Or, “I Don’t Want To Be A Boomer”
A while back, I realised that I was getting left behind, technologically-speaking. While my age has been a subject of great debate over the years, (people say I sound 45 and look 25, and I kind-of enjoy playing into it,) I’m too young to feel that old-man instinct with new technology.
A little paranoia started it all; I went to a tech conference way back in time. A programmer-turned-investigative journalist was giving a talk about the future implications of free speech and so on, and part of the talk was on the Tor browser, the Dark Web and so forth. At the time, that was how people in the intelligence industry – if you could call it that – were getting information out of the hotspots; at the time, that was Syria, Libya and the Donetsk region of Ukraine.
The problem was, as this guest lecturer stated with almost complete certainty; Tor was compromised, if someone wants to, they can read everything, and digital privacy is now a myth. There was a lot more going on in the talk, but it’s maybe something for another day; the point was that the day for internet privacy was gone, and if you wanted to win the war for online privacy, well, you were probably ten years too late.
And that was about ten years ago now.
But somewhere around that time, I started to hate the idea of the cloud. It’s something I held onto for years; right up until my server got compromised and then the dodgy tech support guy managed to entirely wipe everything off it, causing me I don’t know how much in losses and would probably cry if I ever found out.
After that debacle, I figured it was time to join the 21st Century while we’re still in it.
I’ve tried a ton of tools, from the high-tech to the not-so high tech, and we’ll talk about that later.
One tool I use every day though; OneNote.
I use it because I built a blog on my desktop, and slowly but surely, I’m moving my blog archives onto it for better organisation. It allows hyperlinking, to the point where you put anything in two square brackets [[ and it becomes a hyperlink and creates a page automatically.
If WordPress had this feature, it’d be fantastic.
For now though, absolutely great tool and I’ll update this article in the future with more use cases. I have to go though; pressing business to attend to.
+1 for OneNote. Great minds and all that. Been using it for years throughout uni, various jobs, fiction worldbuilding and personal projects, etc.
Perfect for using it across work laptop, home laptop, tablet and phone and having all notes synced throughout the MS ecosystem.
Rarely hear of anyone else using it but for me its the right balance between too simple (apple notes), too complex (Notion) and not shit (Evernote).
I’ve paid Obsidian’s cloud syncing this year, simply because of its compatibility with Linux. I’m not really a tech guy, I chose it because I found it sexier than others note-taking softwares. I do know that I need to build a local server (or at least understand how my father – the tech guy – built his). And I still don’t trust any clouds but my mind…