Self-Hosting

I think out loud. That has always worked better for me than sitting in front of a blank page, which means I end up with a lot of Just Press Record voice memos sitting on an iPhone - a few seconds at a time, sometimes a two-hour walking monologue, rarely anything in between. They sync to iCloud, and then nothing happens to them. I have yet to voluntarily scrub through a ninety-minute audio file to find the one sentence I cared about at minute 43. ...

I’ve been a Google Photos user for the better part of a decade, and for most of that time I made peace with the trade-off: Google gets to look at every photo I take, in exchange for all of my photos automatically backed up, searchable, and accessible from anywhere. That trade-off felt fine in 2016. It feels less fine now. The free tier got worse, the AI features got noisier, and every so often I’d notice another “just check that this is the right person” prompt and remember that Google has been quietly building a face graph of everyone I’ve ever photographed. ...