My life on The Internets: a year later

It’s been a year since I changed the way I deal with my Internet presence. I would like to share some updates in this article. In short, I am pretty satisfied with my current setup but a few things could be improved.

I am more than happy with Fastmail (affiliate link) for emails, calendars and contacts. It works very well! It has everything I ever needed and the support team has been amazing! The only missing feature is that, when sending a calendar invite from my phone or laptop, it uses my Fastmail email address (account@fastmail.com) instead of the email with my own domain. This should be supported soon, though.

I don’t use any Instant Messaging application anymore (I was using Google Talk before). Instead, I rely on emails and SMS. There is Slack now too :-) I started to use WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook now, ugh! Not my best choice but it is a bit like fighting against Skype with family/friends, it is a tough job.

Another “complicated battle” is related to the use of encrypted emails. I still send more clear text emails than encrypted ones. It is a bit sad but no a huge surprise, I guess. I don’t think people care enough about privacy and GPG is complicated. On the same topic, I don’t use iPGMail on my iPhone anymore.

A few months ago, I bought a Raspberry Pi 2 for my place. I wanted to try self-hosting, i.e. hosting my server and thus keeping my data and my services at home. I first installed Tiny Tiny RSS, the best RSS feed reader ever! The feature I love is the daily email digest. Every morning, I get an email at 8am, offering a few links to read. Because there is an abstract for each link, I can skip those I am not interested in so that I do not spend too much time reading.

I am also self-hosting a Pastebin-like called ZeroBin and ownCloud. ownCloud 8 is amazingly stable and fast and it is now possible to replace Dropbox (or Drive). It can also be used to self-host calendars and contacts. I don’t want to self-host my emails though. Emails are rather critical and should not be unavailable for too long.

At work, we chose to use ownCloud to self-host most of our tools, including files, calendars, and contacts. I may consider moving my personal calendars and contacts from Fastmail to my ownCloud instance as well. We’ll see. In case you don’t want to manage your “own” ownCloud, there are countless providers. In France, I would recommend Framadrive.

Last but not least, I keep using Instapaper, likely the only web application that I am not self-hosting at the moment. Wallabag seems more and more what I need, though. I don’t know why I am still relying on Instapaper instead of Wallabag, maybe because changing habits is hard?

One more thing by the way… I did not find any Disqus alternative yet :-(