Electronic on Dawnstar

Adios Facebook

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 21:27:16 +0000

Taking a break from social media is progressing as I permanently deactivated my Facebook account today. I know I’m not going to miss it, although I was in a couple of useful groups.

Adios, Facebook

Facebook often gets criticised for the lack of privacy. “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product being sold”, and that is very much true. Facebook gets revenue from advertising. To be able to target ads, they need your data. Whatever you have in your Facebook profile, your friends, everything you have ever posted there or all the websites you ever visited that had a Facebook like button, they will all count. Even if you don’t have a Facebook profile, they will still probably keep a shadow profile of you, based on your phone number, email address or other identifiers they may get from you or people you interact with.

It’s really not much different to what Google does. They also depend on advertising. So does Twitter and most of the internet. That’s why ad and tracking blockers will improve your privacy and I recommend everyone to use them.

Don’t get me wrong though. Facebook will not give your address or phone number to 3rd party advertisers. It doesn’t work like that. The advertisers on their platform will want to target their ads to certain demographics and that’s how Facebook will show you the cat food ad. You liked so many cat pictures on your feed that they will think you probably have a cat.

Another more serious issue with Facebook is that they haven’t really bothered cleaning up their platform from hate speech. There are tools that allow you to report posts but you are most likely to receive the usual “This post does not violate our community standards” response.

Many groups are badly moderated and popular public posts will often get tons of hateful comments on them. This is really sad and depressing and the main reason why I wanted to leave the whole platform.

I also think that many friend connections on Facebook are superficial and you don’t really know them. Why do you connect with old school friends or workmates you haven’t seen or spoken with in 15-25 years? Do you actually care about them? Do they care about you? Well, some of them are still quite close friends but there are other means to communicate with them. I do have several chat groups with friends and people I used to work with, b~ut I bet there are a lot of Facebook friends who will not even notice I left.

Anyway, if Facebook makes you feel a bit depressed, take a little break and see how it improves your life.

The Internet Is Broken

Sat, 17 Nov 2018 20:53:17 +0000

The internet! The internet is broken! Our broadband provider Relish has usually worked just fine without any major long-lasting hiccups. Sometimes the speed hasn’t really met our expectations, but it’s a wireless 4G broadband. It’s not fibre!

Last Sunday, everything suddenly changed.

Constant hiccups! The connection dies, doesn’t work at all until the router gets rebooted. Speed drops below 56k modem level and frustration grows beyond the limit where it’s trying to make us crazy, constantly pushing the anger-o-meter to the reddest of the red hue of the spectrum.

Today we decided to do something about it by ourselves, as customer service wasn’t really able to detect any issues with our router. “It must be interference”, they said. Yes, they are probably right, but it doesn’t help us as we cannot track the origin of that inteference.

As I had not yet got rid of my old iPhone, we got a Vodafone Pay-As-You-Go SIM card and our internet now pretty much is provided by that loyal old companion of mine.

It’s obviously not a perfect solution and I still need to figure out how to get connection to my TV, game consoles and Sonos speakers.

We have roughly 2.5 months left in this flat so getting a DSL isn’t really an option right now. Originally we decided to go for wireless because the fastest available DSL connections were estimated to be only 11MB, which is ridiculous in 2018.

Vinyl Corner

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 14:15:56 +0100

After dreaming of a vinyl player for years, I finally decided to get one.

I bought a Rega Planar 2 turntable, which is connected via Rega Fono Mini A2D pre-amp to the line-in connector of a Sonos Play 5 speaker.

The setup is not perfect though as the pre-amp doesn’t have a volume output control at all. The only way to adjust the volume is to access the room settings in the Sonos app and change line-in level from there. The built-in volume control in Sonos is disabled for line-in signal. Maybe I’ll get a better pre-amp some day.

Update 17/11/2018: This is not actually true. The volume control works as you would expect it to work. I’m not sure if this was due to an update in the Sonos software or some error in my configuration.

The shelf is made by KomodaFurniture.

My vinyl corner

I really like how my setup looks like. The sound of a record feels very different after getting used to digital streaming services, but it’s very much subjective anyway. Some people think that the sound of a vinyl record is close to perfection, while digital signal will always be inferior. I don’t have strong opinion about it, but I sometimes like to do things in an old fashioned way. Browsing through the records in your shelf feels very different to browsing through Spotify playlists.

A spinning record looks insanely cool! Can you achieve that with any streaming service?

Without Alcohol

Tue, 21 Aug 2018 20:46:46 +0100

After going to Slovenia for Metaldays festival, I decided to take a little break and be without alcohol for few weeks. At the same time I also reduced my carb intake below 100g in a day.

I’ve lost 4kg in 3.5 weeks and I’ve been much more productive than normally. I’ve probably had more GitHub activity during these few weeks than during the last few years altogether!

Despite not drinking alcohol, I’ve managed to participate in some social activities. I’ve went to a board game evening, scored the third place in a pub quiz with the team, and I even went to former workmate’s farewell party.

So yes, it is possible to live a social life without drinking. The problem is the other people who are drinking as they will become slightly annoying when they get drunk. Who would have thought that?

Berlin

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 22:56:41 +0000

Sometimes when a man leaves the comfortable surroundings of his own kiez, he might notice that Berlin is actually a very big city.