Thomas Koch

I've never really used facebook so it's not too hard for me to delete my account there. The only thing that's a pity is that I found (or others found me) many people that I once met and which I'd love to meet again once. So I'll go through my facebook contacts list and will try to copy all contact data especially the email adresses and plan to write emails to everybody every quarter or half a year about happenings in our lifes. I'd be glad to receive such emails from others too! They'll surely be read more carefully then my facebook timeline!

This gets me to another point: I still don't have a satisfying free (as in freedom) solution to manage my contacts across devices and available on my web server. The same for image galleries. So I can understand how convenient facebook for many people is. Still facebook is evil and it's an important and ongoing project to provide a better alternative.

It'll be harder for me to leave Twitter. This one comes next. If people would just switch to the free and privacy aware alternative identi.ca...

And then I've to finally provide a better alternative for my family to share baby pictures then Google Plus... Leaving Xing and Linkedin also doesn't worry me, I just have to collect the addresses of my important contacts there. Not so pressing is to leave Couchsurfing for bewelcome.org.

So if you want to hear news from me just pass by www.koch.ro from time to time or put my blogs feed into your feed reader. I'll also keep my identi.ca account.

update: One tiny example of facebooks evilness is, that they don't show me your real email address (anymore). They only show me an @facebook address. So if I don't know your real email address from any other source, I would not be able to send you messages without sending it over facebooks servers. I read that you can change the email address shown back to your real email address somewhere in the options.

update: Richard Stallman has a site about Facebooks evilness

update: Thanks to XTaran for sending me a link to this related picture:

A few years ago I started to run my own server. This was an interesting challenge back then but today I only consider it a waste of time and money. Therefore I'm searching for (a) service provider(s) to substitute my self hosted applications:

• mail server with IMAP, Spamfilter, webmail
• private/public Git hosting
• (sharable) file hosting
• blog
• photo gallery
• wikis
• mailing lists
• online address book, calendar
• feed reader

However I'm a bit insane about privacy, security and reliability. I simply want to be able to TRUST. This rules out IMHO: Google, Github, Yahoo. On the other hand I'd probably be prepared to pay an insane monthly fee for a provider that just keeps me happy.

I'd love to here your recommendations! I'm especially interested in providers that are organized as cooperatives and care about environmental issues.

Do I need to mention free software? An extra plus would be a healthy distaste for PHP.

some cooperative-style provider initiatives that I still need to evaluate:

• immerda.ch
• riseup.net
• jpberlin (mail, lists)
• ecobytes.net
• mayfirst.org
• hcoop.net
• tuxfamily.org
• more ...
• Systemausfall.org

Somebody probably already recommended you to switch to Git, because it's the best VCS. I'd like to go a step further now and talk about the risk you're taking if you won't switch soon.
By still using SVN (if you're using CVS you're doomed anyway), you communicate the following: Continue reading "Perils of not switching to Git"

Do you believe that there will come a major inflation in the next months or years? If not, you can stop reading this article. Otherwise lets think what would be the right thing to do now. Continue reading "Stop coding for money"