Since the beginning of the year I’ve been going through the largest personal computer and technology transformation and learning experience since I first started using computers back in 1992. It has been like learning computers all over again with the simultaneous joy and frustration that comes with it. With AI, I’m able to greatly exceed my natural skill and reach a level I have no business being in and have enjoyed it immensely.
The Trigger
What started this snowballing project is the move to a subscription model for just about everything. In the ‘old days’ you bought a piece of software, or a thing, and it was yours end of story. Over time, companies figured out how to get additional money on the same purchase. Do you want the extended warranty? How about protection? Faster delivery? Save $30 if you apply for our credit card. With this item, here are other frequently purchased items! And the list goes on an on. The question was how to get people to spend more money for each purchase. This has now morphed into subscriptions. Instead of just adding additional cost onto the additional purchase companies have decided to not make the thing the purchaser’s property at all, but instead a lease, a rental where you have to continually pay for it. It is capitalism doing what capitalism does, which is to push those profits ever higher and it has become absurd.
Sidebar: I’m reminded of my “Coconut Example” post of 2007 when I returned from Vietnam. I compare the experience of buying a coconut in Vietnam and America. In Vietnam you want a coconut. You pull to the side of the rode, give the vendor 500 dong and receive a coconut. In America, you go into a store and try to buy a coconut. They say keep your money and just finance the coconut. They ask for your e-mail, telephone number, date of birth, social security number and if you’d like to join the coconut rewards program. Coconut credit card? Would you like to purchase additional straws? How about Coconut protection in-case the coconut isn’t to your satisfaction. You get the idea.
Anyway, the trigger for me was hitting my limit in my Google Photos plan. I currently pay $20 for 100 gigabytes and was continually receiving warnings that I was running out of space. Furthermore, we had data and photos on different services. Microsoft, Apple, Google, all wanted us to put our data in their cloud and over time would charge more and more money as we all became dependent on those services. But before I took that second step about the data it was just photos.
As I have my own server, a wonderful Synology 920+ I decided I was going to use Synology Photos even though it was a step down from Google Photos. To compare, Google Photos is like a Lamborghini and Synology Photos a nice new Volvo. The Volvo is dependent, reliable, has a great safety rating which gives piece of mind for the family, gets great gas mileage and I’ll even receive compliments on it from time to time. Another very important aspect of the Volvo is it is mine. As for the Lambo, it is completely amazing and the most incredible car on the road. However, the Lambo is leased and although that lease has a very attractive rate, the dealer is sleeping with my wife.
Google can do whatever it wants with your photos. Those photos describe everything about your life and thus your life becomes Google’s property, not your own. No good.
It was a project and there was a cost to upgrade my drives and transfer all those photos. I’ve always preferred solid state because they are more reliable and “snappy” than HDD. They cost more and don’t hold as much so I had to consider how much data I would need over time. I have four family members including myself and video takes up a lot of space. Furthermore, I had to consider backups which added more cost.
The project was successful and after some initial anxiety on performance I can say I’m very pleased. I deleted all my photos off Google and did the same for my boys. It will take some time to convince the wife as she likes Google’s sharing aspect and doesn’t realize how bad Google has been behaving with people’s data. “Don’t be evil” used to be their motto. They quietly deleted that motto many years ago.
Linux
I attempted to switch to Linux in 2002 while I was a student at Waseda and with the help of another student, my brilliant friend Horacio. He helped me install Red Hat on a separate partition to Windows. I was enthusiastic but I didn’t have the incredible patience to learn the command line, the Terminal which is an integral part of using Linux. I tried for a few weeks but after it took me all day just to install the printer I gave up.
The spark here was twofold. The first was Windows 10 stopping support in October and the demand I buy a new computer since Windows said Windows 11 wasn’t compatible with my current computer. More cost, the constant nagging to use Windows Drive, the addition of Co-Pilot were not conducive to encouraging me to upgrade. What pushed me over the edge was seeing all the ‘tech bros,’ at Trumps inauguration. I finally realized these were America’s oligarchs and they are not my friends. They are the new Lords and I’m just a simple serf who must provide 20% of my harvest on land I do not own and never will. Instead of land and grain, it is technology and my data. I basically rent the tech and they harvest all my data constantly wanting to know where I am, what I’m doing, who I communicate with and pretty much every aspect of my life.
How about no.
I decided to switch to Linux as it is free, open source, secure and ‘for now’ my distribution isn’t trying to price gouge me. Plus, Linux has improved greatly from 2002 and there is one huge factor that didn’t exist until last year which is AI. Instead of having to bother my incredible friend Horacio, I now had a teacher at my fingertips with AI.
I had enough familiarity with Linux that the process wasn’t too daunting. The biggest challenge of this entire tech project was my database. Back in 2006 I learned Microsoft Access when I worked at Japan Airlines. I was hired to go after the “American market” as JAL has primarily concentrated only on Japanese companies. There was a woman who had worked there for years and was the only one taking care of this “American Market.” She kept all the information in manilla folders in her office and so nobody but her knew anything about current relationships. I decided the best solution to this problem was to put all that data in a database and share it with the entire office. The power was thus taken from her and given freely to everyone. Kind of like Microsoft versus Linux now that I think about it. I spend a month going through forums and made an incredible database the office adopted for many years which they named after me pronounced in a Japanese way.
Well, I took my work, stripped out the company confidential information and used it as my address book, password manager and to keep info on all my appliances. It was the most important piece of software I used for over 20 years. Now I had to build another one using the Linux version which of course is Libre Office Base.
Actually, I didn’t start with Base but found a simpler version called Kexi which made it easier to transfer that data directly from Microsoft office. The insurmountable hurdle however, was I could not assign a primary key, thus it couldn’t do what I needed it to do. So after a month of trying I gave up and went to Libre Office.
Like my Google Photos comparison with Synology Photos it was the same with Microsoft Access and Libre Office. MS Access is the Lamborghini and Libre Office Base a Volvo. Only this time the Volvo used manual instead of automatic transition and the instructions were all in German. By this I mean Base just didn’t work as simply and easily as MS Office. Without getting into all the minor details my main issue was the futility in trying to get the Master, Slave forms to work together with Base’s insistence that it delete the first record of my dataset for some strange reason.
My solution? Just scrap the Master, Slave and use only one form for each dataset. The hardest part was I wanted a combo box and when I typed in a company in my “passwords” form I wanted it to find the corresponding data in the form. This involved macros which MS Access would mostly provide but Base struggled with for this operation. This is where AI came in in a big way. I just told AI what I wanted to do and it wrote the macros for me! The second item was I just couldn’t get the navigation buttons to do what I needed them to do. Buttons shouldn’t be hard and seemed straightforward. They just wouldn’t work properly, there was always some small problem! The solution? Use the native navigation bar and place that up top instead of creating individual buttons.
Getting all my data into Libre Office Base and getting it to work took an entire month but I accomplished it.
With Linux I no longer needed to worry about Windows continually hoovering up my data and sending it to Microsoft. Plus as a free, open-source project I didn’t have to worry about continual price gouging.
I thought I might be done, but now I was in learner mode and so the project snowballed.
Pi-Hole
In reading all those forums I learned that the amount of data companies hoover up about us is appalling. What caught my interest was the ability to stop all those ads that appear whenever technology is used. Companies hoover up your data and then use it to tailor ads to sell us more crap. The ads are a nuisance but the invasion of privacy, as I’ve learned, is appalling. Furthermore, seeing all the tech leaders at Trump’s inauguration is a terrible sign. Our data is used by companies such as Palantir, not only to sell adds but to create synthetic profiles which know us better than we know ourselves. Scary, dystopian stuff!
So I learned about Pi-Hole which is a data “sink” meaning it will block all those privacy invading data transfers at the network level. Many people will install an ad blocker” such as UBlock Origin but that is only on a browser. It is like trying to stop a flood with just a pebble. Instead Pi-Hole will block all of it from every device on the network at the network level. The immediate benefit for me, is no more popup ads when I read my hometown newspaper on my iPad in the morning. But more importantly the updates to my synthetic profiles have now stopped updating out of my home network.
I was thrilled when I first got it to work and then aghast at seeing over 18,000 information requests being blocked PER DAY!
As for the technical setup I could have run Pi-Hole in my docker on the Synology NAS but was warned about it sucking up too much RAM. Luckily I had an old Raspberry Pi 3B+ sitting in the garage and Raspberry Pi-Hole is made specifically for, guess what…. the Raspberry Pi. So with the help of AI I did something I’ve never done before. In the past, I’ve always been more comfortable with a GUI version but graphical interfaces take up a lot of CPU and RAM so the system can physically show you in graphical form what to do.
With AI, I could use the “headless” version meaning you have to interact with it through the command line. What was formerly very intimidating became easy-peasy with AI. No more spending weeks hunting through forums trying to get the thing to work. Just ask AI and presto!
Home Assistant – Home Networking
In the past I had used Home Assistant on my Raspberry Pi just for one simple action. I’m a very nostalgic person and thought it would be nice to have a grandfather clock. But unlike the one at my grandparent’s place, I didn’t fancy it going off every hour especially at night and god-forbid the midnight hour where you’d get 12 successful BONGS.
I realized I could use Home Assistant to chime whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Therefore, I set up various chimes such as Winchester, Big Ben and Carmen Ohio to only go off at certain hours and was happy with it for many years.
As I was in learning mode, I decided to figure out Home Assistant to it’s full potential and make my home truly “smart.” Furthermore, I could remove automations – deGoogling my life is another focus of this overall project – from Google and put them directly into Home Assistant. Just another step to decrease reliance on Google. Home Assistant will identify everything on my network and I could set up not only my chimes, but monitors, gauges, automations, controls and everything else using Home Assistant this time not on my PI – it is busy with Pi-Hole – but in the Docker on my Synology NAS.
The best outcome of this is I’ve repurposed an old Samsung Tablet as a home control monitor in the kitchen. It shows when household members are home, where they are, can turn on lights, shows the weather, how much hot water is left, a live stream of the camera at the front door, the air quality, temperature and so on. That is just on my main dashboard. It also shows information about every single device on my network.
Internet Control for Kids
The internet has become an invasive and mindset altering thing. Instead of the internet being a destination, such as the old home computer with a dial-up modem, it is now a thing from which we cannot escape. Just look at anyone, anytime and how much they peer into their phones every minute of the day. It reminds me of a quote by Nietzsche.
“When you peer into the abyss the abyss peers into you.”
And peer the internet has. The internet is the reason we have Trump as President. It is the reason we’re so divided politically. It has radically transformed society to the point we’re no longer a society but a market and that market involves ideas. From the constant bombardment of ideas we’ve gone from civil politics to Nazi salutes, to talk of invading Canada and to incessantly discussing bathrooms, genders and feeling the need to specify if a name is male, female or other? What? If we could describe any of this to our 1980’s selves our 1980s version would believe we’ve all gone mad. And we have. Thanks to technology.
Therefore, we must guard ourselves against this omnipresent power which demands to know everything about us and alters our way of thinking. I realized I must do this for myself but especially for my kids. The internet now has more of an influence over kids than parents and this is terrible.
The epiphany came to me when I was up late working on the aforementioned database and decided to see if the kids were sleeping. It was 11:30 PM on a Wednesday – a school night. To my surprise they were both playing games with friends!
I have wonderful boys and they will listen to me, especially since I will take the time to explain why I’ve come to whatever decision. However, the internet is a powerful force and the pull may be too strong. So I figured out how to just cut the internet on their devices at certain times. Most people will rely on “Screen Time” for Apple products and that is useful, but what about non Apple products?
The solution is both. Screentime goes into effect at certain hours and the internet also cuts as my oldest primarily uses his PC. This way, there is no temptation to just “play another 10 minutes,” and their friends cannot tempt them by calling at any hour of the day.
To guard against any perception of just being an “overbearing parent” I take the time to explain the internet and what is happening to my oldest, and will do the same for my youngest when he is ready. I installed Linux on my oldest’s computer and have him use it primarily except for gaming, which many of the most popular games require windows. I explain why social media is such a bad influence thus we will all not use it, except for Discord. On the other side of the coin I’m very liberal with their game time and will sometimes play with them and buy them whatever game they’d like (except for the overly violent ones). I’ll also do research and find really cool puzzle games. Not, boring stuff that are associated with most parents mind you, but things like the game Portal which is not only incredibly awesome but necessary to know if you want to understand nerdy, internet culture and be in the “cool kids club.” My oldest loved it and now understands what those forum users mean when tempting you with “cake.” Portal was a couple of years ago but now I have my oldest playing the Talos Principle which he also enjoys. I had to get him off Fortnite and Valorant as much as possible.
Thinking about this there are thousands and thousand of games out there but all the kids only play one of about 10 which is absurd and usually involves a gun. No bueno.
Conclusion
I’ve really been enjoying this “re-learning” of the computer and internet. Companies will continue to charge more as everyone becomes more reliant on their services and they’ll also continue to suck up everyone’s data. Trump is only a means to an end for the tech bros which Elon is showing. They want to hover up every piece of information about everyone and it has already become a form of control. The end game is ideas by Curtis Yarvin where the tech bros are the new oligarchs who not only demand payment for services too many are ready and willing to be imprisoned by but eventually it will know everything about us. For now, it is primarily to serve us tailored adds and get everyone to spend more. Work is being done to know everything about us and used for control. The dystopian future is already here but like the Matrix, people do not realize the extent to which they are already imprisoned. Conspiratorial you say? Try not looking at your phone for an hour let alone a whole day or week. We cannot. Try not posting something to social media. To illustrate just how much has changed, back in 2000 people were afraid of putting pictures of their kids on the internet because “the pedophiles” would get them. People were reserved in sharing their political opinions. Now, we cannot get them to stop. Not only that but their political affiliation is a major part of their identity.
People don’t realize how bad it has become and with AI it will become 1000 times worse. Parental influence will decrease, replaced by their AI companion girlfriend, parent, friend. It knows more and will know our kids better than we do. Like kids, adults are also imprisoned by this Matrix. Just tell me what your source of news is and I’ll tell you your political affiliation. Have you uploaded the 10,000,000 picture of yourself to the internet because you crave the dopamine hit of the “like?” We’re addicted, imprisoned and slaves to the Matrix and it is always with us. Where are you at this exact moment, even your gas station app wants to know. With whom are you communicating, what do you look like, which political party do you support, how much do you earn, where are you going, what are you doing???? The internet wants to know.
Before I go, I wanted to mention that Facebook specifically told us they were going to do this with something called “Beacon.” There was tremendous backlash and the project was scrapped. But guess what, they did it anyway and now just suck up all your data secretly when all you wanted to do was share the 1000th picture of yourself.
It is now not only Facebook but pretty much every single service, website, app that connects to the internet.
I feel like I’m a member of the rebel alliance fighting against the imperial forces. I’m not important at all but I have my principles, my morals and hopefully for a little while longer, my freedom. By self hosting, using Linux and keeping tabs on the way the internet is trying to control our lives, I feel good, more in control and am learning. This is all very useful not only for myself but to teach my kids as the internet is no longer our friend but a tool of manipulation.
And with that I’ll get out of bed and go see my customer. I’m in Lake Mary, Florida, will have brunch and then off to my hometown of Ohio. I’ll unplug, sit on the porch, listen to the birds, drink some wine and “touch grass” as they say. The world is changing, the forces of Mordor gaining strength, but with Linux, self-hosting and continual learning, I’ll keep myself in Lothlorien for as long as I can.
