Today has been consumed with “routine” computer maintenance. Usually I live in my fortress of nerditude; safely behind walls of Linux and brainless prepaid cell phones that couldn’t play Pokemon Go even if I wanted to (which I don’t). Alas my employer gets me tied to certain systems and I have new hardware. The various new OS & software installations all want a pound of flesh and they’re probing for every bit of control. (Also they inexplicably think I want to see CNN, add Yahoo to my browser, and type in my credit card number.)
It’s relentless:
Microsoft has crawled up my ass.
Yahoo came out of nowhere and shit on my browser. (I found and killed that abomination toot sweet.) I had no idea Yahoo still existed. What’s next, a MySpace link on an AOL floppy disk taped to the Sunday newspaper?
Google apps is pissed at me because I’m seeing other browsers.
An iDevice is scanning the perimeter of my cyber footprint. It keeps begging for attention like a limp, foppish, little, toy simpering around the edges of the Terminator’s kitchen. Even if I have to use it, I begrudge its OS. An iPad is not yet a real computer. (I can hear the commentary brewing now but I will only accept pro-iDevice comments from professional welders and nuclear physicists. Seriously, if I can’t jam a thumbdrive into a USB port it’s a form factor that’s being deliberately annoying.)
The people who inflict this crap on us are monsters. Combined they’re a tidal wave of bullshit. Microsoft / Google / Apple are the worst; the Three Stooges of privacy violation!
They’re all trying to get me to use competing and incompatible cloud services and none care what I, the guy who paid for this crap, desires. I have a storage service… it’s a RAID array crammed in a fireproof box in the garage. It’s stupid simple, works great, costs nothing, and it requires that creepy pervs who want to ogle my family photos have to at least do me the honor of hacking. Also I don’t have to genuflect to anyone to access my own Goddamn files and that’s priceless. Yes, I back it up remotely but I sure as hell ‘aint putting my shit on anything that reports to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or whatever psychopath took Google off the “don’t be evil” plan. Screw them!
None of them can have my cell phone number. If they want to piss me off they’ll have to get in a car and drive to my house like a proper shithead. Why make it easy? Plus the damn phone is off and I’ll either lose it or break it eventually anyway.
Apple is extra annoying. It won’t shut the fuck up about iTunes. This is work equipment. I’ve got shit to do. If I want songs I’ll turn on the goddamn radio. (Actually I don’t want iAnything. Steve Jobs can suck it.)
Furthermore:
- Nobody needs a GIS lock to deliver e-mail. It’s e-mail, not a cruise missile.
- I don’t need iTunes to view a *.PDF.
- Bing has never worked for anyone ever.
- I don’t give a rat’s ass which word processor pops up when I read a page of text. I have several, use what I want, switch often, and have no loyalties. As far as I’m concerned the demise of WordPerfect and the unforgivable insult that is Clippy were the end of caring.
- Why the hell do I need to scroll past Estonia and 200 other places I don’t care about on every installation? Sure I get it that United States is “U” but making 350,000,000 Americans scroll past Micronesia (which has the same land area as a backyard in Texas) is politically correct bullshit.
- I don’t need spell check in Italian pre-installed. In fact the number of people who need multiple language spell check is similar to the number that have an urgent need to scroll alphabetically to Morocco.
- Facebook is not for me. Fuck off.
- I don’t Tweet.
- LinkedIn is like a clingy ex girlfriend that won’t go away.
None of this is anything other than 50 companies fishing for information. Harrumph!
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Damn! You’re beginning to sound like me!
No, an iPad isn’t a computer. Neither was an TRS 80, or whatever that %&*$@ thing they used to sell as a kit, programmed by flipping toggle switches was called.
And I have an iPad and actually like it. It has a signal merit; IT AIN’T A PHONE.
We live in science fiction, and as anybody with the sense of a quince tree has always know, science fiction is full of inconvenient nonsense. So it history. So, come down to it, is life. You ever wake up and have a day completely devoid of bovine excreta, you should probably check your pulse; you may be dead.
Yep. That’s about the size of it. I have a policy of keeping my computer free of software I don’t use, and squashing the installation of things I don’t want.
I managed to finally kill the Windows 10 upgrade nagware a few months back. Some of my family, not being as computer paranoid as I am, keep getting invaded by uninvited “upgrades” that cause their digital world to periodically burn to the ground. (One of my family though is more computer paranoid and literate than I am and keeps his stuff in a home linux-network behind a physical attack-barrier firewall. :-P)
Your backup scheme sounds surprisingly like mine. I have a home server with ~four USB drives attached: “The GhettoNAS”. I can access it from anywhere, and I’m pretty sure only *I* can access it from anywhere. Every two weeks I swap out two in the backup queue for two in the glove-compartment of my car.
Glovebox in the car? Nice “offsite” location.
I’m still trying to give Win10 the enema it needs. How’d you kill all the bullshit?
The Windows 10 nagging should be stopped now that it is past July 29th, however I used Never 10 over at Steve Gibson’s lair. https://www.grc.com/never10.htm
MadRocketSci – What sort of NAS software/distro are you using?
I have been using a spare P4 Dell with Mint as an FTP server until recently. I tried Open Media Vault but am having problems connecting my Android phone and Ubuntu MATE by FTP. The poor old Dell only has 2GB of RAM, FreeNAS recommends a minimum of 8GB.
One of these days, I need to take the time to figure out how to set up an e-mail server on my home server. Then I could serve from my own domain.
I’ve been meaning to do that forever too.