Over the past few months I’ve been trying to simplify certain things in my life, especially by getting rid of some unused (social media) accounts. This included Facebook. Yesterday I removed Twitter from all of my devices, including my iPhone and iPad. This is probably just for a while, let’s call it “detoxing”.
I also took care of adjusting my primary email address from an @gmail.com address to my own domain. The email service is still hosted by Google, but now I have full control of the domain itself. Think about what would happen if your email provider would decide to just kill your access to @gmail.com, @yahoo.com or whatever… There are already too many services linked to this domain, so I’m moving off of the Gmail address.
Email is also the primary way to contact me. I still get DMs from Twitter pushed to me via topify (which lets me reply to the message directly via email), but for the time being I’m not reading @-replies.
In this process I also cleaned up my iOS apps, only leaving behind the apps I really need, plus some apps on the second screen that I use on occasion or just can’t delete (I’m looking at you Apple!).
The newly revived MacBook Pro, thanks to an SSD, got a reinstall, once again only leaving the necessary applications behind (which for some reason still feels like it’s too much). There are still some things left to take care of. But it’s good so far. Next step is buying another SSD for my desktop machine and also getting rid of unnecessary clutter there.
The process of setting up the machine was greatly improved by moving most of my important documents to the cloud (which already took place a few months ago).
Important things go into an S3 dump, managed by JungleDisk. Things I want to share easily and aren’t so important go into a Dropbox account. Be aware of these lines in the Dropbox terms:
Dropbox reserves the right to terminate Free Accounts at any time, with or without notice. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, and without further notice, Dropbox may choose to delete and/or reduce: (i) any or all of Your Files if your Free Account is inactive for 90 days; and (ii) previous versions and/or prior backups of Your Files.
I’m also trying to go back to an RSS reader as my primary news source, in my case the just released Reeder Beta. I’m also using the app on my iPhone and iPad.
And what have you been doing this weekend? 🙂