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What I Use Instead of Google

kiramclean.com

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Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#181

Post by WorldMaker »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #178
WorldMaker wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been really interesting to see the shift in ads and other things across the entire web when I forced all of my Google interactions to non-default containers. The amount of painful ReCaptcha interactions I've had has gone way up, but getting rid of a lot of the low quality "personalized" ads generally seems worth it. It was most useful for cleaning up the horror show that is YouTube recommendations if random YouT…

> The amount of painful ReCaptcha interactions I've found that clicking the Headphone icon and transcribing the few words makes this a much less annoying experience (especially as a non-American [1]). It also seems more forgiving of errors, though the audio is pretty clear anyway. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805

I have resorted to that more than once at this point. I consider that part of the "painful" as I may not always have speakers at the ready and/or at certain times of day feel a need to take the time to plugin headphones so as not to bother neighbors/etc. I also suspect given how many bots have moved on to using that themselves that those are going to get nastier and worse "soon" too.

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#182

Post by AlotOfReading »

seszett wrote: post #110
rayrag wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Apple were a different company, it would've made maps available for use on web browsers and non-Apple devices. That could also help in a more rapid improvement of maps as opposed to the mostly-useless state it's been in (except for a few countries and regions in certain countries that Apple likes and works more on). Try https://satellites.pro/plan/world_map# - you can switch between Apple Maps, OSM, Mapbox, Goog…

I wonder how they do that, that doesn't look like a use case that Apple is OK with. But anyway, I didn't realise how bad Apple Maps was. It's miles away from OSM and even from Google Maps, at least in the places I looked up in France (so not like in remote areas of Mali or the Amazon forest).

It's pretty shocking. I checked near some Apple commuter stations (where they presumably have employees living and actively using the service / have access to good data) and noticed it was missing entire parks and roads.

The situation on other countries is much worse though. Some countries are missing entire islands. In Mongolia, they don't have province (aimag) borders, and some provinces are even missing labels for their capitals! Worse, there's sparse recognition of district (sum) labels, but some of them seem to have recognized the sum centers as distinct towns, butchered the transliteration, and then marked them before the aimag capital, as happened with "Hovsgol" (Khövsgöl), Dornogovi.

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#183

Post by marci »

executesorder66 wrote: post #60
wtmt wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have local (non-cloud) backups? If yes, that's great, but otherwise I wouldn't recommend a cloud-only (or a single backup) approach to storing important data.

I currently have backups on some external drives. But I plan on also doing backups with blackblaze or somewhere similar. My plan for the cloud server is just to have a central place to access all my (and my wife's) files from any device. But then my problem is, as I mentioned earlier, how do I bulk edit/organize those files using desktop software?

SSHFS?

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-...

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#184

Post by Klonoar »

cassianoleal wrote: post #59
Klonoar wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're presumably concerned about FastMail being in/from Australia. The thing is, if you're concerned about a state agency, you have bigger issues. If all you're after is "I don't want to give Google my money", FastMail is pretty good - and to boot they're one of the few with a still working push notification certificate for Mac Mail.app users, I believe. Email is a lost cause. Just choose the one that sucks the lea…

> don't do important things on it. How do you accomplish that? In my experience every single service on the internet relies on email for account creation, password recovery and general identity verification. I'm not saying that's good, only that it's the current state of affairs.

I'm rolling my eyes at your comment. Come on now, you know what I meant.

Email is like getting mail in your postal box. It has no real protections except for people saying "yeah, I won't read your mail". Thus, if something is important enough, don't use it for that.

If you really need to do something privately there are better equipped avenues; if you're worried about tracking, it doesn't matter because

- any service mailing you will try to track you

- if you email with anybody from Google/MSFT/etc, your email is on their servers anyway.

It's a lost cause. It has been for some time. Keep a strong password on it and 2FA and such, but otherwise, it's not worth the time to care about.

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#185

Post by unilock »

modeitsch wrote: post #170
XCSme wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the suggestion, I have been looking for a good note-taking app forever, this looks interesting!

is there a way to import all my google keep notes ?

Personally, I went from Google Keep to Standard Notes to NextCloud Notes, but the process is similar to go from Standard Notes to Joplin.

There's instructions for how to transfer from Google Keep to Standard Notes here[1]. Then, export from Standard Notes via a "Decrypted" data archive[2], extract the plain text files from the resulting archive (I don't recall the exact path), rename them all from .txt to .md using zmv or a similar pattern-based file renaming program, and import them to Joplin as-is[3].

You'll lose formatting, unfortunately, and probably other things like attachments and checkboxes -- I'm not entirely sure, as I didn't use any of the more advanced features of Google Keep.

There's also instructions to go from Standard Notes to Joplin directly[4], bypassing plain text. That might preserve formatting and such.

Your mileage may vary, as they say.

[1] https://standardnotes.org/help/35/how-can-i-import-my-notes-...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/StandardNotes/comments/5sf0id/you_c...

[3] https://joplinapp.org/#importing-from-markdown-files

[4] https://programadorwebvalencia.com/migrate-notes-from-standa...

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#186

Post by hinkley »

dusted wrote: post #62

I'm all for getting out of the cloud, but moving from one company, to multiple other companies seems to have achieved nothing but diversify and multiply the amount of terms you've had to agree to (they will all tell you the same thing in the end: if they block your account, or lose your data, it's your problem). The only real solution is self-hosting[1], which is becoming a bit difficult with email these days. [1] No…

I have wasted a lot of breath trying to convince people that the right way to go is to have one physical data center, and put all redundancy and edge networking in the cloud.

One of my fears is that as soon as you outsource hardware maintenance, then employees who were good at this sort of thing lose much of their value, either in their own head, or in the group consensus. They start to wander off to work for other companies, and you quickly lose critical mass. Once that happens, the quality of advice you get for architectural proposals degrades, and your number of stupid design mistakes notches up considerably.

These people also provide a lot of your 'informed consumer' qualities. They can explain why you shouldn't have to pay $1000 a month for a service.

I've seen this play out a couple of times. It's too slow to be called a train wreck. It's like watching erosion take out beautiful house. You can enjoy it for a while, but eventually it starts to sag and then fall apart. Slowly at first and then all at once.

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#187

Post by weetniet »

budafish wrote: post #139
dmytton wrote: post #26

Moving large numbers of files - like the 50k of Google Photos the author mentions - can be done using https://rclone.org . Set up Google Photos as a source and then use the copy command to move it to a different location[1]. There are a lot of different commands which work with many different cloud storage systems e.g. sync everything one way locally to a backup, mount a FUSE filesystem, do two-way sync, etc. [1] htt…

As others have said Google Photos backup via RClone has some caveats, mainly not downloading at original quality. Google Takeout does solve this but but in weird hierarchies. I stumbled on a new project which simulates a browser download using a headless Chrome Developer tools session[0]. Looks interesting, supports continuation and can be ran on a cron job. Worth a look. [0] https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-cdp

Also, see Jake Wharton's Docker GPhotos Sync [0] for a containerized version of this tool. Unfortunately, this method seems to be the easiest way to automate a backup at full quality.

[0] https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-gphotos-sync

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#188

Post by kbelder »

whoknew1122 wrote: post #128

Interesting to see what others use. I'm a bit curious about using CloudFlare's DNS though. If you take a stand against Google's societal impact, why switch to CloudFlare? CloudFlare's 'content neutral' stance enables a lot of hate speech and other, more disgusting material. It seems odd to have ethical concerns about Google, but not CloudFlare.

Because I think censoring hate speech can have a worse societal impact than being a neutral host. CloudFlare is, from my viewpoint, behaving more ethically.

Re: What I Use Instead of Google

#189

Post by mceachen »

budafish wrote: post #139
dmytton wrote: post #26

Moving large numbers of files - like the 50k of Google Photos the author mentions - can be done using https://rclone.org . Set up Google Photos as a source and then use the copy command to move it to a different location[1]. There are a lot of different commands which work with many different cloud storage systems e.g. sync everything one way locally to a backup, mount a FUSE filesystem, do two-way sync, etc. [1] htt…

As others have said Google Photos backup via RClone has some caveats, mainly not downloading at original quality. Google Takeout does solve this but but in weird hierarchies. I stumbled on a new project which simulates a browser download using a headless Chrome Developer tools session[0]. Looks interesting, supports continuation and can be ran on a cron job. Worth a look. [0] https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-cdp

> Google Takeout does solve this but but in weird hierarchies.

Surprisingly, the Takeout split archives can contain partial contents for a given folder or album. If you extract everything into a single merged root, you'll see both the sidecars and images in the same directory.

If you're on macOS or Linux, you can do this by mounting the tarballs with ratarmount and skip the extraction step. Details and links here: https://forum.photostructure.com/t/archive-file-format-compr...

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