I’ve been using email aliases for a few years now, but all spam I get is addressed to my main email (which admittedly is readily available on my website). Seems like no one has sold my email address yet

While the disposable cards might not always work, you can always create a regular virtual card and delete/freeze it afterwards. Not sure if there are any limits tho

Not really the same thing, but Revolut has disposable virtual cards that you can use (but it’s a full-fledged bank).

Some apps like MBWay in Portugal also allow you to create these virtual cards, but it requires a Portuguese bank account.

I’ve had this “problem” before, and I did not want to use the full Messenger app for privacy reasons as well. I had installed Messenger Lite, but it was discontinued a few weeks ago. I now have Facebook Lite, which also has Messenger, and you get notifications as well. It’s not perfect, but don’t give it too many permissions and you should be mostly fine. Using it in the browser is absolutely terrible, and you would not get push notifications.

That’s great to hear! There are still some apps on my phone that aren’t taking advantage of it then – or perhaps it has something to do with my custom ROM.

I’m unsure if this is still the case in the latest Android versions, but the terrible camera APIs in 3rd party apps/social media apps is still a big reason why my non-techy friends switched to an iPhone. Even if the quality of pictures using the stock camera app is good, if the photos that come out while using Instagram or Snapchat or whatever kids are using these days are low-quality, they’ll consider moving to an iPhone. Again, I’m unsure if the APIs already exist or if it’s just app developers that are not using them. Either way, there needs to be a push in this direction.

I’ve been using Restic for a while, and it’s backing up to a Hetzner storage box (1TB).

Restic supports encryption, compression, deduplication, and can forget old backups in a spread out timeline (configurable; e.g. save one yearly, three monthly and 7 daily).

On top of this I also use healthchecks.io to make sure all backups are working.

I’ve been wanting to switch to PhotoPrism for a while. Is face/object detection any good, compared to Google Photos? Do you need powerful specs, or can a low-spec machine handle it?

I self-host my own mail server. I don’t send many emails, but they seem to be arriving correctly whenever I do at the moment, but it wasn’t always like this. I’ve properly setup SPF, DKIM and DMARC, which helps a lot, but my IP address was blacklisted on some servers from a previous owner I guess. I have a VPS from OVH. I had to manually fill out some forms to get Microsoft Outlook to accept emails from my server. Despite that, it has been working flawlessly. I have my own domain since 2017, and I’d say the age of the domain is also important.