A couple of weeks ago I installed Pop OS 20.04 on my System 76 Gazelle laptop. I had seen a fair amount of hype about it, and decided to give it a go. I ran Pop OS for some months a year ago, and liked it, but it became a big sluggish over time for me, so I went back to Ubuntu Mate. But I like the cute looks and polish of Pop OS, and I like System 76 as a company. They seem to be doing a good job. (Tangent: I hope they make a phone some day!)
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I’ve never been much of a Gnome fan. It hasn’t been lightweight enough to suit me and I don’t like hamburger menus. But this OS is quite snappy, after I turned off the animations using Gnome Tweaks.
And it turns out, I really like Pop OS. I mean, I really like it! Who knew? It is quick, and smooth and runs great, and I haven’t had any weird glitches. I will wait and see whether it slows down over time, but so far I’m quite pleased.
There isn’t one specific feature that’s blowing my mind, but it’s generally smooth and does a good job. Which is what I want. At this point in my Linux evolution, I don’t want to try the most exotic distro, I want a low-maintenance machine.
I find myself strangely content with my technology situation. The phone is working well, computer is nice and smooth. I’m even happy with Jekyll for my web sites. That is good for my productivity in the rest of my life. In the ‘Planner community’ they call it ‘Planner Peace,’ where you quit fiddling with your planner and just use it to help you get on with your life.
Modern life is so complicated that we need all these fancy systems just to keep the basics together. Sometimes I just want to run off and live in the country and grow my own food instead. But in the meanwhile…
In order to make things more organized, efficient, and not so irritating, I am working on systems. When I feel disorganized and inefficient, instead of assuming I’m deficient or just bad, I am looking at where things don’t flow and where there is a question about how to handle something. Those decision making points are a problem. I need to have a smooth, well organized system to handle the thing, so I don’t have to think about it. Life has enough decisions to make without having to relitigate each individual piece of paper. That applies to real life and computer life. When I don’t have a good system, I keep fiddling with it endlessly and it’s annoying. But once I get a good one in place, it tends to keep working. That gives me hope!
There are still pieces which need a better system - syncing favorite photos with my phone, a more reliable local sync, and other details. And that isn’t looking at my house or my art studio. But most computer things are working pretty well. If I can find a better bookcase there’s even hope for an organized desk! I know, whoa.
While employees of big companies are striking, and articles online are saying how you should curtail your shopping to the essentials so as not to overload those workers. It sounds like large businesses are imploring us not to buy from them, and small businesses are trying to stay afloat. So I am doing my best to comply with their wishes! Because I am a helpful person, and only somewhat snarky and sarcastic.
If Amazon and Home Depot don’t want our business, small local companies surely do. Many of them have online shops right now, or are open limited hours, and are trying to stay afloat. A friend of mine runs Aloha Gardens, which just opened, and I was thrilled to shop there for a new trees, plants and potting soil, and they are happy for the business. Another local company, Powells Books, has had enough support in the form of orders to allow them to hire back some employees they had to lay off. I am lucky to have a local pet store for cat and dog food, and their prices are better than big pet shops. I sure wish we had a small local hardware store though. Home Depot is hard to avoid for house projects.
I have been able to avoid shopping at Amazon for a long time now. They have a terrible search function that makes it really hard to find anything anyway. I use eBay for random things from the internet, and it does the job just fine. I’d like to expand my list of good online small businesses. For my fountain pens and nice notebook addiction: Truphae, Jet Pens, Goulet Pens are all good. I’d love to find a source for more retailers like that. Googling for products brings up a million Amazon products, which is not what I’m after. But I digress.
My next goal is to start shopping locally for vegetables. There is a farm that accepts online orders and you can pick the veggies up from the farm, or from the farmers markets that just started up again now.
With the pandemic revealing the weaknesses in our system of centralized supplies and distribution, decentralizing is as good for real life as it is for the internet.
Our pup Olaf with some new trees from my friend's nursery
I am feeling pretty happy and settled in with my new Android phone. I do not miss the iPhone, and am thrilled to be able to install from Aurora Store and FDroid, and I do not feel the lack of Google Play Store at all. One of the pieces I set up is a nice easy note taking system, for sharing notes between my computer and phone. You know, for copying text and recording lists and little bits for reference.
I tried out Turtl and Joplin syncing with Dropbox, but settled on Standard Notes. My reasons for this are basically: it’s easy. I am trying to do less with my computer and focus on my actual artwork, writing and study.
If I always had wifi, I might just sync a text file using Syncthing. But for this purpose I actually want to use a cloud based system. Plus that makes it easy to add notes from the computer at my studio, and have them sync right up.
Offline access works well with Standard Notes. I did not go with Turtl because it only works while online, which is a huge peeve of mine. It feels like my data is held captive by the internet. I like to be able to write on my tablet and sync it when wifi is accessible. You have to be able to write in the park! Obviousl.
I did not use Joplin because the sync options were less convenient for me. It can use Dropbox and others, including Nextcloud and WebDAV. Those are great to have, but less handy for my personal setup.
Standard Notes is clean and simple and works great. It is open source and works offline. They have a nice privacy manifesto which shows me that they have good goals and practices. I’m not saying it’ll do the job if you are a journalist targeted by oppressive governments. But it’s fine for me.
One of my goals in life is to spend less time at the computer. Though I still need to type, it is easier for me to focus when writing on my tablet using a bluetooth keyboard, like I’m doing right now. Having tools like Standard Notes works well with that.
I am trying to get various systems in my life, both digital and “IRL,” smoothed out and working well. I organized my desk, spiffed up my planner book. And one I’ve been working on lately, is photos. I have a mountain of photos on my main harddrive, and various messy backups on my external harddrive, and it’s a problem.
To be super honest, my photos haven’t been well organized since I was using iPhoto on Mac, and that’s been quite a few years. As lame as the iPhoto system is in the way it hides your photos in their proprietary file structure, the interface and tagging was pretty nice.
I have tried every photo organizer I could find on Linux, and Shotwell is the one that comes closest. It wasn’t until I discovered Saved Searches that I realized it does everything I want it to do. But it does! So that’s pretty great.
I am working to tag all my images so they are grouped nicely. And using saved search I can show which photos are not tagged to help tidy them up. Also to group to focus on or exclude work images, since photos of my paintings are part of my life and there are a ton of them.
One important detail is to check the box in settings to “Write tags, titles, and other metatdata to photo files.”. I didn’t discover that till late in the game. Whoops.
In the previous post, I was talking about using FSLint to sort out duplicates. That is an ongoing project, as will be merging in old backups to make sure I haven’t missed anything, and clearing out all those duplicates. Fun!
Apparently FSLint is not as actively maintained as Czkawka, which continues the same function. I have used it with some success, but still had to do some manual duplicate removal.
100 Days to Offload Post 4
One of my ongoing quests is to get my photo library in decent shape. It is pretty messy. I have many years worth of photos, and what makes it a mess is duplicates. I’m not exactly sure how many, but I know there are times where I imported photos in to my library, and instead of excluding duplicates, the software added a ‘-1’ onto the file name, or some such, and so I have duplicates.
I finally have my library mostly okay on my every day computer, but I have backups on my external drive that I need to comb through to make sure that my library is complete.
I found a groovy tool to help with that project, called FSLint, which scans for duplicates in whatever folder you like. It is still tedious, checking choosing which files to delete, but it seems thorough.
I recently updated to Pop OS, based on Ubuntu 20.04, and there are some problems with software dependencies in FSLint in 20.04. So you can’t simply install FSLint through apt or the software center, as usual. The problem was reported on the bug pages, so I am sure it will be fixed one of of these days. But in the mean time, to install it you can download and install the .deb files for FSLint, and its missing dependencies as listed here:
Update: Actually the contacts app doesn’t work right, can’t add a contact with Google Play Services turned off. Finding a non-Google contact app to use that will integrate properly with the rest of the apps is still a goal for me.
I have disabled Google Play Services, and find that everything is fine, so long as you take the time to disable the notices saying the app won’t work without Google Play Services. It says “Phone will not work without Google Play Services,” but that seems to be a lie, because if I ignore the notification, Phone (and everything else I can find) work just fine.
I have not found out how to do that across the boards. Seems to be you have to update it for each app individually. It seems the way to do that is to go to Settings –> Apps and Notifications –> Notifications –> See all from last 7 days –> tap the three dots menu, and tap ‘Show system.’ Then it’ll show the notifications from things like Sounds and Emergency Information, and you can toggle them off, mostly.
Except it won’t let me turn it off entirely for Phone and Emergency Information, but I can change the notification to Silent, and turn on Minimize, so it doesn’t go bing every five minutes, and the notice isn’t so big.
This is how it works in my Pixel 3a with Android 10 anyway. Could be different for other phones, and I can’t promise it won’t change.
NetGuard is a critical piece of my strategy in mitigating the evil tendencies of Google in my Android phone. I paid for the pro version, and I am very excited about it. It gets you some nifty features, and supporting good open source projects like this is a very worthy cause!
Netguard lets you set which apps on your phone are given cell and wifi access. The paid version provides the option to show system apps too, so you can block internet access attempts from practically anything you like. I have the option for (almost) all apps selected to “Notify internet access attemps,” so I know when a process is trying to connect, and I can decide if that seems reasonable to me.
My current strategy with my phone is to have Google Play Services enabled, (because the contacts app stopped functioning without it), but block network access from Google Play Services, and everything else I can from Google. I block with a fairly heavy hand, and figure I’ll see what breaks - it’s easy to change settings. And thus far, nothing has broken.
I just know that if an app I’m is trying to log in or do something online, and isn’t working (it doesn’t give an actual error, just doesn’t work), it’s probably because I blocked it through Netguard.
I certainly don’t know that much about all the apps and processes in there - others will be more informed about how to go about this task in a more strategic way. But my whole nerdy life has been built on getting in just a bit above my head and experimenting and seeing what happens. I’m an artist, not a programmer, so I feel that this should be enough to make things better, if not perfect.
It’s clearly swimming upstream to have digital privacy with the technology structured as it is. But hey, I try, and that’s better than nothing! I’m pleased with my progress, such as it is.
