Libb

Mullvad first, but then I would put Proton. And yep I pay for mullvad despite already paying for the Proton suite of apps.

That said, more people able to easily start using a vpn is great news... Until the day our leaders, always so focused on our well-being, decide to make it illegal for us to use a VPN for our own security quite obviously as there would be no comparison with what may happen in some dictatorship.

I use a small French company called monarobase. I don't use it but they offer wordpress hosting (and they have easy to use assistant for all their other offers). I've been their customer for well over 10 years now and I wouldn't want a larger more widely known host because 1) I never had any major issue with them, contrary to larger ones 2) their customer support is is the closest to perfection I have ever dealt with—which I find invaluable since I have myself very, very limited technical knowledge: every time I've made an oopsie, they fixed it in a matter of hours (and they never laughed at me :p)

If you want a bigger host and not some small French one (we have great cheese, too), like already suggested I would say the German at Hetzner are great but depending the offer, you will have a lot of maintenance to do yourself. So is the Swiss Infomaniak, I can say I really like what they're trying to make with their Site Creator, even though it still needs some work.

Infomaniak cloud/office suite is also very nice, if anyone is interested: myksuite.

WorPress (though I am open to alternative suggestions).

I started to use WP when it first appeared but in the last decade or so I became incredibly tired with both the direction it was going and the constant flow of feature updates and countless security updates. Not mentioning extensions). I wanted something a lot less demanding, simple and less bloated. I learned to use Hugo, a static website generator. That's what I'm now using. May not fit all use case but it's perfect for me. And I have zero maintenance (security or whatever) server side, since Hugo is only installed on my computer on the website is 100% static.

Thx, and yep it doesn't take much room ;)

Can't read the paper but Vivaldi is a great browser. Always have been my go to Chromium browser... when I don't use something FF-based ;)

I 100% agree on that, no discussion. I was just pointing out the fact that quite often a 'I have to' should be written as 'I'm used to' ;)

Its a great choice for those who can, but some people have to travel for work.

We (my spouse and I) decided to stop using planes the day we realized the environmental crisis we were heading to. That was in the early 00s, some 25 years ago. And be it for work or for personal reasons we have not used a plane since then.

Work was the easiest to solve for us: video + phone are often enough and when they're not a local correspondent we can mandate is more than able to deal with whatever needs a human presence (edit: it was a little more difficult for personal travels, but nothing impossible either). I have no doubt it's not always possible, but I'm also pretty confident it's often possible, it's just... not the usual way people think about it ;)

Nope.

I would suggest to not cross the US border as a very fine way to protect from them. That's what I do but I may be too extreme?

Thanks for the detailed and informative reply. One point really resonates with me, and that is cutting half of the computer/phone time. I guess I’ll try this,

This alone can be a life changer. I know for witnessing it how hard it can be for younger people and i also know what the terrible trap screen time is. Wishing you all the success :)

and cut half the transit YouTube time to something more meaningful. Also, I’ll try adding a bit of light strolling in the evening to see if things get better.

I don't know what are the hobbies you want to reinvest your time in (and you don't have to tell me, obviously), but if it is anything related with, say, reading, writing, or even sketching. Transit is a nice opportunity. Just do it... the analog way because if you do it on a screen you will be on a screen, and you will be tempted to check stuff online, check messages, feeds, emails, and if you manage to not check those you will still feel an urge to fiddle with the device in order to 'optimize the experience' or something along that line. Analog is your best ally (like the EU used to be for the USA up until recently :p)

To read on the go, I carry a small pocket book with me. To write, I carry a small notebook and cheap Bic ballpoint pen. For sketching, it's a small sketchbook with the same ballpoint pen plus a pocket box of watercolors that is small enough to fit in my jeans pocket if I wanted to (I don't I carry my stuff in a small messenger bag). It could be a lot of other activities the analog way, even things like knitting.

Say you feel an urge to send an important message to someone. Don't. Write it down in your notebook, using that cheap Bic you started carry with you instead. Close the notebook and wait til you're back home/office to reopen it and read that important message. See, if that message you wrote earlier still seems important enough to be send. You may be surprised. If it is still important, you will still be surprised by how much better written and articulated your message will be once you send it. Win-Win, like they say.

As for the “sleep early” part, even though I really love & want to feel that 4AM absolute silence, (and I have tried that before in uni!) I’m afraid that’s pretty much impossible because we usually work to quite late

We're 50+ my spouse and I and we seldom go to bed bed before 10pm at the earliest. I will generally not sleep before midnight (yep, I learned at a very young age to reduce sleep time). Young adult, maybe your age, I was working so much it was considered normal I would see my spouse at all (I would also stay at the office entire nights). But you don't need to be that extreme.

Say, everyday you decide to you wake up half an hour earlier than usual and, because you made it clear with yourself that you will use these 30 minutes to do something hobby related, after only 7 days you will have spared 3h+ for your activity. And that's only sleeping 30 minutes less a day. Younger I used that trick to save time to do... scale models (little plastic planes I assembled and painted).

Anyways, this has been very helpful.

It's nice to know, thx.

Will be bookmarking this and come back from time to time. Love that you are doing something I can’t, that 4-8AM period must be so sweet, especially if you get to witness the sunrise through the window :)

We live in an apartment in a big city, we do not face East but I can still (and do) watch the day rise and the light more and more broadly paint every little detail in the landscape out of the darkness, around me. It's magical, no matter how silly it looks. Later in spring and summer I also like to have the windows wide open, or sit on our balcony, listen to birds. That is,, up until cars start pooping the mood with their roaring engines. Birds have become so few in recent years... I do wonder for how many more years we will be lucky to hear them :/

Love that you are doing something I can’t,

You probably can do something very close to it (I worked a lot, like a lot the issue was not the work itself, it was my lack of clarity in what I really wanted to do). But you don't need to to do it like I do either (I know I'm a short sleeper and not everybody is). Find your own compromise, the one that will work for you. Maybe you will realize waking up an hour earlier is that magical spot you needed.

But first, focus your energy on reducing that screen time of yours. This is the most impactful if you're anything like most younger people, imho. Potentially a real life-changing event. Like I said I wish you all the success!

I did not know that. Thx!

Alas, I doubt this will arm the orange racist clown or its billionaire buffoon. Only people like us will pay the price, some of them wearing that stupid red cap some of them not wearing it.

But you don’t. For example, you cannot publish a derived work.

That's not how ownership/copyright of creative work is supposed to work. Even the guys at GNU will admit that and suggest to use some other kind of license if one really wants to not put limits on the use of their creation.

The question is about the ownership of the physical object, here the printed book not about the creative work it contains.

I own the book I purchase, it sits on a bookshelf in my home and, under no circumstances, can the seller or anyone enter my home to get that book back because they changed their mind or because they changed their agreement with the publisher and can't sell the book anymore. I purchased that book. I own it. It's mine, no matter what is their new situation. End of the story.

The same goes if say, a publisher was being forced to edit a book to change its content because some crowd or another find it offensive. They have no legal rights to enter my home to replace my non-edited older copy of the book with that new edited copy. That old version is my legal property even if they make a new one. That's what property and ownership is all about.

So, sure, I don't own the text in it I can"t change it and can't distribute my own copies of it but that has nothing with the ownership of the object I paid for, that is IP and copyright.

That being said, I still am allowed to do copies for my own personal use (it's written in the law, here in France that if I buy a book, a movie a CD I can make copies of it for my own usage, heck we even pay a 'copy tax' on every single empty storage support we buy to compensate for that). And I'm also allowed to do whatever derivative work I fancy from any existing work. Nobody can't say a thing, I'm just not allowed to distribute it. So, I could decide to write a follow-up to Anna Karenina telling how she comes back as an angry zombie I'm just not allowed to distribute it... Well, maybe Anna Karenina was not the best example since the text is in the public domain (I can sell derivative work if I fancy doing so) but you get the idea ;)