Over the last five years or so, I’ve really grown irked at a lot of the services provided to consumers by cloud vendors, particularly the two big ones in mobile: Google and Apple. I can’t say why, exactly, but something about that reached a head and I decided to do something about it in early this year. I started playing around with NextCloud in February. I liked what I saw, but decided that maintaining it 24/7 on janky, decade old hardware wasn’t a good idea. I wanted something much more reliable.
That’s when I discovered HomeDrive. For $299 they’ll sell you an Intel NUC box that’s preinstalled with their software. The specific box that they sell was retailing for between $250 and $325 in the online stores I checked. That’s just the hardware. It has a 1 TB SSD and 4GB of RAM. Everything is running in Docker. It is NextCloud hosted on your own hardware. They do light management of the NextCloud software (updates, additional features). They provide you a web endpoint, but I also mapped a subdomain on another domain I own to it. You can turn anything that has to do with them off and I may do that eventually.
I’m no longer putting any of my new files, photos, music, etc into either Google or Apple’s clouds. In the last month, I’ve migrated all of my photos out of Apple’s cloud except for a few that I chose to keep there. I copied all of the photos from my Google Pixel 2 & 3 days and early return to IOS into the NextCloud server via Google Takeout. I haven’t deleted it from Google yet (not that you can truly ever choose to delete anything). I will. But I need to do some additional work looking into indexing/searching the photos in NextCloud. I’ve done some of that research, but I’m not ready to execute changes yet.
I have my entire MP3 collection loaded, and am pretty much adding some new app and the data to power that app every week. I’ve got a bit over 250gb on that SSD.
Month: April 2021
Climate and Air Travel
I’ve seen a lot of attempts to rationalize air travel as not being as destructive as it really is. Possibly, at an “average human” level some of those rationalizations are true. Perhaps, as with so many other things, the problem is a few wealthy individuals and some corporations. The folks at Possible have a study on this. You can download it at the link below. Some highlights include:
In the USA just 12% of people take a massive 66% of flights.
In France 50% of flights are taken by a tiny 2% of the population.
And here in the UK, a mere 15% of the population take 70% of all flights.
Elite Status: How a small minority around the world take an unfair share of flights. — Possible
Emissions from flying are threatening to crash the climate – but not everyone is equally responsible. Our latest report, ‘Elite Status: global inequalities in flying’, reveals that in almost all of the countries with the highest aviation emissions, a small minority of people take up a huge share of