I can’t decide if I want to pay for email.

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I’m having trouble. Lately, I don’t love monthly subscriptions. I wrote a post about how I was considering cancelling Spotify. Ultimately, I’ve decided to keep Spotify for now, because I like being able to organize my music into playlists and having access to those playlists on whatever device I’m using at the time, whether it’s my gaming PC or my phone or my laptop. Now, Fastmail is on the chopping block.

I kind of like having email at my domain. One of the benefits of paying for email is, as long as I’m willing to continue paying for my domain (which is a cheap yearly price) and somewhere to host my email (which is Fastmail, for now), I’d never have to switch my email address. I can use one email (or aliases at my domain, if I feel like it) to give to people and create online accounts with, and never need to worry about getting a new address to people or updating accounts. And that is kind of nice.

The thing is, I don’t email that many actual people. It’s just not one of my main methods of actually communicating. My email is significantly more often used to get information from companies, and to login to my accounts online. I send a lot less email than I receive. So I’m thinking that maybe sending email from my domain isn’t actually that important. I could just use a gmail address if I need to actually send emails to a person.

But Fastmail also isn’t that expensive. It’s half the price of Spotify for new customers ($6/month), and right now I’m only actually paying $5 monthly because they haven’t switched me to the new pricing yet. That is really not very much money even at the new price. And it’s kind of nice having all my email at my domain and having the ability to send from my domain if I need to. Because I do give my custom domain email to anybody that needs to email me. I recently moved into a new apartment, and I used my custom domain email to do all of the communicating before signing the lease. That’s not something I’m doing every day or even every month, but it is something that I want to have zero issues with. So maybe the $5 a month is worth the peace of mind knowing that I’m not relying on either a Gmail address that I could lose access to, or some clunky forwarding solution to keep using my own domain without paying for actual hosting of the email.

I know for sure I want to be able to keep giving a custom domain email for online accounts so I don’t risk losing access to all my online accounts if I lost access to whatever email account I chose to make that isn’t at my domain. I just don’t know if I want to continue to actually host the email for the relatively little cost, or axe the monthly subscription completely and setup some kind of forwarding solution for that. Sometimes being able to send from my domain is definitely nice… I’m just tired of subscriptions… 🤔 I don’t know…

High Potential has very high potential

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I finished watching the first season of High Potential yesterday. And it was actually really good. I’ll be honest: I probably wouldn’t have even started watching it if it weren’t for the fact that Kaitlin Olson is the main character. I love Always Sunny, and I also really enjoyed The Mick. And the show did sound interesting: she is the janitor at the police station, but turns out she’s actually super smart and remembers/notices everything, and she basically solves a case for them while she’s cleaning one night. That’s how she ends up being a consultant instead of the janitor, and every episode she helps investigate a different murder.

There’s more, too. A long time ago, her boyfriend disappeared. He disappeared in a way that made it seem like he maybe just ditched her and her kids, but she doesn’t believe that that’s what truly happened. One of her conditions for becoming a consultant with the police is that they’ll look into what actually happened to him.

I binged through the whole first season in about a week. And I will be very impatiently waiting for the second season. They ended with not one, but TWO HUGE cliffhangers. I wish there was more right now because I totally do not feel like waiting. But if you’re looking for a good show, I highly recommend checking it out. I very much enjoyed it.

LocalSend is amazing

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I just wanted to post about a tool I’ve discovered recently and really like: LocalSend. I don’t keep many files in the cloud anymore aside from my pictures in Google Photos. But sometimes I still do need to get files between devices. I wanted a way to do it that was quick and easy and didn’t feel clunky. And LocalSend is the way.

It’s basically a cross-platform AirDrop alternative. I’ve installed it on all three of my main devices (phone, Macbook, and Windows PC) and now, as long as I am on my home network, I can easily drop files between them. That’s the only catch compared to AirDrop: you do have to have your devices on the same network, so it’s not really a useful tool to send files between people if you’re not somewhere that you’re both connected to the same WiFi. Although, I think you can use your phone’s hotspot as the shared network. So it’s not only useful while you’re at home or whatever. I have not tested this, but I probably will at some point.

For now though, it’s the perfect solution to getting my MP3s of remixes not available on Spotify transferred across my devices 🙂

My Tech Ecosystem (February 2025)

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I wrote this post a while back about the tech I used daily/on a regular basis, and I’ve been meaning to write an update on it for a while now. I’ve kind of simplified or eliminated tech in some areas of my life lately, so not everything has stuck around.

Email, Contacts, and Calendar

I wrote about how I was happy to get away from Gmail by setting up my custom domain email with Fastmail. And for now, I’m still using Fastmail for my email, as well as my calendar and to sync my contacts between devices. With that being said, I could see myself moving away from it in the future. I don’t love paying $5 a month for something so boring. But I do want to continue to have my email at my own domain. So for now, I’m too lazy to find a cheaper or free solution that is reliable enough for my standards.

Photos and Cloud Storage

I’m also still using Google Photos for now. The face tagging and everything else it does to organize your photos is still great. I pay for 100GB of storage, and I’m pretty sure I’ve filled less than half of it. $2 a month to store all my photos (hopefully quite safely) is a pretty good value in my opinion. I just take pictures on my phone, so maybe I’d be filling that up quicker and be more worried about the price if I was using a nice big camera or something, but for my use Google Photos feels like a no-brainer to pay for. I have stopped using Google Drive, though. I used to keep basically everything in Drive just so it could sync between all my devices. I don’t actually really need to do that, though. I have a little flash drive that can be both USB-C and USB-A to easily transfer files between my Macbook and Windows gaming PC. And for the most part I just keep things stored on my Macbook.

Task Management

I stopped using Todoist. It was definitely a waste of money for me honestly. I just use the default iOS reminders app now. It’s actually got a big advantage over any other tasks/reminders app because when you get a reminder notification, it will stay on your lock screen forever. Other notifications from normal apps eventually get moved into the notification center, which takes a swipe to view from the lock screen. But the built-in reminders app gets a bit of preferential treatment, and that little banner will be staring at me every time I look at my lock screen until I mark the thing I need to do as completed.

Domains and Hosting

I’ve switched this blog to WordPress, so it couldn’t be hosted on Github pages anymore. I decided on EthernetServers as the hosting company. It works fine. It is not the fastest hosting in the world, but it does the trick for my little personal blog here. I stopped using YOURLS as well, since WordPress can handle redirects fine. I still use and like Porkbun for all my domains.

Security

I still use the free version of Bitwarden. I did stop using Authy and switched to an app called 2Fas for my two-factor authentication app. It’s fine, it’s pretty basic and let’s me backup the secret keys needed for setup to a file so I can restore them if I get a new phone.

Smart Home

I guess I didn’t even include this in my original post, but I had tinkered around with both HomeKit and Alexa and have decided at this point that I’m done with smart home stuff. I will be buying some LED light strips that do not connect to the Internet for my new apartment. The only benefit my smart lights ever really gave me was turning on my lights in the morning when my alarm went off. And that is kinda nice, but I can also just leave my blinds open so the sun is shining in when my alarm goes off. Or just reach over and turn on my lamp when I turn off my alarm.

I might ditch Spotify Premium

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I’ve been using Spotify for a long time. I have switched a few times to other platforms like Google Play Music (RIP) and Apple Music, but in the end I ultimately settled on Spotify as being the best streaming service for me. And I still think it is the best music streaming service. Having podcasts under the same app as my music has grown on me. I don’t love that I can’t follow a show via RSS feed, but I have the Apple Podcasts app for the few shows I need that feature for. And of course for music, Spotify probably has most of the songs you’ll ever want. I even finally figured out how to actually use the local files feature on iOS without having to set up some weird sync playlist and hoping Spotify actually syncs it while you’re on the same network. Turns out, you can literally just put local files into a special folder on iOS now. Super simple and easy as long as you’re willing to move the files to your device yourself instead of needing Spotify to sync them for you.

With all that being said… I’m not actually sure I need a music streaming service. I am actually kind of tempted to just download an MP3 player app on my phone. Lately, I’ve really been trying to only use technology that actually improves my life. It should enhance something, or make something easier, or whatever. And I’m not sure that Spotify actually enhances my experience of listening to music when I could just download all my favorite songs and listen to them that way. It’s not hard to get MP3 files. With current iOS versions, I wouldn’t even need a second device to download the MP3s and put them on my phone. I could just download them right on my phone. And I’ve already found an app that seems like it would work fine for being my music player. And, I think Spotify has gotten a lot worse at music discovery.

Speaking of which, that is one feature I’d be losing: discovery. But I’m pretty sure I could just start finding new songs I like through YouTube. My music taste has actually kind of changed because of Spotify. I used to listen to a lot more EDM remixes. Those often don’t exist on Spotify, so I ended up listening to more mainstream music so I could have the ease of use of Spotify. So I’m actually not even so sure I’d be losing out on discovering music. It could be argued I’ve been missing out on a lot of songs I would like because I usually don’t bother to listen to it if it’s not on Spotify.

I made UpNote perfect.

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There’s this notes app that I really like called UpNote. It’s kinda similar to Evernote in that your notes are available wherever you sign in. It’s really simple to use, let’s you organize your notes basically however you want with tags and notebooks etc, and just works for basically everything I need.

I had two small issues with it, though. First of all, this icon… it sucks. It doesn’t make it obvious what the app is. It did not stand out to me on the home screen of my phone. Just no good.

You know what does have a pretty decent icon? The default notes app on iOS. So I used the Shortcuts app to change UpNote’s icon to something that makes a lot more sense:

I think it looks a lot nicer on the home screen:

There was one other issue, which was that if I hadn’t opened it in a bit it would open to the All Notes view instead of opening my General notebook. I don’t want to have notes created outside of notebooks, so ideally it would always open to my main notebook I use. Luckily, UpNote offers links you can use to open the app to a specific notebook. So, instead of having my custom icon shortcut just open the UpNote app, it actually opens the link to my general notebook. And UpNote is smart enough to only bring me to the notebook view if it’s not already opened to a specific note in that notebook. Basically, it works perfectly.

The Middle

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My current sitcom addiction is The Middle. Which, it turns out, is not a spin-off of Malcolm in the Middle. I liked Malcolm in the Middle somewhat, but I wasn’t really interested in a spinoff. And that’s part of the reason I didn’t watch this show sooner. In my brain it was off-brand Malcolm in the Middle. And I saw no reason to watch that. Turns out it’s a completely unrelated show, and I’m enjoying it quite a bit.