KeePassXC and Attempts at Increased Security
One of my side distractions projects this last week has been to import my passwords into a password manager, finally. I'd been remembering all of my passwords - like, actually committing them to memory - and I am excited to free up those neurons for other things. KeePassXC came recommended by my dad - it's a free, locally-stored, open-source solution to password management, and its password generation is super customizable and very useful. Sometimes I'll catch myself flipping back and forth between a generated password and a generated passphrase, comparing the entropy values just... for shiggles.
I also have made the switch to Firefox from Brave. Brave was starting to feel icky to use, and one of the only reasons I was sticking with it was how effective it is at blocking ads on YouTube (a heavy source of my copium in these trying times - I have been watching a lot of Game Grumps). But it turns out Firefox with UBlock Origin does exactly the same thing, with a little less bloat and significantly less moral opposition, short of compiling something myself. I'm frustrated most places I turn these days to find that the old adage of 'there is no ethical consumption under capitalism' seems to be holding true. It's not excuse for feeding into it if you have the means and resources to do something different and better... and I'm learning which ways to move meaningfully slowly and mostly-methodically. But for now Firefox means I get to use the Sidebery extension (also recommended by my dad), which makes tab management much more intuitive for me - I love vertical tabs and think mostly in the form of nested lists, so... Sidebery is kind of perfect.
Altogether this is very far from actually taking control of all of my data... I'm not exactly deGoogling just yet, even though over the years I have moved further from Gmail and more towards Proton. I'm also still deeply entrenched in the Apple landscape, which comes with its own share of problems, but... I mean, at least it's not Windows, right? Right guys?