Something weird happened to me just over a week ago: I experienced sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL). I’ve just about fully recovered now, but it was quite scary and very different to what I thought it was going to be like. It started on Monday 20th February. I had just taken a shower and my ear felt strange, quite similar to the pressure from an airplane flight or some kind of blockage. I felt a bit dizzy but it didn’t really bother me. I could still hear fine, or so it seemed; I didn’t think it was serious. Then the next day, I woke up completely fine. Whatever the problem was seemed to have resolved itself and I felt normal. Then the next day… my ear felt blocked again. ...

Lately I’ve been in the mood for discovering new music. I had mostly been relying on Spotify for this, either looking for new material by bands I already know, or by using the Radio feature, or by searching public playlists. None of these were very satisfactory - I feel like Spotify tends to recommend you the same few bands, even though their library is vast. So I thought, OK, I’ll try searching myself. The genre I’m looking for is Doom metal - a very slow, heavy subgenre of metal with clean and death metal vocals and (of course) gloomy lyrics. I got into it via the “Peaceville Three” - three UK bands who are still my favourite bands today. Anyway, there’s a legendary forum on doom-metal.com which is an excellent source of information. In this case, one forum user had posted an incredibly helpful recap of the best releases from the last decade. Perfect! But how would I know whether they’re on Spotify or not? ...

For a long time I had been using Google Drive to store all my important documents. It worked extremely well - always accessible no matter where I was, synced across all my devices, and never had to worry about my files being unavailable or deleted. Ultimately though, it didn’t feel like it was mine, and I didn’t like the idea of depending on Google. When searching for an alternative, I considered full-blown cloud solutions like Nextcloud/ownCloud, but they seemed overly complex to me. Also, I didn’t like the idea of being locked to their product, despite it being open-source. I wanted something simpler. So I thought: how about plain old S3? It’s simple, easy to integrate, works everywhere, and I don’t even need to host anything - so it won’t consume any resources. My main concern about this plan was that the files wouldn’t be encrypted - if someone gained access to my S3 drive they’d get access to my files, and that would be bad. ...

I decided to try switching over to an iPhone, as I mentioned in a previous post. The main reason is that it’s the final step in de-Googling myself, which is an achievement that I’ve been wanting to unlock for a while. I don’t really know if it’s any better for privacy than Android, but it should at least not be worse when configured properly. My phone of choice is an iPhone 7, which I got a good deal on from Carousell a while back, for the sole purpose of setting up an Apple Watch. Although it’s a few years old now (2016), it’s still a very decent phone - good screen, responsive, and the form factor is just right for me. Sadly it’s been dropped from the latest version of iOS, which kind of limits its long-term usefulness, but I figured it would be long enough to decide whether I want to stick with iOS long enough to get an upgrade. ...

I recently discovered alternative frontends - websites that let you use the ‘real’ version of Twitter, Reddit etc. through an alternate website. The advantage of this is that it stops those big sites like Twitter from tracking you, because they don’t see the connection from your web browser. Anyway, one of the most convenient ways to take advantage of this is through a browser extension like LibRedirect, which will automatically filter links and redirect you to the alternate versions of popular sites. You can even set it as your default search engine, so it can redirect to an instance of SearXNG, a privacy-respecting search engine. ...