart duplicate photos. Even my pixels need to be minimal.
  • n8n (Zapier/IFTTT alternative) is my new digital butler, still a bit rough around the edges. Coding my own automation magic because their recipes are just appetizers for my needs. For the record I'm now using it to automate RSS feeds triage and automate the web archiving of some bookmarks as I feel archiving beats bookmarking.
  • Diving back into Rust. Cooking up something for productivity and knowledge management. Stay tuned.
  • And of course, some snowballs and video gaming to keep things balanced and fun.

To be continued.