Hello again and thank you for stopping by! Recently, I’ve been trying to do more stuff with my hands in order to stay away from a computer screen. So, I’m starting a new series on this blog, called “Handyman”, where I’ll show some of the handywork I did around my house, car etc. Ironically, the first post will be about technology, where I’ll show you how I cleaned my Logitech MX Ergo mouse.

The war in Ukraine is undoubtedly one of the worst tragedies that happened in our lifetime. Much has been written, many analyzers have said their opinion on the matter, so I will abstain from stating mine here. This post aims to show another aspect of the war: what effect it has on free speech online and the digital world in general.

Long time no see! I’ve been cooking something in the kitchen lately and it is finally ready.

First of all, Merry Christmas, everyone. In the midst of the holiday season, I decided to give whoever is reading this my opinion on how important FLOSS is and why it should be endorsed and celebrated by everyone.

Well, this is a bit of a bummer. Recently, Signal added a blog post announcing that it would close off one of it’s server-side components in order to “protect us” from spam.

After reading the first part of the series, you might be compelled to think about ditching Google and going on a more privacy oriented route. I fully support this and in this post, I will present to you my own experiences and the issues and rewards I ran into. Before going into details, I want to make two disclaimers: I am still using Google products, but either all of them are open-source (Android, Kubernetes, Angular and Go to be more precise) or are being used behind some kind of a proxy and that I am not an expert in any case and you should not take my word as gospel, other solutions may work for you better than they did for me.

I will split this section in two parts: main products (alternatives to the search engine, Drive and so on) and mobile products.

Google is in almost everyone’s lives more or less nowadays. This is normal, as they are one of the largest corporations on the planet and their products are being used by billions of people. They have a monopoly on the mobile phone market (through Android and their Play Store), the search engine market, the content creation market (YouTube), the browser market, the smart wearables market and many more. As their primary business is connected with data, this monopoly turns out to be a danger to the privacy of users as they become targets for data harvesting. In this two-part article, I will explain my motives to decide to remove Google from my life and how I did so.

Last semester at university we had to write a scientific paper that summarized already-existing information (as an exercise for the bachelor thesis). There were several choices for a group, each with different focus and I decided to direct my paper in the Security and Privacy sphere.

Podman is one of the newest kids on the blog when it comes to container runtimes. Developed by RedHat, it aims to provide a container runtime that does not need a “big fat daemon” for it to run, thus improving security and performance of the system. I have turned Podman into my daily driver for development and I have some thoughts to share about it.