Oda (Gretchen)

I gave Discord Nitro a try, probably because of some rather nice Warframe skins that came with it, and it's not a bad launcher but a little redundant with some other services. I do like it quite a bit more than the Epic Launcher, though it's still rather bare bones compared to Steam and GOG's launchers and installers.

Pros: The curated list of included games is not bad. It has a few stinkers but for the most part you're going to find some popular games. Dandara, Tooth and Tail, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, Hob, Bioshock Remastered; there's plenty of variety here. There are some extra emoticons and other benefits for Discord users that I didn't really make use of, but some people might like those, and it supports Discord, which is a very nice service.

My virus checker alerted on Dandara and when I wrote in to support about it they said they'd talk to the devs about the false alarm, and not long later I had a fresh and non-alerting version. (I opted to wait for it to pass rather than disable my virus checker.) Support was quick and professional.

When I wanted to cancel my subscription, it didn't end benefits on the day but will wait until the end of the month, and I was able to remove my payment information.

Cons: There's a lot of overlap in the games if you also subscribe to the Humble Monthly or Amazon Prime (giving access to Twitch Prime and some free games every month.) I like Discord's client better than the Twitch client, but we're already using Amazon Prime for other reasons, and am finishing out a Humble Monthly subscription as well, so there's very little available that isn't already there through one of those sources, or isn't an older game that I've already picked up on sale somewhere.

TL;DR: A decent alternative game launcher, probably most interesting if you already use and like Discord, with a good variety of games to play; it adds new games routinely. The launcher is a little better behaved than Epic's and Twitch's. Ultimately I find it too redundant with Twitch Prime and Humble Monthly to continue, but I did use it to try several games out that aren't available through those.

When last seen, I had lost my struggle to de-Google. Google was just too convenient and difficult to replace, and the ease of mobile commenting and reading on Google+ was a lifeline to me. Even better, they had realized that pseudonyms were not harmful and had decided to allow people to use them, so my major impetus had been removed.

Wellll now let's fast forward to 2018, when G+ is a dead cat project. It was NOT the Facebook-killer that they had hoped for, and was constantly accused of being a ghost town despite the thriving and active communities and conversations. Google+ was not a smashing success, but it was a solid social platform, with a good feature set, but it certainly was not making them money hand over fist, and I think they were having trouble figuring out how to monetize it. Also, and I think this is crucial, I think they figured out that they cannot replace human administrative effort with algorithms, and the spam-hunting and harassment adjudication was more work than they really wanted to do. That's likely a big part of why G+ died; the administrative overhead and need for human eyeballs to do it right. Google has a solid distaste for any recurring customer-facing job that can't be fully automated. (I credit Google Voice's continuing if likely up-against-the-wall existence with the fact that it's more fully automated.)

So where am I now?

I'd like a way to keep in touch with the people I met on G+, a wide variety of lovely and interesting folks. I want to be able to be syndicated via RSS (at least the public posts; I can't recall how easy it is to make a feed of the private ones), so that I'm less in a walled garden than I used to be. I wouldn't mind getting back into the habit of writing structured things so that my brain doesn't atrophy into the state of a goldfish. I'd love good mobile support, but I can't have everything. Dreamwidth has most of these things, a dedication to being a stable platform, and a proven track record. Yes, the UI is dated, yes, the mobile support is rudimentary. But the rest of it is golden.

I'm not going to put a lot of my energy onto a site that might get acquired, because I've had too many sites I love get Yahoo'd or sunsetted by Google. I'm highly suspicious of anyone with too much of a profit motive. I don't mind people making a good living out of storing my data, but I'm tired of being treated as disposable, and having the service yanked out from under me the moment it's acquired by new overlords who want to use it in other ways. I've done this dance too many times before. Dreamwidth is the known good, so it's going to be my core hub. Anything else is going to be peripheral. If I do establish any presence on the other alternatives, in order to test the waters, I'll put up a sticky here pointing to them.

I need to clean things up and get used to being here again, but... here I am. Thank you, Dreamwidth, for your stability.

Edited to add: looking back, links into Google's poorly done Photos mode are also now broken from here (I think they broke years ago and I just didn't notice, in one of the various Photos upheavals), so I guess I need to figure out photo hosting, too. Google is too prone to get bored to be a good host, Flickr got Yahoo'd, Instagram is <shudder> Facebook's, so now what?

More on book management... MyBookDroid will import from and export to Goodreads quite well for a beta, though it's not true sync yet. (That's on the roadmap.) It's also a partial import, but still, it hits the important part: shelves. All in all, it gives me the good key features of making it easy to see my list of desired books, so if I'm in a bookstore I can check if the book is on my list, as well as an easy way to import physical books onto my list -- I can scan a book and put it on my 'buy later' list, or scan a book I've just read to easily rate it and import it into Goodreads.

Goodreads itself is proving to be a good social library site, with good privacy options combined with social goodness, something a lot of sites find hard to balance. It's very easy to add books in, especially with app support, and it talks quite well to Calibre.

Calibre is the newest addition, and seems to be a very fine personal library server. I can selectively export to Goodreads, which I like, as well as create records for physical books. It has an ebook reader built-in, and will serve up a library. I wasn't able to get Aldiko to talk to the library, but I tried Moon+ Reader and liked a lot of its other features as well as its ability to see my Calibre library.

I'm also going to give Cool Reader a try because it's GPL, and keep an eye on Book Catalogue, which doesn't seem to have online backup/sync as of yet, and that's something I really need.

In repairing an annoying very intermittent network bug on my phone where it fails to connect to 3g at all (very frustrating as it will happen sometimes to my phone and sometimes to my husband's), I discovered that there is a another general network bug on the LG Optimus V: it is bugged into a mode where it is scanning for cell networks 50% of the time even if you have a solid CDMA connection. The best workaround for this is to put the phone into airplane mode for 15 seconds after booting; this will hold until the next reboot.

There is a small app on the market, Toggle AirplaneMode On Boot that will handle this, or in my case I'm doing it with a Tasker profile that waits until the first crush of booting is done with and then toggles it. There's also an app, Network, which will go straight into the RadioInfo menu for the settings workaround, if airplane mode doesn't work for some reason. Another workaround, which has worked for me when airplane toggle and even rebooting didn't work, was to dismount and remount the SD card. (Buh.) Fixing this setting considerably lowers the Cell Standby battery use, and you can tell if it's working by plugging your phone back in, unplugging it, and checking after a minute: when it's fixed there won't be a stat for 'Time Without Signal' under Cell Standby on the battery history screen, assuming that you have a good signal to Virgin.

I am also able to replace Silent Boot with a Tasker On Shutdown/On Boot profile to mute the hideous Virgin boot sound.

Apps Replaced By Tasker: 4.5; Toggle AirplaneMode On Boot, Silent Boot, and Unlock at Home; I am keeping a backup of Network on my SD card in case I need to dig into that menu later. I am counting Llama, Setting Profiles, and TaskBomb as "1" because I was evaluating them all for similar purposes but hadn't decided which one when I realized that I preferred Tasker even though it's rather fiddly to set up. They're all pretty worthy for someone looking for something simpler.

Apps Added Due to Tasker: 1; AutoShortcut, which allows Tasker to run a shortcut (in my case a music playlist.)

Prying myself out of the cloud is hard when I've continued to be too ill to get much usable time in the day. So I'm going for ambient effects. It's kind of morphing into a general 'why aren't we doing proper backups anyway?' project, too. The backup coverage is not as tragic as all that -- Dropbox and other cloud services are pretty good for covering the gaps, and my raw photos all end up in a locked flickr stream, but there's a definite dependence on external cloud services that I don't want to fix by just paying a new cloud service. (Even though that would at least be a matter of aligned interests.)

So... let's see. Thunderbird still seems useful, but I'm mostly using it for archival and not really reading mail in it. That's probably not a plus, but to be honest I'm not reading/replying to a lot of mail at all. I've noted the presence of a portable Thunderbird, which means it can be run out of a crypted space or cloud synced share or both, and that's very interesting. A synced/encrypted Thunderbird that can live in a dropbox and/or memory stick is about as handy as Gmail without being web-based, and it's very flexible about who it will talk to. The person who kindly hosts my mail has been busy, so no IMAP there yet; I imagine I will want to use Thunderbird a lot more once there's IMAP for my main mail.

I like Dropbox and I liked Mesh before it stopped working on XP, and in general I like multi-way sync, especially with versioning. I do not know if I like Dropbox enough to pay for it, especially with the privacy concerns, even with tack-ons to encrypt the contents (I would rather give money to people who get it right, as a point of principle.) I've been comparing to Spideroak for a while now... but haven't tried the Spideroak sync yet. I think I want to play around with Spideroak sync and then decide. I prefer Spideroak's ethos, and it's a true backup solution with sync tacked on, which may be more what we need anyhow. Where Dropbox really shines is around shared files, so I need to see if Spideroak can be usable that way as well.

Spideroak does seem to work pretty well, with the exception of some cruftiness with iTunes, which is the major reason I use it -- it builds up a lot of copies and I have to go in and manually delete them to make room. What I'd like to do is set up a policy to only keep certain ones, like a tiered incremental plan. It also seems to back up the entire library over and over again, rather than doing change-only partial backups as promised. Possibly because it's almost always open and iTunes isn't a very polite app and may not play well with being rifled while open? I wouldn't put it past iTunes, which has been a cranky beast since the day I installed it and hasn't really gotten much better. I do not have the brain cells to play with other music management right now, though, so I'm stuck with it.

I have also looked at Zoho -- in a very cursory manner at their mail, and deeper at their spreadsheets, which aren't a bad replacement for Google Docs, though they're showing a few buggy bits and aren't as well developed. From there I sort of toppled sideways into Creator, which I gather is a kind of Access-like (I have never seen Access so I'm not sure) forms creator which has some nice integration with Sheet -- you can export a set of records to Sheets and then operate on it in the spreadsheet. Anyhow, it seems functional and cool. I haven't looked at the plain writing app yet because I mostly write into text files. I haven't played with sharing yet. The major alternative to something like Zoho would be some sort of versioned sync that lets me share spreadsheets with my honey, since that's a major thing we do with Google Docs.

I'm actually pretty close to looking at some sort of version control like git or svn -- I've only used them in a very rudimentary fashion in the past (and mostly rcs and perforce) but version control speaks to my former-sysadminly heart in a way I cannot deny; being able to roll back to older versions was great at work and it's sort of a basic need whenever you have two or more people with their paws on the same files, even if they're both reasonably careful about it. (Google Docs and Dropbox bake that in.) Either that, or backing everything up/repositing everything on a version controlled file system, which I'm not sure is easy to do with the kind of shoestring budget I have. (A handful of random old PCs running Windows, and no brain budget to switch to a UNIX. Plus shell access to a remote UNIX box with web/mail/ssh but no PHP.)

What I have been up to:

Not a lot.... Health issues, mostly, have had me at basic day to day. Which isn't bad, really, but it means I haven't had a lot of cognitive surplus. I want to be doing more, but pushing it won't help, so I am not.

Because it's mostly busywork and hence can be done as a bear of very little brain, I've done a major cleaning of my Facebook account, because I am still using it (for now) to keep in touch with family, but I don't think their privacy is going to get any better either. So: fixed a lot of settings there, and deleted all of the fluff from my Wall, likes and things, and tried to zap everything that my name points to in public. Ruthlessly deleted anything I'd posted that no one had touched. While none of it is earth shattering in the least, I am not really fond of having a bunch of "I like pie" trivia under my full legal name.

I am not hardcore enough to do some of the things described in danah boyd's post on how "Real Names" Policies Are an Abuse of Power like deactivating my account when I'm not actively logged in, or scrubbing everything off my wall even if other people have commented, or scrubbing my comments off other people's posts. That feels like it's going too far.

Not sure how I feel about Google+ right now. It's a marathon, not a sprint. And hard to think clearly about when I'm on a bad part of my particular health curve.

I would like to be able to think of social networks as only fun and only about the people, and not about the enormous amount of work it takes to have a modicum of privacy, because it wasn't designed in from the beginning. The privacy issue is enormous, and bigger than these sites, and it's going to quietly (and not so quietly) hurt people and a lot of people don't even realize it yet.

I wish it were easier to get my family over here, where I actually feel comfortable, welcome, and included. I like the community on Diaspora, a lot, but still have concerns about the privacy. I like the vibe and community on Subjot. It's short-form and fully-public now but will including private later, and it has delicious topics, just like I wanted baked into Google+. Oh yes, that's another thing I'm trying out, Subjot, but it's been so low-key and easy that I find it's very natural. Though now I tend to reach for it instead of twitter. Longer form than twitter with topics and real comments and a restful UI? Yes, please. I was only going to look but I thought I'd just post one thing and there I still am; I like it a lot.

I've also switched to DuckDuckGo, which is hardly even-minded of me as I didn't try the other alternatives, but I tried it, liked it well enough, liked some features very much indeed, and stopped. Even just switching search engines is a pretty big change for me right now.

The amount of rambling I am doing is probably some indication of why I haven't been posting anything structured lately.

Sarah Mei, one of the Diaspora core contributors, has responded to my post on Pondering Diaspora Security. On a weekend no less! Please see the comments on Diaspora, and reply there if you wish.

Anyone who would like an invitation to the joindiaspora.com pod in order to respond directly may PM me with an email address; you may also sign up directly without an invitation on the diasp.org pod.

For everyone who is voluntarily doing a takeout, but wants to keep their Android phone: talk to your app vendors first and see if you can have them switched to a new GMail account, or you will lose your paid-for apps forever. If you are in your grace period on a suspension, requesting a review can get you shut down long before your grace period ends.

It's not warned about anywhere on the data liberation page, but one item of data you cannot liberate is your ownership of any Android apps you've bought.

"Data liberation? What data liberation? Where? Oh.... you’ll graciously allow me to have content I actually created, but not the things I bought and paid for; silly me, here I thought you actually MEANT it. (You’d think I would have learned by now, eh?)" -- Bonnie L. Nadri

Google Checkout does not liberate personal info either.

At least, my name and address remain welded to Google Checkout, even if I delete the credit card. I can't do squat with those fields if there isn't a valid credit card attached. If I add the credit card it auths it then and there to make sure it all matches and won't let me change the address to something that doesn't match and then delete the card.

<extra sarcasm> The place where I most want to see flaky privacy behavior and only a partial removal of personal information is the one attached to not just my wallet name, but my wallet contents. </extra sarcasm>

Current status on my own Android apps:

App vendors have gotten back to me. One didn't get the possibility of losing access to the account so tried to be helpful by trying to tell me to use it as a secondary account. I think they will probably let me move the apps to another account if I lose access, though. But I am not sure if I can go Amazon with them; I need to check and see if they're in the Amazon store. (An app move might not work as well if I've already lost access.) Another vendor has offered me the choice of Amazon or a fresh Google account, which is a fair pick. I don't think there are any independently authed app stores, more's the pity.

Because of the lack of ability to move apps between accounts, this must be done ad hoc for each app vendor, and they are basically doing it out of their kindness of their hearts if they do it at all; nothing is making them do it other than good customer service and decency. So it's heartwarming to see them be accommodating here, and I want to recognize that they are going above and beyond. (In this case it's the makers of Ultimate Todo List and iSyncr.)

Todo:

Check purchased apps against Amazon store. Dither a while about which I want. I am going to have to do a full migration either way.

Pros of Amazon: Google doesn't get a cut. I won't get cut off from Amazon for using whatever name I feel like. They will probably get better in response to complaints.

Cons of Amazon: Reputed to treat devs worse than Google does. Requires network connection to use any Amazon apps at all (nng). Slower review process so it can take much longer for updates to trickle through. I am going to have to have a Google account for some functions anyhow. Store is limited in selection and hard to search and people game the reviews even more than Google Market. (Kind of a surprise because their physical stuff shop is fine.)

(Mirrored to Google+)

I really haven't been getting much done, but I got a little bit done tonight, at least.

Here are some links to excellent blogs by people also doing the same thing:

• Goodbye Google!
  
• thegeniusfiles #GooglePlusStrike

Another very helpful tool is the Dashboard, which can show you where Google is storing your data.

Google Checkout

On the plus side, this had a nice little summary of all of my Android purchases, so I ended up not having to dig through my gmail box as I had feared.

On the minus side, I cannot fully delete my data! I tried deleting my credit card, and while it deleted the credit card number it refuses to delete the address and phone number attached to that card. If I try to edit it, then it tells me I need a valid card number to do so. I tried various permutations including re-entering my card to see if I could then remove the address data, but it does a credit card verification against the number, so I simply cannot edit the data away or delete it. Did anyone ever test card deletion? This is a serious privacy failure.

I'm going to leave this on hold here with the credit card still in place, since I might end up getting credits as part of my app transfer process, and come back to it later.

Android Apps

Having received my app summary via Google Checkout, I used the 'Contact Vendor' links to send mail inquiring the best way to transfer an app off of a Google account, so that I can re-download it even without the account attached on my phone and still receive future updates. This has to be done individually to each vendor.

New Google Account

Given that I might need to transfer apps to a new Google account, I have set up a new GMail account so I have a place to send them. I used an invite and didn't need to authenticate SMS. Remember to check 'Always use HTTPS' under General settings. I also like to turn chat off and set it to only let people chat with me if I explicitly allow it.

Buzz: It appears to be turned on, but I don't yet have a profile set up. It throws a 404 if I try to disable it from GMail without a profile.

The Bad News: Another crash day so not a ton of progress, though I got the weekly chores done at least. This is probably where my weekly 'still life with farmers market' would be going if I felt like I was actually welcomed by this service. I was planning to keep doing posts-as-usual, but sadly it feels a little like a farce to continue so I will probably be posting even more boring single issue stuff and less of the rest. It is not as if pictures of what I eat or digressions about my dog are super amazing content anyhow, but while I'm waiting for the next hammer to fall I just don't feel comfortable with it anymore. I will continue documenting my slow dawdle away from disentangling my life from this particular cloud giant.

The Good News: I'm still feeling very engaged with people here, though, and love to read what they post. The gaming community here in general is thriving and beautiful. So I still hope the horse will sing, though that hope seems more silly with each new development. I'm a ways from gone unless I get suspended, so I'll try to grab people's twitter/blogs/etc. on my way out. Feel free to post them here! I have an RSS reader and am on Dreamwidth and Twitter, though the latter in a not very active sense.

Email and Docs Research: I've done some reading up on Zoho and didn't see any egregious wails and lamentations in response to my basic searches for reviews, so I will be trying them out when I get more spoons. They also offer web mail and it is supposed to be very solid. I'm trying to decide between that and a solution that offers me a local store that I then can index. I don't actually know of any good desktop/unix based mail indexing solutions, though. Another solution is that I am planning on going to a different provider soon and they will offer email as well, so I could use them as my back/mirror/archive. Email is actually the least of my problems since I host my own, but Zoho offers Docs replacement as well. Heck, depending on their setup I may be able to do some things I wasn't able to do with Sites.

Phone: I keep staring balefully at it and not wanting to start untangling it. It's enough of a hairball that I am procrastinating. I think the solution is to try to pry my apps out of the marketplace and deal individually with their vendors. I don't have that many paid apps. Or find an alternate marketplace of some repute. I'm not happy with Amazon Marketplace though I like them for other services, so not sure what good alternatives are. Another alternative if I can't find a good marketplace is to try to get the app vendors to re-auth my apps onto a new Google account. Except I'm pretty sure they're all going to force real names all the way through at some point, so I'd prefer having them tied to Google as little as possible. While I don't mind a vendor knowing my full name (they're getting my credit card, after all) I do object to my full name popping up on reviews. Static pseudonym is fine.

Wiki Ruminations: I've also used wikidot which in its paid/ad-free form is pretty sweet. It's pretty ad-infested in its free form, but it's a good general purpose wiki and I don't have to keep patching it or removing spammers, which is the general issue with self-hosted wikis. I can host static content in theory (in practice I probably haven't edited a static webpage since 2006, so while it is up there it isn't getting maintained) but running wikis has historically annoyed me, so having that hosted seems plausible as long as I can export it at will. More research, probably. I won't really miss Sites, as it is is Not Quite A Wiki and lacks some features that I keep really wanting.

Mirrored from Google+