I've been looking into degoogling a bit. It's not going well. I'm experimenting with Nextcloud, currently with the specific small goal of switching from Google Keep to Nextcloud Notes. The Android App for this is so bad. I want to like this but it's so hard.

#degoogle #nextcloud

I trust Google's data security a lot. They have a lot of smart people working on it. I'm less confident about Nextcloud and its hosting.

I mean I trust Google to keep my data safe, they do an excellent job of ensuring only me and, well, Google has full access to all my data.

@jani Why are you so sure about Google? It's not as if they don't have HUGE security issues

Ah, I don't know how to cite another toot here, so just:

https://floss.social/@thehappycoder@hachyderm.io/115615183221379326

@jani I tried to do that once and lost three years worth photographs :-) After that I bought Asustor 6404T (the most recent model at the time) and plain and stupid Dropbox subscription...

A specific item in the Nextcloud Notes app: The top row of editing icons are minuscule.

It's not just that I'm middle aged and use bifocals, but my thumb being wide enough to cover four icons at once makes me feel sadly fat-fingered.

The font size setting has no impact on the icon size, but also curiously no impact on the rich text editor font size. Only the plain text editor.

#nextcloud

@jani I.e., I realized that hacking kernel does make neither a data storage expert nor even half-decent sysadmin ;-)

@jarkko Yeah, this. I don't trust myself to run most of these services myself. I know I could learn it, but I'd rather do something else.

But even if I buy Nextcloud hosting, I know the expertise and monitoring and everything is scattered among dozens or hundreds of hosting companies.

@delawen Yeah, well, trust is a gut feeling, backed by evidence and track record. 🤷

I use Google Workspace (checks notes, yeah it's still called that today) so it's on me (not Google) to ensure I don't reuse email addresses in my domain. They have no control on it.

Plain gmail accounts are another story, I don't know if they recycle them.

@jani For email, and especially for managing multiple subaddresses such as iki.fi and kernel.org forward, I've fallen in love with Fastmail recently (about a year ago) :-) They've really polished that service in recent years.

@jani There are way better apps than Nextcloud notes, that can also selfhost. Check out @joplinapp.

@altim @joplinapp

I'm sure there are. But I'm not looking to replace a plethora of Google services with a plethora of *independent* services, each with their own clouds, self-hosted or otherwise.

@jani More older I get, less I want to do myself. I turn every rock before I realize, "this actually needs to be done". It's like sending fucking special forces, when you touch the text editor and write code or configure software manually :-D

@jani BTW, were you asking about loopback driver or was it someone else? Yesterday, after year not touching the code I migrated the driver to use VB2, remove all other features except capture, and implemented file descriptor based life-cycle model for the /dev/videoX devices.

Someone pinged me about i t around Dec and that got me so stressed that I actually had to open the text editor ;-)

Those three issues were basically lowest common denominator to send RFC patches. I need to polish what I came up for some time but it is now in my internal queue :-)

@jarkko Yay, it was me!

Feel free to Cc me on the patch. I don't really have any domain expertise to review, but I can chime in with my "I want this!" 😁

@jani It took one year of motivation exercises and three hours of active work to accomplish the changes that were in the backlog...

@jani I will for sure :-) Thanks for kicking my ass. Otherwise, I likely would not be working on it.

@jarkko Feels like a lot of home improvement type of things. "Come on, I'll do it, no need to remind me every year!"

@jarkko Any time! 😂

@jarkko
I use Fastmail at the moment. When I was setting things up, a family plan, the ability to use custom domain and forward certain addresses to external recipients was quite important. Fastmail does that nicely.
I know it has downsides, in location and connections to USA.
@jani

@miiko @jani Pragmatically speaking, inbox location does not matter that much :-) If it does, then you would encrypt it (with OpenPGP) anyhow. Intelligence services can obviously download all your email traffic if they want, without access to your account.

@jarkko
Yeah, true. In the more geo-political scenery, I would like having no ties to anything US-related, though.
@jani

@miiko @jarkko

AFAIK Fastmail is an Australian company with servers in the US.

I think I'd rather have all of it in the EU. For example, the Nextcloud instance I'm experimenting with is running in a data center in Finland.

@jani I use the plain Nextcloud mobile app and markdown text files for my notes. Works well.

@jani
You can also check https://opencloud.eu/en/ / https://github.com/opencloud-eu

Nextcloud is basically continuation of the ages old Owncloud, while Opencloud is more community oriented fork of the Owncloud-ng or whatever it was called (in short: forget about Owncloud itself, use the forks). PHP vs Go, too.

A colleague is using Opencloud, I'm using .. well, SSH and stuff, I don't have photos etc on Google no matter how much Photos tries to force me to click their "backups".

@jani @altim @joplinapp Perhaps you may like to have a look at #Proton.me services? I use a bit of Proton, a bit of #Nextcloud but TBH for notes I prefer #Joplin :)

@jani @altim @joplinapp You can configure Joplin to store it's notes in your nextcloud (or any other webdav backend). That's the way I use it.

@jani https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jarkko/linux-tpmdd.git/log/?h=vcam

Not yet ready for submission but it has the basic blocks in some form: VB2 and file-descriptor based life-cycle. It requires some iterations of cleanup, simplifications, tweaks etc. but I think it is now framed correctly :-)

@jani I.e. it is hammered to the correct mold but code is still somewhat convoluted in some places but getting there ...

@jani I'm now also experimenting with zerocopy dmabuf changes and contiguous allocator. I'm worried that if I leave them out, I might be ignoring something that would become bottleneck adding them :-) I'm glad I wrote year ago a program that streams scrolling checkerboard to loopback device, as I think I can make its flow dmabuf enabled quite easily :-)