Social Media – Suggested Course Correction

Social media is one of the most powerful tools ever created for expanding human knowledge. It has broken the monopoly that geography and institutions once held over education and ideas. Anyone, anywhere, can learn from experts, explore new perspectives, and participate in fast-moving global conversations. It has also transformed how we find each other. Communities … Read more

Privacy as a Fundamental Right

A few friends and I have decided to migrate from WhatsApp onto Signal messaging.  I’m doing this because I don’t want Meta having accesses to my (approximate) location, contracts and other metadata.   I know that the messages are securely encrypted (after all, they use Signals messaging protocol).  However, I worry about these summary AI feature, … Read more

Alternative to Vimeo -> Bunny Videos

My company has been using Vimeo for perhaps a decade.   Over that time, our usage has grown sustainably.  The cost of the bandwidth for Vimeo is really steep, and we ended up on an enterprise account – which means you then have someone to negotiate the price of your data with.   It’s really time-consuming and … Read more

Migrating away from Google… DeGoogling

Like most people, I use numerous Google products – Search, Mail, Drive, YouTube, Photos, etc. I use them at work and in my personal life. Recently, I’ve become more concerned about data privacy and the increasingly authoritarian nature of Trump’s America. So I decided to move away from Google (as much as possible) in my … Read more

Google Drive / Filestream Using Lots of Battery

I have just just been setting up a new Macbook.   I was expecting the batterylife to be 12 hours.  However, Google Filestream was just continously sycning and using battery.  Google Filestream shouldn’t sync anything…. however the probelm was that Bitdefender was scanning everyfile in the filestream.   Hence the computer was continuously syncing file after file. … Read more

Disabling ONLY_FULL_GROUP_BY In Ubuntu

I’m run into some error message like:  “Expression #2 of SELECT list is not in GROUP BY clause and contains nonaggregated column”.  It’s turns out that this is caused by MySQL updating the way it behave in relation to aggregate functions since MySQL 5.7.  Here is how I solved it on Ubuntu . You can … Read more