Now

For the past two years I have been busy finding myself and reconnecting with my roots. Now it is time to put that into change and to tackle the overwhelming amount of todos that need to be done to move my life in a much more joyful direction again. A glimpse into my daily life at the moment:

Current

Just came back from my wedding photography workshop in Denmark. Small group of wonderful people. Freezing cold wind for some epic shots. Now day to day business has me back.

Switched to rclone to move my online cloud to my offline cloud. SO MUCH FASTER! And I already moved all my precious travel shots back to my NAS. Next: photo sessions from 2009 to 2024. A lot of data, but still less than those 12TB of weddings lurking online. After over 12 year, I think I can delete a lot of those.

Gaming: bought Far Cry 5 in a Steam sale and started playing it. Not a fan of the hunting part and this whole MERICA! stuff, but a nice open-world shooter with some wonderful landscapes.

Ongoing

Staying sane

What a year it has already been. While the whole world seems to turn to fascism and ignores the huge problem our planet has with our existence, I try to stay sane by consuming as less news as possible (sometimes it works out great, sometimes it doesn’t) and focusing on the things I can change: my close friends and nearer environment to spread as much kindness as possible.

Privacy | #unplugTrump | re-owning data

A couple of months ago I started to use my power as a consumer (and my eternal love for privacy) and began using more privacy friendly, ethical and local companies. Needless to say that the change in US government speeds up that process - especially for tech services. There is the hashtag #unplugtrump trending throughout the Fediverse where people share tips and help each other to switch away from US big tech services to more privacy friendly, often EU based services.

Right now I’m focusing on getting rid of Amazon and it’s services. Prime is a no-brainer. Since the last enshittification wave (raising prices, adding ads to paid subscriptions, moving everything to random video channels) I already setup a small home server, installed Plex and started to collect blu-rays of my favourite movies again. It’s pure joy!

But with Prime comes also the Amazon Photo Cloud and I still have around 20TB of images laying there. That’s why I upgraded my old abandoned NAS this month, rewired my local network and have now my own personal local cloud to welcome all my online images. Downloading those might take a while though as Amazon removed their API a couple of years ago and I now have to fiddle around with their software.

Leaving Meta | rethinking Social Media

After writing about the possible consequences of leaving Meta I closed all personal accounts on Instagram with the beginning of this month and deleted my business WhatsApp as well. Feels great. Now only my business account is left which will get a short revamp in the next days to leave it to rot afterwards.

I also started to rethink social media in general and my usage of it. Even though I’m really happy to have found a new place within the Fediverse, social media should still not be something I spend a lot of time on. Might need to adjust this in the near future.

Blogging

I started blogging again on blog.sturmsucht.de (EN) and really enjoy it. The first few posts were kind of heavy as the world’s situation has left it’s impact in my current mental health and business life, but I’m really looking forward to carve something helpful and empowering out of it soon. Writing is a wonderful way for me to express myself.

What’s next?

Catching up with daily work and pimping my website further more to be less dependent on social media and local groups. So much stuff to do.

Finishing my cloud->NAS migration for everything non-wedding this month.

Moving my newsletter subscribers from FloDesk to Ghost.

Planing a trip to South Germany in the next couple of weeks.