Ever wondered how much time we are wasting on social media? This is a pretty good summary page - https://www.demandsage.com/average-time-spent-on-social.../
Back around a decade ago I had clearer ideas of what I wanted online, and why I was blogging. I stated my primary goals definitively...
This has been a long time coming, as GIMP 2 was released in 2004. The new version of GIMP looks really good. Here is a screen shot of it installed on my Linux Mint PC:
This webpage covers all the new updates. They seem have stayed fully focused on improving the features, and unlike Firefox or Jaguar they have not fallen into the fashionable cesspit of trying to go woke or reinvent themselves. Which is great to see. https://www.gimp.org/news/2024/11/06/gimp-3-0-RC1-released/
At the start of 2024 I switched over from blogging on Wordpress.org and using my own server space on www.frot.co.nz to using the Blogger platform because I was totally over the ever increasing complexity of using WordPress, and the hits on my old blog had dropped by more than 90%.
It used to be worth the extra effort back when I was getting hundreds of thousands of hits, but these days, now that everything I post is grey-listed to oblivion, I can't be arsed jumping through hoops, and I wanted to go back to the simplicity that I used to enjoy back in 2014.
Using Blogger this year has been great, I can just about post content with my eyes closed, and even after 10 years of not using it, everything was exactly where I remembered, and it all worked perfectly. I hate Google, but I really like the Blogger platform
1. Blogger is owned by Google, and Google are evil deep state data spies and globalist scum. I am using their platform, so they having their evil way with my content, and also there could well be some unspoken line in the sand that I may one day cross, that will cause them to totally blacklist my blog, or even shut it down all together. This is my enemies space, so by using it I am arguably a hypocritical sell out.
2. The hit count is terrible. Despite pretty much posting something every day all year, this blog has had very little traffic. Only about 100 hits a day, and not only is that amount not increasing, but every time it gets up to about 150 hits a day it seems to then drop back down to about 50. I suspect that is because searches for my content just don't come up with any results on this blog.
My old Wordpress blog is certainly grey listed to some extent, and the hits are pretty crap on that blog too these days, but at least the search results are vastly better for content on my old blog.
3. There is no longer any capacity to put anchor points on pages. Apparently Google removed that feature at some point. It doesn't matter for blog posts, but for longer pages a menu is often needed. I'd like to add more pages with longer content in the future, because most of my posts are fairly short, but without an index long pages may not be very useful.
Nevertheless, in 2025 I'm planning to continue using Blogger because it's simple to use and makes posting on line easy and fun like it used to be in the early days.
But this is by no means an endorsement of Blogger, I keep backups of everything in case they shut my blog down, and I'm not expecting much in the way of hits. This little blog is for my own amusement, I've given up any illusions of changing the world!
Lately I've seen more discussion about the latest wave of AI spyware that is currently being rolled out. But most people seem to be blissfully unaware that pretty much everything they do online is being monitored and recorded by big tech companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft, along with advertising companies and deep state agencies like the CIA.
A common response upon being informed that they are being spied on, is to just accept it as "normal" and pretty much give up even trying to maintain their privacy. But as we saw with the covidhoax and the death jabs, unless people take responsibility for their own freedom, the deep state plans to enslave and kill us.
Yes it is possible to maintain your privacy in a surveillance state, but not if you are using a regular "smart" phone or a modern commercial operating system. You can actually keep using computers, phones and the internet, if you want to, and maintain your privacy, but you will need to make the effort to stop using big tech spyware and switch to using different technology.
If you want any privacy, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are total no go zones. They are all spying and have been for years, but their latest tech is next level. An example is Windows 11 which has a new "feature" called Recall that is essentially taking a screenshot every five seconds and using AI to analyze it.
If anything, the AI on the latest Apple I-phones is even worse, but some normies seem to be more open to the idea that Microsoft is spying rather than Apple, so it's often a good entry point to the whole AI rabbit hole.
Normies are so addicted to their spy-phones they will pay thousands of
dollars to be tracked, recorded, and monitored by the deep state. On average, an Android smartphone sends data to Google 90 times a day and an iPhone communicates with 51 servers per hour.
So what do I recommend doing to maintain privacy? Here are some good first steps:
Switch to using a Linux operating system such as Linux Mint
Stick to using Free Open Source Software (FOSS) such as GIMP
Use a "de-googled" phone such as a Brax 3
Use privacy mail services such as Proton Mail (& especially avoid Gmail)
Use online aliases and avoid using your real name, especially on platforms like Facebook
There is a lot more to it than this, and I plan to cover all these topics in more detail.
