¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

is there ’the best’? What is right and what is wrong? Who defines that? Everything is just a placebo and a mere set of conventions and imitation… ↩︎

I am not posting much to this blog mostly because the posts I want to write are long and I don’t have much time to write + review them. So, writing shorter posts while transmitting the message I want should be a good exercise for the next couple of posts… ↩︎

while OS X is okay, in the end you’re sacrificing most of your privacy over convenience, and this remains the same if you opt to use Windows as your main OS. There is no force to stop lack of privacy if you use a proprietary software with access to the internet. ↩︎

the satisfaction of not using a KISS and/or do-it-yourself Linux distribution for desktop/personal computing/development purposes is simply sad. But what I am calling “bloated” won’t hurt either; it is mostly a matter of pride (and comfort). ↩︎

Chrome has an awesome performance. However I would state that Chromium (or even SrWare Iron⁶) offers more privacy but it is only easily available for Linux. Firefox offers even more privacy however Mozilla sometimes makes bad decisions. Honestly, as an end-user they are mostly the same today; the only thing that I miss in Chrom{e,ium} is the Panorama view (Ctrl/Cmd + Alt + E) from Firefox. ↩︎

my browser of choice when Windows used to be my main operating system circa 2010–11. ↩︎

deprecated. Oh, where are my badges? :/ ↩︎

mostly Google. DuckDuckGo is just for the bangs. ↩︎

Facebook privacy should be important, however you don’t want to become insane by pretending it works like snapchat and (thus) deleting your old posts or events you attended. The better thing to do is: think twice before posting so you won’t have to clea{r,n} your posts later. The way better thing is: don’t share flood or cheap humor (aka 9gag, buzzfeed, and similar), at least not too often, as it pollutes your timeline and the timeline of your friends. There are better places and/or communities more suitable to share these kind of posts (I just cited two of them). Also, don’t post all of your photos to Facebook. It you really want to post some photos, then just post a few ones. There are people that upload entire albums to Facebook as it were super cool. Not only it is lazy but it also permanently exposes every moment of your life/trip/whatever to every person with access to your feed, and there is no easy “undo” button – you can delete the photos later, but they will still be stored somewhere in Facebook servers. ↩︎

in 2009 I would be super enthusiastic about twitter (or even ‘identica’, for that matter). Today I simply lost almost all of my attraction for it. It is still cool, but it is not for me, neither as a follower or as a tweeter. However, for those of you who still like it (which is okay), I would recommend deleting old tweets periodically (there are several services which do that) or protecting your tweets, as they quickly become deprecated in relation to what you tend to think. ↩︎ ↩︎

I think the best way to use Facebook is to be flexible and maximize your (induced) serendipity of getting good events to go to and good connections to interact with (a.k.a. ‘friends’ in the Facebook terminology) without being too much restrictive, but without being too much open either. Finding the right balance is tricky and it is a matter of experience and personal choice. Anyway, regardless of how you use the network, it is really bad to be too much closed (why bother having an account then? I know some people who have not. They are perfectly normal and sane. Yes, they are real too!) and also to be too much open (you don’t want all of your posts or photos indexed by search engines or way too much addressable. Right? Specially, you don’t want your new friends (maybe your future boss, who knows?) to see things you don’t want them to see). ↩︎

Instagram is tricky. Yeah, I find out its design awesome (congrats engineers!) from the technical point of view. But I find out its users either (i)way too much open (and sometimes unaware of that) or (ii)way too much ‘I want to be pop, and brag all the time’ or (iii)‘I want to document all of my trips every day or so, even if these trips are from weeks or months ago’ or (iv)whatever. The point is: it is really hard to pick a subset of its users who try to use the site/app as a place to share good moments and feelings for a true and pure purpose (what is true or pure anyway?) other than just trying to appear. Well, people do what they wanna do and whatever, but still if you have to define a metric to determine what is a good community, the items I discussed here will inevitably be discussed. I am still unsure whether I identify myself with the overall Instagram community, however I learned that if the app is well designed (it is indeed!) and if it was made for the purpose of sharing occasional photos (not posting entire albums, please!), then it is a good fit for a person who wants do to exactly that: “share occasional photos”. Regardless of how other people use it. And period. Oh, and about privacy: keep photos private. I think I won’t change my mind about that point. ↩︎

almost finally: snapchat. It is a very original and nice app IMHO. First, photos are temporary, which is greeeeeeaat (no digital traces, at least theoretically); second, you share small moments of your life with people you (theoretically) care about, and you get a snapshot of the life of people who (again – theoretically) you care about. It is private by nature and there is no way of accessing its photos from the web (I mean, unlike Instagram; of course you could try to scrape the origin of the photos by debugging/tracing the web requests from the app but let’s focus on the overall end-user). The “small” moment concept is great and probably inherited or influenced by Twitter at some point (and maybe this is the reason why people don’t seem to use Twitter anymore as much as in the past). And well, I think if it is used wisely and/or with attention, then it is the best social network out there today. Less superficial than twitter / facebook and less bragging-wise than Instagram (well, at least people can’t post old photos/videos in there). And, the most important: it feels personal and interactive – exactly what a social network aims to be (usually). ↩︎

‘unfollow’ is always a great concept for stop caring should you need to ↩︎