Horizon Innovations

Ideas are easy, implementation is hard

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Escaping From Google

In the wake of Facebook data fiasco and Googles collection for their own end, I thought it would be an interesting project to see if it’s possible to go Google free on Android, and Google free completely for my business. A lot of people use Google for a lot of things ranging from email to maps, drive (storage) to music and of course search.

In the wake of the passing of the AA bill through the Australian parliament, i have updated, amended and added to, to take this into account.

What are the replacements for the most common apps used and how does it effect the work flow?

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome is th idea that nearly all of Googles apps are integrated, they are connected to each other, and on Android, many apps use the Play Store (Google) notification system. Some apps have reduced functionality without the Google connection.

The Apps

Google Android PC/Mac/Linux
Search Duckduckgo/Smartpage  
Maps OSMAnd~ Openmaps
Gmail Protonmail/Tutanota  
Calendar Etar Lightning/Nextcloud
Drive Nextcloud/Mega.nz  
Chrome Waterfox/Via/Orfox (requires Tor) Brave  
Music Blackplayer/VLC VLC
Keep Markor Atom
Launcher Nova/ Lawnchair  
Message (SMS) Signal  
Photo Nextcloud/ Smugmug  
Doc’s Nextcloud/polaris office/Andropen office LibreOffice/ Openoffice
Password Keepass2android KeepassXC

 

And for Android itself: LineageOS is probably the most well known and has the most available supported devices. Mokee (needs some modding) or Resurrection Remix OS (more found on xda-developers.com) are also good and generally kept up to date. There are more specialised android remakes that are far more secure.
Replacing the Android system is the only way to take Google off your device. It is a lot easier to do now than before and some manufactures are friendlier than others with this.

As I’ve put a non standard (manufactures) Android on all my phones, for this review I use my Sony Xperia Z. It’s not a new phone but still works well and the community support is outstanding.

The biggest part of Google is their free online apps that can sync across devices. It was revealed a while ago that they use AI bots to search through your email, docs etc for keywords so they can present you with more relevant advertising. I’m not keen on this. What to do about it? Well, most businesses these days have a website, which means they have a server. On my server I’ve installed an app called Nextcloud. Nextcloud can, with the aid of plugin and third party software do almost everything Google does, except look at your stuff, there is also an encryption plugin. Your calendars, photos, file storage, music and video streaming, encrypt it all, sync to all your devices and it’s open source software (and it’s free!).

Keepass is a password encryption storage system. Cross platform. Here will give you what is available https://keepass.info/download.html

Update:

As the new AA Bill is so invasive with it’s powers (I’m not going to get political here) what can be done to protect yourself from spying eyes and keep your privacy?

I researched most of this a while back. Besides the above, if you have a server for your website, move it to a safe country like Switzerland. Then for your finance and communication, I’d suggest using an operating system from a USB stick. There are a number around, one that is most recommended is Tails (https://tails.boum.org/) as it comes with almost everything you need to stay safe. On their website they even have an installer to take the hassle away. I’ve used Tails and can recommend them. Along with ProtonVPN, you’d be good to go. This is a bit of a hurriedly finished post, so I’ll be updating it over the next few weeks just to make sure I’ve covered everything.

Any questions or suggestions that I’ve missed are most welcome.

Stay safe 🙂

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Eating Well

zuzyusa / Pixabay

A friend of mine was having trouble loosing weight, yep the same old story. Count the calories, reduce the plate size, do more exercise and still nothing really happening.

So we looked at how it was done in the olden days. And that was very different. It basically boiled down to reducing certain food types, namely sugar, bread, biscuits, cake, chocolate etc. We saw the connection, sugar and carbohydrates. My friend hunted out some books from the library, on of which was the Real Food Revolution by Prof Tim Noakes, which is based on the finding of Dr Banting.

She starting on this lifestyle choice and lost 20kg in 9 months without extra exercise or plate size reduction!

I will be going into more detail in another post and referencing some science to back this up.

If you want to feed you body the propper stuff for healthy living, my suggestion is to go onto the Banting diet, do your research and enjoy life. The minimum you could do is to cut out all the processed food that’s on the market and reduce/stop your sugar intake.

More later – eat well 🙂

 

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Linux for the Macbook?

           I have a Macbook Pro, which I enjoy using. Credit where credit is due, it is a good machine. I’m in two minds as to whether I’d get another, but this one ain’t broke so I don’t have to answer the question just yet! I also like OSX, mostly. There are some things I’m not keen on, but like my windows machine before, there are some things I cannot do on Linux, such as Logos Bible software.

On to the question of Linux for the Macbook. Which flavour to go for and why? I cut my teeth on Red Hat 7.1 (which I still have!) and moved to Debian via SimplyMepis. I have tried many others including Ubuntu. For those who are not sure about what I’m talking about there are some websites that go into more detail than I care to here, like Distrowatch.com. Fedora was first on the list so I tried that. It worked well and Fedora 20 is a great improvement over previous versions as this time it felt spritely and the update and package manger were also improved (compared with Fedora 17). But then came “systemd”. This is the new init (basically boot up) system developed by some Red Hat developers to replace the existing aging init system. The problem with systemd is its mission creep. Its slowly becoming the “start” system for everything, and there are some things becoming dependant on it which (in my opinion) shouldn’t be. The Unix philosophy is for lots of small bits to do things exceptionally well, so if one bit falls over or fails it doesn’t take everything else with it. If any part of systemd falls over, it’ll take the whole OS with it. Not good for mission critical systems.

          Unfortunately most of the Linux distros are moving this way, which is a real shame. So if not fedora then what? Of the main Linux flavours it would appear that Debian and Ubuntu offer long term support versions which don’t have systemd, so I’ve gone for Xubuntu LTS (14.04). This will use upstart init system for its lifetime and hopefully by then the mess of systemd will be sorted and Ubuntu might see sense and open source upstart! Even with this I noticed there were “systemd” patches installed to allow apps dependant on systemd to work with upstart. Sort of leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

          Ubuntu and therefore Xubuntu installs easily along side OSX. The only thing to remember is OSX likes to have space between partitions and without these OSX wont upgrade, but it appears the Xubuntu install takes this into account – a nice touch. Once installed it just remains to reconfigure “refit” so Xubuntu can boot. Proprietary drivers are required for the Broadcom wireless connection and Nvidia for the graphics which Xubuntu has you covered – just install and go! Easy.

         And as far as the work I do on the Macbook is concerned, I use mainly Linux and then only OSX when I have too. Its good to have it around. I would love to go fully open source but some of the stuff just isn’t ready yet. I don’t think its too far away now.
Next: to configure Xubuntu for developing Android roms for the Asus TF201.

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Fedora 15 beta – Looking promising!

I first found GNU/Linux on the front cover of a magazine way back in 2000 I think. It was a product called Red Hat 7.1. I proptly installed it onto my then one and only laptop, a Toshiba Satellite 3 with a P3 700MHz and 192M RAM. I wiped off Windows ME and took 3 days to get Red Hat up and running. This took all of 1.5G of a 10G disk!
Fedora 15 takes over 3G of disk and I doubt that it could run on a P3 with 192 M RAM. One of the main reasons I liked Linux and still do is its lightness compared to MS Windows, or even OSX. But it is increasingly getting bigger (more bloat) as hardware becomes more powerful. The problem I have is that like with windows before, if I wanted to upgrade my software, I had to upgrade my hardware first, and now this is becoming more so with Linux. There are not many distros that will run happily on a P3 and 192M RAM, which is a shame, not even the Ubuntu!
So, back to fedora 15 beta. The first one I tried was the live CD to see how it looked and performed. As I like light weight stuff I opted for the LXDE version.

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Blogging Clients

It’s been a while since I tried some different blogging clients. I piece is being written with the help of Petrus-blogger, which is a java based client. It is quite straight forward to use and works well. The only thing I have notice (and I’ve submitted a request) is that for wordpress I am unable to write off-line, which is somehing I like to do often. So to use Petrus-blogger I have to write using another editor and then copy/cut and paste when I have internet connection. Other than that, it is stable and useful.

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Posting to a blog

I’ve been blogging (albeit on irregular intervals) for a while, here and on blogspot and sometimes on LiveJournal. I moved here because I consider wordpress to be better for several reasons. It is open source, a good reason, and it is standards compliant. I have installed wordpress on my server and it is easy to use and modify because it is standards compliant and well written. Another reason is that I do a fair amount of writing ‘off-line’ and have found that there are off-line blogging clients which work better with wordpress than with blogspot. Blogspot seem to change their system every so often which creates hassles for the clients and their developers (good ol’ Google!). So, on to the clients. I used to have a mac, a G4 iBook. A good machine but I gave it away to a friend as I collecting to many laptops and my wife suggested I ‘loose’ some. Also I found being ‘locked’ into a system was too restrictive. On the mac I used Ecto, which was and is a great blogging client. But, it only runs on mac, although there was a windows version which I think isn’t being developed anymore. As I don’t use a mac anymaore, and I don’t like using windows (too full of bugs to be paying money for), I use linux (as you might of guessed from my previous post) and finding a blogging client to work on linux is difficult. There are some good ones that work on windows which wont work on Linux even with wine (www.winehq.com) but linux does have a few, most of which are fairly simple. There are two that I came across that work and have some good features and both require java. One is petrus-blogger. It is good but it seems a little unstable and for some reason wouldn’t work on my system with wordpress, no matter what I tried. The other is bleezer, which I am using now. It seems to work well, but doesn’t like it when I am off-line with wordpress because it can’t access the list of posts, but other than that it works well. It isn’t the prettiest to look at, as it seems with most java applications, but is functional. It has a full array of formatting options along the adding hyperlinks and posting images, although here it didn’t seem to work and I had to manually upload this screenshot.

Bleezer screenshot
Bleezer screenshot

It also seems stable so far.

For looking at these applications, it seems a shame that so much effort has gone into producing something useful, and then nothing, almost like,”Ok, I’ve made a product, see, it works, now I’m going to stop and do something else”, a bit like a “3-day wonder”. Its satisfied a need, scratched the itch, served a purpose, an now discarded with no thought given to those who’ve pick up the tool and now feel rejected and cast aside, floundering and not knowing where to go or what to do… There come a responsibility when producing a product that people come to rely upon. Is this software still under development or has it run its course? In most cases, most developers act responsibly but there are the odd few who put something really good together, release it into the wild and thats it, leaving it there hanging. Shame.

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