cruciferous

Some 2026 privacy resolutions #privacy

2026 Privacy resolutions

There are a lot of things I have been far too lax about with my own online privacy in the past. And while that true anonymity may be impossible to achieve, it's actually very easy/practical to take a ...

I saw a great post on Privacy Guides the other day on privacy resolutions for 2026. Achieving true anonymity and privacy in our modern world is pretty much impossible.^[1] But I do think there are a lot of things I have been far too lax about with my own online privacy in the past. And while that lode may be impossible to achieve, it's actually very easy/practical to take a lot of steps towards a more secure and private online life. These are some of my privacy goals this year:

• Delete Facebook, finally. I haven't used Facebook in years, but my account has been there sitting idle. I've finally completely deleted it.^[2]
• Use a privacy focused browser. Safari is pretty privacy forward itself, but I don't love that it's an Apple product and locks you in. I've been toying with Firefox. I may or may not stick with this one. Safari just works so well.
• Remove myself as much as possible from Google's grasp. I plan to write about this more soon, but I've just had enough of Google.^[3] This one is going to be tough because there aren't really a lot of alternatives to Search and Youtube.^[4]
  • As I wrote on my microblog, I have yet to find an alternative to Google Search itself unfortunetly. But perhaps the future is bright!
• Don't hand out my primary email to most people. I recently switched to Proton Mail. I've been loving it, I don't have anything bad to say about it so far. And on top of allowing me to set up custom domains, it has very robust aliasing software built in. So now I have a setup of: primary email, secondary emails, burner catch-all, and a slew of aliases.^[5]
• Use a VPN. I know they do not do a whole lot on their own. But they do still help a bit, and i's so easy to use a VPN. So may as well!
• Block as many ads as possible. Enough is enough. I'm sick of being tracked to sell me new shoes. This is another graet feature of a lot of VPNs at the DNS level. I also plan on subscribing and tipping more publications that I read as part of this.
• Pay for services instead of being the product. Similar to blocking ads but subscribing or tipping. I think I'd rather pony up $5 or $10 than have my information sold. This also seems like a better business model for developers.

Bonus resolutions:

• Don't let privacy be an all-consuming hobby. Again, ultimately complete privacy and anonymity on the internet are impossible. I see a lot of people on privacy forums going out of their way to self-host, anonymize, and re-route everything they do online. And that just.. doesn't seem like a useful way to live. I often get too into the projects I take up, and I won't be doing that here (I hope).
• Try to convince other people in my life to care a little more about online privacy. Not trying to be a Reddit Atheist-type here, but it's actually pretty easy to do a lot of these common sense privacy things.
• Don't shop at Wegman's and its peers. For obvious reasons.

Will probably add more or exapnd on this list at some point! There's also something to be said about deleting data that's already out there. Unfortuntely the US does ot have a right to be forgotten (or really any nationwide provacy laws at all!), but it's still usually possible to get your data deleted if you try.

In my rant about Google I suppose I left out the other two “alternatives”.

Kagi

Kagi spits in the face of privacy with its manifesto and disregard of even basic GDPR protections.

But the results are pretty good. Kagi is seemingly the only search engine where you can search “US Population” and it will return a number instead of gibberish (fun fact, Google used to do this just fine!! They invented the Knowledge Graph for this purpose! But now you get a probabilistic AI answer that will under or overshoot by 20million and sometimes tell you something completely unrelated)

I also think their business model is unsustainable and silly. $10/mo for search is not going to scale. They claim to have ~65k members but are very unclear on what that means. Is that active paying members each month? I doubt it. The churn must be insane on a product like this.

Brave

It’s really hard to like Brave, the crypto-peddling search engine. But I have to admit that it shows potential. It’s the only US search engine with its own index, which is very promising.

Brave’s results are about as fine as Duck Duck Go.. Sometimes a tiny bit better (case in point: search “Dinner in Chicago” in DDG and you’ll get nothing, whereas in Brave you’ll get some restaurants).¹

There is no good search now

So I guess there aren’t really any alternatives to Google Search. Google is bad and so are all the rest… Maybe someday the European search engine Qwant will get really good..

Every so often I decide that it is finally time I de-google my life, and this time I even got far enough to switch away from Gmail (which as it turns out I don’t miss at all). But somehow there are still no good search engine alternatives — and Google itself isn’t even that good!!

For all the discourse on bullying etc., bluesky really does feel like pre-2016 twitter in a lot of very good ways

Even as a non-technical user, micro.blog’s atproto integration is pretty nifty.. Seems to connect with Ghost too?

Firmly believe that the plural of Brussels Sprouts should be Brussels Sprout, like Attorneys General

I am shocked there is no easily accessible guide to this so I thought I'd create one. Bluesky does not have the ability to let you embed a profile feed on its own. But it's super easy to embed a Bluesky profile feed on your site using a third party tool:

You can just use a script from Vincenius on GitHub called bsky-embed. You do not need to host anything, all you need to do is add this HTML code to your site:

<script type="module" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bsky-embed/dist/bsky-embed.es.js" async>
</script>
  <bsky-embed
    username="YOUR BSKY HANDLE HERE"
    mode="LIGHT"
    limit="5"
  >
  </bsky-embed>

If you want it a little prettier you can do something like this:

<script type="module" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bsky-embed/dist/bsky-embed.es.js" async>
</script>
  <bsky-embed
    username="cruciferous.net"
    mode="light"
    link-target="_blank"
    link-image="true"
    load-more="true"
    limit="5"
      disable-styles="false"
    custom-styles=".border-slate-300 { border-color: --color-accent; }"
  >
  </bsky-embed>

I have this setup on my site at cruciferousgreens.com/little-thoughts and it works great. I miss the days when people used to easily share how to do little website things like this. Let's bring that back. It should not have taken me an hour to figure out how to do this.

Bluesky does have a great tool to embed posts at embed.bsky.app. I hope they add a tool for profile feeds!

Anyway hope that helps anyone reading.

In 2026 I want to write more.

Recreational blogging is a common New Years goal. And I’d like to join the cacophony of voices shouting into that void.

My hope for cruciferousgreens.com, the newest casualty of my domain-acquisition habit, is to finally have a little low-stakes place for my thoughts and ramblings. I've started lots of blogs in the past, but they've always had goals of traffic or visibility. This time there is no goal. Only write.^[1]

On editing

People talk a lot about the flow state of writing. You sit down and the words just magically get onto the page. No one knows how it works^[2]. But it does work.

Writing is a fulfilling process for a bunch of reasons, and the flow state is one of them.^[3]

But I think there’s an even more fulfilling hidden gem in the writing process: editing.

It’s one thing to get thoughts to page. It’s another to make them clear to the reader.

There’s something magical about going through a doc and striking through extraneous thoughts. Illuminating clear points. Moving around stuff. Making sure things make sense.^[4]

I’ve always liked that process. So maybe that’s another thing in 2026: I want to edit more.

On publishing and tech-y stuff

This is where I always get bogged down. I love tinkering with a site. I actually think that's one of the most fun parts of the web (henry from online talks about this and lots of other stuff in his really great recent piece A website to destroy all websites).

I've dabbled in web design all my life and have created some nifty things. Most recently I tried out Carrd.co, which I also still recommend. But ultimately I think if I am going to blog regularly I just needed to pick something. I picked Ghost.

There are a lot of great blogging services out there. I decided to go with Ghost and Magicpages because I like what Ghost is doing (and I love seeing new indie publications like 404media and Hearing Things popup from the exoduses of media consolidations).^[5]

I bought an annual pro plan so that that decision has been made and I won't need to revisit it. This is the site and this is the hosting I'm going to use, and now I can just write.

I find that Ghost is typically pretty great but there are some weird lacking things too (footnotes come to mind).^[6] I might do some articles here or there on making Ghost work better, geared to a semi-technical audience like myself.

Except... uh oh.. Now I have to actually write some stuff

So anyway, what is this blog?

I think all of this is a long way of saying I don't really know yet. I guess it's about leafy vegetables.

Either Schumer can’t control his caucus and so he should resign as majority leader, or Schumer worked behind the scenes to allow Dems to cave and he should resign as majority leader