This is a mirror of the post on /r/kettlebell: https://www.reddit.com/r/kettlebell/comments/1p5kwbm/an_average_new_dads_approach_to_training_with/ Why this post? I often get asked in comments about how I program my workouts. In order to address these comments, I’ve decided to write this post and outline my process. Goal My hope with this post is to better understand why you should program your…
This is a one-off to my blog. Not sure if I’ll update again soon, but I wrote this post on social media and wanted to mirror it here. We’ll see if in 2025 I start actively blogging again. My top ten albums of 2024 (in no particular order): State Faults - Children of the Moon. Probably got the most play time out of anything in this list. Perfect blend of screamo, and melodic post-hardcore. Favorite…
Hi everyone! So I archived this blog at some point in 2022, but I’ve decided to bring it back. In the middle of 2022, I lost interest in blogging, mostly because I felt I had nothing to write about. Now that has changed. There’s been a lot of changes both with my personal tech and my life in general. In part 1, I’ll start with my personal life. 2022: My Year for Health 2022 could be called the…
One of least favorite things about my personality is I’m a perfectionist when it comes to things I use on a daily basis, especially with technology. Another thing is I like to minimze the number of devices I need to use to get a particular set of tasks done. This came to a hault again with my relationship with my iMac recently. Over the past 6 months, I used the 24” M1 iMac as my primary personal…
This 3rd part of my de-Googling journey was never meant to be written, but it’s been a roller coaster ride of ups and downs since part 2 written back in February 2021. In summary, there was a period of time in the past year that I went back to many Google services. Including, but not limited to: Google Photos Google Drive Google Docs/Sheets Google Keep Google Maps YouTube This post will update…
Over the past few months, I’ve been looking for a new pair of true wireless (TWS) earbuds and have pretty much returned every pair I’ve tried. In this post, I will talk about why I started looking for new ones and also why I’m giving up on them for now. My 1st TWS Earbuds: AirPods 1st Generation My first pair of TWS earbuds were the 1st Gen AirPods , technically 2nd hand from my partner, given to…
Introduction Hello! It’s already 2022 and I’m not sure what happened to 2021. In this post, I just wanted to reflect on 2021 and what I hope to accomplish in 2022. 2021: Another rough year, but moments of joy 2021 was another rough year. One of the most obvious reasons was the continued effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thankfully, vaccines were distributed this year to the general public, at least…
Introduction Over the past year, I’ve been bouncing between several different cloud storage services and/or sync clients, each with their own trade-offs between convenience, privacy, and pricing. For context, I use cloud storage primarily for easy immediate access of important documents/files. It also acts as a pseudo-backup (I use Backblaze and local drives for true backups with snapshots) in…
My desk now ( Large Photo ) Introduction In my last post, I griped about all my issues I was having with macOS and was going to switch over to Windows/Linux with the purchase of a Lenovo Ideapad Slim Pro 7i . Unfortunately, Linux support on this machine was quite terrible and WSL wasn’t going to cut it for my love for the command line use cases. Long story short, I ended up picking up a blue 512…
Introduction In my last post , I talked about my adventure with various computing devices in 2021. I wish it was over, but unfortunately I am me. I tend to be a tech minimalist and try to own as few devices as possible. My fiance got a 2020 13” M1 Macbook Pro from me as a gift after she finished school back in July. However, this machine was largely collecting dust and I decided to start using it…
Introduction In this post, I wanted to reflect on the changes in devices I’ve had throughout 2021. I’ve had many ebbs and flows on figuring out what I wanted to use, based on my use-case, while also trying to balance digital privacy and convenience. This has caused me to switch operating systems on several occasions, and also buy/sell many pieces of hardware (thankfully a majority of which were…
Introduction In recent months, I’ve recently kind of stumbled into using more Apple products, all of which are in the ‘budget’ category: Phone: iPhone SE 2020 64 GB I switched to iPhone back in April . In summary, I moved mostly because of iMessage’s massive adoption here in the United States , and for folks unwilling to switch chat services like Signal or XMPP, I rather message them with…
Introduction Last month, I wrote about switching to iPhone from Android and overall I’ve been really happy with the switch. I’ve been generally been getting grumpy with technology and may have greatly regressed on many of my old privacy goals, for the sake of convenience and features. Some of the pitfalls include: Switching to macOS as my desktop OS iMessage and Phone calls through the OS are…
I am by no means a security researcher, expert or professional. Most of this post is my opinion using more higher level concepts about the topic at hand. If there’s something I missed here, please reach out and let me know! Background After being interested in privacy issues for the past few years (on/off) and on the Fediverse for the past months, I often see folks conflating privacy and anonymity…
Background For my daily mobile device, I was using Samsung Galaxy S10e up until recently, when I traded in for a 2020 iPhone SE . As a FOSS advocate, this may be a bit surprising, but I feel like the trade offs between privacy, usability, and convenience were a major factor for my switch. In this post, I will overview what I felt was missing with Android, why I switched to iPhone and what the…
Back in October 2020, I was using Google Photos for my digital photo & video management and sharing platform. I still believe Google Photos is probably the best photo management application out there, in terms of features, UX and pricing. However, the privacy implications of using the service are unfortunately hard to ignore. One criticism of the Google Photos app is how to delete old…
EDIT (2021-05-26): I ended up moving back to Netlify again. It’s currently on GitHub, but I would like to transition to something else for the future. Managing app passwords for ftp was becoming a pain. Back in January, I decided to rehost this website with Netlify . Although this has made things incredibly convenient, I sort of didn’ve love the fact I was relying on GitHub to maintain my website.…
There are variety of file syncing options out there, with the most popular ones being Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, and Microsoft OneDrive. Although the pricing for all these services have very affordable prices (per GB), there is one thing they all have in common; they presume trust on the provider to keep your data safe and respect your privacy. Whether it be a distgruntled employee, poor…
Back in January, I did a CSS clean up on my website and mentioned that I was still using the default Jekyll Minima , but would have liked to remove my dependency on it. Today for some reason found me the motivation to do so, and hence the site youaboutre seeing now no longer depends on the Minima theme in my Gemfile at all! In its place, I am using a combination of CSS snippets from the previous…
I haven’ve blogged in a while and I decided I needed to just dump my thoughts about various things that has been occupying my time. Although I am not participating in #100DaysToOffLoad , this blog is very much in spirit of that style of writing. Quitting my Theme Journal After missing two weeks in a row of updating my Theme Journal , I’ve decided to abandon it entirely and also remove it from my…
Back in December 2020, I wrote a blog post documenting my de-Googling journey. Since then, I’ve made enough significant changes to justify an update. Most of these updates are good; however I do want to point out some regressions as I’m trying to find a balance between privacy, usability and mental bandwidth to make changes in my life. This post will focus only what I’ve changed since my last…
I have a tried a variety of Linux desktop environments, but I always find myself coming back to GNOME 3 . GNOME 3 was a [controversial] change when it was first released, but the ability to use extensions has somewhat alleviated the situation for a lot of GNOME folks. That said, I have become quite familiar with the workflow of GNOME shell, even to the point where I don’ve feel need to install…
Disclaimer: I have no relationship with GoatCounter other than using their service and briefly contributing to the developer on GitHub sponsors; opinions are my own! This morning, I decided to remove the Privacy-respecting analytics service GoatCounter from my website. There are a few reasons for this: (1) website performance and (2) for my mental health in terms of intentionality. I should note…
On January 1, I decided to try a Yearly Theme over traditional New Yearsabout resolutions, with a Theme Journal to track daily progress. After using this system for ~5 weeks, I decided to give an update on my feelings on the Yearly Theme and also how I’m going to change my approach to it. I still love the idea of a Yearly Theme I chose my theme as my “Year of Intention,” and for the most part,…
An updated overview of my full desk setup ( Large Photo ). Wallpaper by Mohammad Alizade This past week has resulted in a lot of computing changes for me, enough to justify a blog post and my thought process of why I made the change. In summary: I sold my gaming desktop pc (i5-8400, 16 GB RAM, RX 580) to a local buyer on Craigslist. I bought a used Thinkpad X390 + Thunderbolt 3 Dock from a local…
Over the past year, I have made many positive strides in improving my digital privacy. This includes, but is not limited to: Deleting my “mainstream” social media accounts: Facebook Twitter Instagram LinkedIn Joining the Fediverse through Fosstodon , providing a community who shares this common interest in digital privacy and learning about new ways to improve it Switching away from Google…
Edit (Feb 14 2020): I decided to make a small update to the website by incorporating colors using Material Design guidelines. If you have issues seeing anything on the site, please let me know by contacting me . As much as I love Nord Theme , I was growing tired of the color scheme on my web site. I decided to change things up and also simplify the the number of color variables I had in my SCSS…
I’ve been using Linux on/off since about 2009. However, primarily I’ve been a Ubuntu/Debian user, only occassionally trying other distributions such as Fedora. During the 2020 Christmas break, I decided to install Gentoo on my personal desktop as a learning experience. When I was originally planning to write this blog post, I had no plans of moving away from Gentoo Linux as my daily driver.…
I decided to rehost this website to Netlify . Originally, this website was hosted by my email provider, Fastmail . Although it worked for the most part, deploying updates to the site was a little cumbersome. In summary, my workflow was: Make changes to website. Build the site using bundle exec jekyll build Commit changes via git to my repository. Open my FTP client (Filezilla) and upload the…
About 5 days ago, I decided to try to take a week off from Mastodon . It’s been nearly 5 days and I’ve decided I’m going to unblock it from my NextDNS account. There are a couple things I noticed in this short period of time. I missed the community Most of my immediate friends and family are not nearly as interested in the most common topics on the Fosstodon , the Mastodon instance I have joined.…
I started noticing that I have been creating the same compulsive habits with Fosstodon , the only Mastodon instance that I have been actively involved with. Even though I enjoy the community, as it gives me a place to express my nerdy side that I don’ve experience with my real life friends, I find myself constantly opening the website or mobile apps, looking for some sort of response or…
I’ve seen a lot YouTube videos showing off their phone setups, so I figured why not write a blog post on what my phone setup looks like currently as a means to “snapshot” my technological life. I plan to do one for my desktop as well soon! As with other facets of my life, I try to be digitally minimal as possible, where each app on my phone stays on it due to its utility. If I find myself not…
Since I couldn’ve sleep and was feeling inspired both by Kev Quirk’s Simple.css Jekyll guide and Thumb’s Classless Jekyll site , I decided to clean up with the SCSS files that can be overridden/modified for Jekyll’s default theme Minima . In particular, I removed every class I could find in the _sass/minima/_base.scss and _sass/minima/_layout.scss files. This required also explicitly removing…
Spotify is amazing. For a small monthly fee, you can have access to almost all the music ever created by humanity. However, from a practical, ethical and for my case, minimalistic perspective, I’ve decided that I can’t use Spotify anymore. My goal here is not to argue or convince others to do the same, but rather to give my perspective and see if others feel the same. This blog article isn’t meant…
On January 1, I decided to try a Yearly Theme over traditional New Yearsabout resolutions. With this goal, it is also suggested to track your progress throughout the year using a Theme Journal , which you can learn more about on the The Theme System website. Unfortunately, the physical journal was completely sold out when I found out about it, so I decided I would write mine in Markdown and also…
I’ve always enjoyed looking at and setting up my desk. Whether it was from various expensive YouTuber setups or scrolling through /r/battlestations , these setups always drew inspiration for myself to improve my own. I hope this post about my setup inspires you in some way as well! Before, I can talk about my setup, I wanted to briefly describe my mindset when it comes to setting up my…
Originally, I was going to write a post for setting my 2021 resolutions. However, I finally read this blog post by @brandon on Fosstodon and decided to give a “yearly theme” (more on this below) a try instead. What reinforced me to try this new approach was that my 2020 resolutions all fell by the wayside. I wanted to lose weight in 2020; I weigh more than I have ever in my life. I wanted to read…
Edited: 01-14-2021 As many more folks in the world seem to feel, many of the services/features provided by “the big 5”, GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) have given us a tremedous amount of convenience, at the cost of our privacy. Among the big 5, I think Google products have always made me feel the most conflicted due to my enjoyment of their services. However, as Chris Wiegman…
Hello, random internet traveler! My name is Nicholas Danes. In order to not repeat myself, you can learn more about me here . I have always had an on/off interest in Linux, Open Source, and Privacy. Inspiration to start running this website primary came from the Fediverse instance called Fosstodon in October 2020; more on this below! Since Summer 2020, I have been slowly migrating away from…