That’s simple and smart. I had played around with the thought of storing encrypted versions of my password manager vault freely available, and making the password a Ceasar cipher of the first letters of each chapter of some book I am sure to find freely online. Not so simple and smart, but at least some fun. Except maybe when you actually need to use it.
I’m thankfully currently not in that situation, but while the situation is meant as a joke, the question is serious.
If I stored everything I needed on a Google account that’s not 2FA-enabled and with a password you remember in your head, things are not that bleak in this particular situation, although it is hardly a convenience that makes it worth it to have that kind of setup in my opinion (and I would assume to most people frequenting this community).
Since deleting my Google account early this year (having used it as a primary account for e-mail for about 15 years), I have only stumbled upon two problems. The first one was that an old account I had with my current ISP had tied my phone number and my old e-mail account. This was solved with a call to customer service that severed that link and allowed me to make a new account with my phone number. The second was that I missed an invitation to an alumni party from a previous job… so yeah…
Note, I did spend a significant time overlapping my new primary mail account with the Gmail-account to ensure I had resolved as good as all of these issues. Since moving to Proton, I think I spent 2 years before actually deleting my Google account. That included a fairly thorough cleanup of old accounts that took quite some time and energy (boy, do some of these services give you a hard time deleting old accounts…)
Ok. The way I’m set up with my partner is to have two calendars, one on Nextcloud (me) and one on Google Calendar (my partner). We subscribe to each others calendars, and I’m also formatting it the same so it appears to be one. However, we cannot edit each others entries, but for our use case that is not needed, we just need to share certain events between us. So while this is not Proton, I believe the same is doable there.
I can see how this is not a very practical with multiple people (but potentially doable, it has been set-and-forget in my case), and if you need the ability to edit each others entries, then it is a non-starter.
Depends on your budget, I guess. My setup consists of a regular Samsung Smart-TV that I have disconnected from the network, connected to a mini-PC from Minisforum running Linux Mint. The reason I got that was mainly for gaming, could get away with a significantly cheaper option if not. I run my own Jellyfin-server for media content (movies, TV and music) and use FreeTube to watch YouTube (which I sync with my laptop and mobile using SyncThing). I do use a wireless foldable and rechargeable keyboard with built in trackpad, but it’s not working as great as I imagined. Corsair used to have a nice media keyboard, but as far as I know they have discontinued it and I haven’t yet found a new one that fits my criteria, so I keep using the foldable one.
As for gaming, I run emulation through RetroArch and Steam in big picture mode. I have four 8BitDo Ultimate controllers in case I get any friends over who are keen on a round of Mario Kart.
I have a mini-PC from Minisforum (not this one) dedicated as a media computer in my living room. It can fit nicely inside the TV bench, which a regular sized computer wouldn’t do. I like that I can play games like Horizon: Zero Dawn on it without any issue. I love it, and I gave about 800 USD for it.
I am planning getting a high-end rig for my office later (next year maybe?), and then I of course will not consider a mini-PC.
I use Obsidian, which is quite powerful with their vast plugin library. You can do a lot of automation, and you can check out some of Nicole van der Hoeven’s videos, who among other things use it to keep track of TTRPG campaigns, both as a player and as a game master. For example this one.
I don’t use their sync service, but have all files locally on my Nextcloud server. I sync them to my phone with Syncthing, which unfortunately means I cannot encrypt them with Cryptomator like I planned, but if you only use it on your computer, that is also something you could do. If you are paranoid about them still phoning home with your data, then you can block its network access with a firewall. I think you can install plugins manually.
I would have preferred it if it was FOSS. I have considered checking out Logseq as an alternative. But the bullet-based workflow doesn’t appeal to me, so I haven’t tried yet. I switched over from Standard Notes, and honestly it was pain to transfer because the text export from Standard Notes was all over the place, as I had used a lot of different note types. I tried to parse some of these smart notes they have, but I couldn’t quickly figure out how they were structured to automate it, so I ended up manually going through and copying over what I wanted to keep. I like the approach of keeping plain text markdown files. It is easier to export to another application in the future, although some of the content will be useless as it is explicitly written for the plugins (e.g. Dataview).
You don’t have to use all services. I have the Unlimited plan and use mail with custom domains (+ the included SimpleLogin account) and VPN mostly, and Drive for backup (no Linux client yet makes it a no-go for daily use, but I have my own Nextcloud server that serves my purpose fine). Pass I have not tried (I use another manager), and Calendar I also don’t use.
I still feel I am getting my money’s worth.
It was made available today. You are entirely correct, it was not very interesting. And the data seems to be lacking, only going back a couple of months (except some categories that went back a couple of years) even though I requested a full log since account creation. This might because I have purged my activity logs before.
It is assuming this is implemented in a way that forces all existing messaging services to implement this or shut down. In that case, you would want to build it from source from a point in time before it was implemented (or shut down). If that is not the case, then this wouldn’t be much of a problem to begin with, right?
If this passes, could you not self-host an older version of an open source service that does not contain the backdoor (e.g. Matrix) for your closests contacts to circumvent this? Not saying that would be very practical for all communications, but at least for exchanging nudes with your partner? If so, at least there’s that, but it would show how useless it is likely to be as anyone actually in the stated target audience could do the same.
Or is there something I’m missing that would prevent it?
You also don’t have access to your fire box in that Hanoi alley.