I've been using iPhone for five years, and it has been with my programming journey. Now that I've just got a Google Pixel 9a, I have the option to move away from both Google and Apple cloud.

I moved to Android with MacBook. Here’s my setup.

It is not bad at all. A lot of setup to do.

KDE Connect
Syncthing (Locally)
Cloudflare R2 + Blackblaze B2 for backups
Own domain email from Apple iCloud+
Bitwarden - Ditched self-host Vaultwarden and WireGuard
GitHub - Ditched self-host Gitea

For photo management, I use digiKam and PhotoPrism (docker). I first use osxphotos to export my iOS photos on my Macbook. (Tips: Download all photos offline first.)

Then I use PhotoPrism to see if everything is right. For some reason, some photos has the wrong dates. I have to manually edit them using digiKam.

Using Syncthing locally with the Android phone directly hooking up to the DCIM folder.

That’s it.

For cloud backup, I use Cloudflare R2 and Blackblaze B2 to setup two offsite backups.

I use rclone to simply one-way back up to cloud

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rclone copy

Then ideally, I will do sync once a week/ a month.

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rclone sync

By using this route, I can easily have TBs of storage without paying a ton of money per month. What’s more is that I have total control of my datas.

I also planned to sell my iPad Mini and to read books in physical form instead. I feel like I prefer them better. I will jot notes on paper and later on transfer it to digital notes using MacBook. So the knowledge can be reinforced multiple times before it even being jotted down.

Why I don’t self-host anymore?

It’s nice to play around with self-hosting. But the downside really is to manage it, and it takes time and effort.

I want to make apps using my spare time, instead of spending it on managing my personal hobby where a managed service can do.

I trimmed them down to using only necessary service. So storage is just storage, Apple iCloud+ arguably the cheapest email host with own domain.

I don’t want Microsoft 365 suite or Google Workspace just for the sake of having the storage; Or get bounded with their tools like I have to use Google backup to use Google Photos Object Search function, which I don’t like.

I don’t want to renew my Let’s encrypt every now and then; Put my sha256 key somewhere safe and remember where it is; Or facing hiccups because I have to manage so many things.

TLDR; Save my time, so I can focus on building, not managing. Interesting enough, when I was using Android before my iPhone SE 2020, I tinkered around rooting my phone, putting ROM in, etc. But only when I got my stupid iPhone SE where I can’t do anything, then I became productive. But now, I’ve already graduated from no direction tinkering to minimal self sustainable setup, to still be able to fight capitalism in the way I want.

ZenTube update and bugfix soon be coming

It’s been awhile since I bugfixed the app. Mainly because of life. But I guess no body cares about your personal life when all they want is for you to improve the product, especially for the paid users.

Bug fix should include the shorts filter improvement; Buggy explorer;

Next Big thing project

It was on hold for awhile because of life, again. But, it’s time to pick up where I’ve left off.

Recent lovely quotes I like:

You know you are under no obligation to be same person you were yesterday.
Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week.