Phew, it's been a while since I've been active here but I'm slowly getting back in the saddle!
Welcomed our second For Privacy child into the world recently and things have been joyfully turned upside down as a result 😁
Quick thread of random updates 🧵
I... spent all my Monero 😅
Didn't expect it to happen so soon, but between onboarding locals to Monero, donating to FOSS projects, funding CCS proposals, and using Cake Pay and CoinCards it went quickly.
Thankfully the options for restocking are getting better by the day!
Shoutout to LocalMonero and Trocador for being amazing tools for onboarding people (and myself) to Monero directly.
I shut down my public Lightning node 🥲
After months of frustration dealing with downed channels and failed payments, I finally gave up on running my own 24/7 node (for now).
I'll circle back eventually, but for now have migrated to using PhoenixWallet w/ splicing via Tor.
I'm also testing out nostr:npub1xnf02f60r9v0e5kty33a404dm79zr7z2eepyrk5gsq3m7pwvsz2sazlpr5 new LSP and in-wallet node, and will hopefully be using it full time moving forward:
My hot take for Lightning moving forward is that only LSP models will be viable for 99.9% of people, and we need to figure out good ways to do the LSP model without sacrificing transactional privacy.
I got invited (again, surprisingly!) to speak at this years Hacker's Congress at Paralelni Polis in Prague!
While my presentation isn't ironed out, my aim is to speak on the options for scaling Bitcoin outside of Lighting, i.e. drivechains, trustless zk-rollups, covenants.
I discovered an amazing FOSS weather app, Breezy Weather 🌧️
https://github.com/breezy-weather/breezy-weather
I've been living entirely without a weather app as I couldn't find any good options, but love that this is FOSS and has strong pro-privacy weather providers and options.
I've started using Obtanium to install/update almost all of my Android apps 🔽
https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium
Obtainium is an absolutely fantastic app that lets you add app sources from all over (Github, F-Droid, websites, you name it) and track updates and install them.
I tried out Proton Pass 🔐
While I think I'll stick with Bitwarden for now as I'm pretty firmly entrenched and like to keep all my eggs out of a single basket, I'm really impressed with the UI and UX of Proton Pass, especially it's integration with email aliasing.
I started using Proton for all of my hosted service emails ✉️
While it's only available for Visionary/Business accounts, having a reliable and privacy-preserving way to send outbound emails from services like Nextcloud is a huge step forward:
https://proton.me/support/smtp-submission
I discovered an amazing Photoprism Android app, 100% FOSS 🖼️
https://github.com/Radiokot/photoprism-android-client
I've long-since switched my wife and I off of Google Photos and to self-hosted Nextcloud + Photoprism, but haven't had a proper Android client (which my wife hated!)
Finally that changed.
Photoprism Gallery is fantastic, loads quickly, and provides great, simple options.
With two kids it's really important to me to have strong backups *without sacrificing privacy* for family photos and videos, and now I can also easily browse those on the go.
Want to know what's even cooler? The author, Oleg, loves Bitcoin + Monero and accepts both for donations, including via Lightning!
Please please please take a moment and send the devs of FOSS projects you love some sats or piconeros whenever possible.
Donate to what you love 🧡
I *think* that sums up the bigger changes while I've been mostly AFK.
What did I miss out there while I was gone? Anything huge in the Bitcoin, Monero, or Privacy spaces that you think I'd like to catch up on?
