Goodbye, social media. Well, kind of.

Last night, I did a massive life cleanup. I deleted X, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and I am closing my Substack.

Why? Simple, visiting those sites either brought me zero use, joy, or just outright anger. I was having a hard time visiting these sites and not wanting to reply to people and get into arguments, but I could not find a valid reason to do so because I know I am not about to change minds, and in the end just increase my rage and own anxiety.

This wasn’t about privacy, or privacy policies, case in point, I have kept Facebook because most of my family still seems stuck on that, Instagram, and even TikTok (I know!). But those algorithms aren’t making me feel terrible all day.

I am keeping LinkedIn for professional use, Goodreads for my books, and Reddit because I love getting tech and desktop ideas there.

What is missing from losing sites like X is news I do actually care about that is updated there faster than anywhere else such as hockey and football (soccer) news, trades, and live updates. Not sure how I will fill those voids yet, but I am sure losing those is better than losing my mental health.

In the years I didn’t own a Mac between 2015 and 2023 I was an avid Linux user. I couldn’t afford a Mac and hated Windows, so I got a Lenovo laptop on sale and put Linux on it. Some day I will write about my Linux distro history, but not here.

One thing I loved about Linux was how much time I spent in the command line installing apps and managing updates. It was just easier and faster than the GUI method elsewhere.

When I finally made the jump back to Mac (maybe another article about why I did that in the future as well), I missed the life in the terminal immediately. Thankfully I knew about Homebrew, but had only used it when needed, but now I wanted to make it a center point of my Mac life.

To do so was easy. Every app I wanted to install, I first searched on the Homebrew site, and installed it if it was there. But I was still stuck with some apps on the Mac App Store, and I never go in there, and I also don’t always open those apps enough to update them if auto-updates doesn’t work.

To solve this, I installed ‘mas’.

$ brew install mas

This takes a record of all your Mac App Store apps so you can see them in Homebrew using a command like $ mas list

From there, I installed a command line app called Topgrade. By running Topgrade, simply by typing $ topgrade it updates all of my Homebrew apps, my Mac App Store apps, ruby, gems, you name it. You can also customize a few different upgrade paths if you use MacPorts, and others.

Now, I just run $ topgrade weekly, daily, honestly whenever I was and I know all my apps are up-to-date even if I am not using them often.

Over the years, this blog and my work have taken many forms. And so has my love or extended interest in technology.

For those who don’t know, I was the founder of ThinkPrivacy_ and a former member of PrivacyGuides, when it was still called PrivacyTools. I was a contributing writer for Startpage.

In those days, I was a big Linux user, and loved jumping distros but mainly an Arch user, and still love my Linux system, but have since switched to a Macbook Air, and a Macbook Pro at work. Yet, with my busy life as a dad, hockey coach, and day job, I fell out of the day to day tech life, something I have missed.

So here I am, jumping back in and customizing my mac’s getting new software and jumping back into the love of all things tech. For those interested in what I am using, I created a What I Use page to discuss the tech I use in my everyday life.

I coded ThinkPrivacy_ in Jekyll, but I have moved away from that and built this site in Hugo.

I work full time in labor as a communications director and am also exploring tools and methods to do that job even better all the time, and plan to write and share experiences there. I want to do faster work, without AI use, and create speeches, content, social media, you name it.

I will, however, explore AI and its uses and faults, and which ones respect your rights, privacy, knowing that they are brutal on our envirornment, but is also relativly inescapable in today’s tech world. So whatever work we can do to harness its power and control it for workers the better.

This site will share more about me, more about my fun in tech journey, and how I modify and use my Mac and just finding fun in the tech world again.

I don’t expect to actually write here a lot, but I like to have a place to come if I have some thoughts to share. This page will be rather static and just a landing page to meet and learn more about me, some of the things I am into, and really, why not just have a site up if I own the domain?

I will eventually write a little more about myself and some of the journey I have been on to get here, but until then, welcome to the new site!