I don’t actually have anything to hide, however the recent privacy screw up by Google when they released Buzz really rammed home to me that all my data is with Google and I am trusting them to keep it safe!  I do not believe the Buzz fiasco was an error by Google.  Most Google products go through several years of beta testing (remember GMail just recently came out of beta) and all of a sudden a new product called Buzz was thrust upon us.  I think this was all very intentional, and Google were just testing the water to see what they could get away with.

So with this in mind I set out to see how I could live life without GMail and Google Reader, and I found it extremely easy especially as I have a couple of VPSs which I have full root access to.

Email

Moving all my email to a Dovecot email server was a breeze.  I used isync to connect to GMail via IMAP and create the equivalent MailDir format.  Job done.

I predominantly use Thunderbird 3 as my email client, though occasionally when I am on the road it is handy to access the mail via a webmail client, and this where RoundCube comes to the rescue.   Don’t be fooled by it’s low version number, it is feature rich and a more than suitable replacement.

News Reader

This was bit harder to find, but I found a fantastic project called Tiny Tiny RSS Reader, it’s a breeze to install and use and even has a mobile interface for accessing from you phone.   It was easy as pie to export my subscriptions from Google Reader and import them to Tiny Tiny RSS Reader, and after using it for a week or so in many ways  I prefer the interface to that of Google Reader, lets face it Google are not renowned for their UI design.

So my online life is no longer tied to Google, and best of all I have achieved the same functionality using free, libre and open source software.  I would like to thank the developers and community of both RoundCube and Tiny Tiny RSS for making this all possible.  From the 1st March 2010, I will terminate my GMail account and presumably all the data associated with it will be sent to the big bit bucket in the sky….or will it?  I guess I will never know.

The second gPodder release in this month brings updated translations, lots of bug fixes and some UI clean-ups to your open source podcast aggregator. Here are some highlights of this release:

• “All episodes” in “View” menu and enabled by default
• Episodes are passed to the media player in chronological order
• Try to use mimetype-based file icons (using GIO) for episodes
• Make sure the podcast list is correctly updated all the time
• Disable feed_update_skipping by default (+expose in UI on Maemo)
• Default cover art for podcasts with no cover art
• Re-designed preferences dialog for Maemo 5 (Fremantle)
• gPodder rotates to landscape on Maemo 5 when the keyboard is open
• Better button captions in shownotes window (“Cancel download”)
• Remove podcast.de search option (this was broken for some weeks)
• Hide “Download folder” preferences option (see User Manual)
• Flush gPodder database after MP3 player sync has finished
• Updated translations (Galician, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Finnish, Polish and German)
• New translations: Romanian (by Gherhardt Mathisz)

The source package is now available from the downloads page and packages for Ubuntu, Maemo and Windows should be available soon.

I recently created a new server at home and install Ubuntu 9.10 Server on it.   As a consequence all the SSH keys I used to access my old server were lost and I needed to add them back again….one at a time from each machine I use to access it.

Although this does not seem a big deal, the method I was using previously was as follows:-

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh <user>@<host>
'dd of=.ssh/authorized_keys oflag=append conv=notrunc'

Although this worked fine, I was catching up on my Linux reading and in Linux Journal #184 (August 2009) another reader Mark K. Zanfardino wrote in withe following more simplified command which works great on Ubuntu:-

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub <user>@<host>

This is not only easier to remember, it also checks that the key being added doesn’t already exist on the server! Brilliant!