Year Wrap-up: English Danmei in 2025

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.danmeinews.com/2026/01/25/year-wrap-up-english-danmei-in-2025/

TL;DR

I fell for a strange pattern of techy computer users to describe / brag about reducing their dependance of IT services owned by US-based tech giants and other companies that embraced enshittification principles.

I didn’t invented nothing new, I just made some small steps towards better control of my data and IT equipment.

IT usage is very political imho. With the recent imperialistic developments and sharp drop in human rights in US, I feel uneasy about using their platforms (Microsoft, Google, social media). This is one of the reasons I’m trying to move away from them and towards FOSS & non-enshittified companies. The other reason is curiosity for exploring new things.

But even selecting FOSS/sustainable IT alternatives is not trivial. They usually lack polished UI, and … ugh, … sometimes there is quite some drama associated with them (e. g. main developer adopts techbro mentality).

OS

As I wrote extensively, I transitioned from Windows to Linux Mint as a daily driver in March 2025.

It’s pretty boring – Mint works, it didn’t crash beyond repair (yet), I don’t think about it anymore.

Now is Dec. and I still haven’t booted to Windows partition. It’s time to delete it and dedicate space for something else.

Browser

Firefox, but looking for alternatives. Mozilla is not my favourite company anymore because of their efforts to stick genAI into the browser and dismissing the community. Yes, I still wear their t-shirt from 2004 and probably will until it disintegrates.

Office

I cancelled to M356 subscriptions for my company and left only 1 license for special cases (spreadsheets with macros for reporting to EU and similar).

Firstly I used OpenOffice in 2003-2006 when I wrote my dissertation and MsWord started to crash after 100 pages. At that time, OpenOffice saved a lot of time, because it handled formulas and references really well. Then I stopped using it until last year. Now it’s my daily driver (Libre Office) again alongside Google Docs (yeah, I know).

I made a promise that all documents that I send out to other people will be in .odt format. In last several months I received in total 0 complaints. Even people with MSOffice can open it and probably they don’t even notice the change of the format.

I especially like (not so well known): Libre Draw for editing PDFs, Libre Write for creating ePUBs.

I also installed NextCloud and it’s NextCloud Office on my selfhosted Yuno, but I haven’t used it much yet. It looks promising, but more complex in comparison with Google Docs.

Email

I bought Tuta subscription and connected it with my domain. I’m using Linux desktop app, mobile app alongside Gmail.

I haven’t transitioned from GMail yet. I gave my new email address only to some specific people and I’m trying to keep it away from various online subsctiptions. I still use GMail, where all the junk goes.

Probably I will keep using GMail as a throw away email account and Tuta for things I care about – such as communication with state institutions, health institutions, friends.

I’m still trying to get used to Tuta UI.

I could even recreate my workflow from GMail to Tuta: Starred emails. In GMail, I star emails that need my further attention. In Tuta, I use labels for the same purpose. I created a new label ‘todo’ which I can apply to the email. It needs some more clicks than starring emails in GMail, which is not optimal, but it’s good enough.

Calendar

I still don’t know how to transfer my calendar from Google Calendar to something else, e. g. Tuta Calendar. I use Google Calendar with 10+ calendars, intervowen with my family’s calendars. Will try to figure it out in 2026.

Cloud storage

This one is the most difficult one.

But I started to ween off Google Drive, which I use from its beginnings. Until now I haven’t found a good replacement, especially for Google Docs.

Lately I bought a lifetime Koofr subscription for 1 TB. I’m using it as a (3rd) backup for all of my family’s photos and videos. It backups my NAS via WebDAV and my desktop via rclone. I also sync my media from the phone to Koofr. Maybe I’ll even use it instead Google Photos. Will see – but at the first glance it doesn’t miss much – maybe albums and search by photo description.

Koofr looks promising and most importantly, it’s based in EU.

A #wish for the #newyear

#newyearseve #2026 #2026Goals #Year2026 #yearReview #NewYear2026 #newyears #democracy

Phew! Well that was a year. I can't honestly say it was all good, but a lot of it was good for me personally. When looking further away, it was of course just a lot of shit. The rise of fascism pretty much everywhere, one more step further into the complete annihilation of the Palestinian people (with permission of the western "powers"), continuation of the assault into Ukraine by Russia, all the other wars around the world especially in the global south - and lets not forget the biggest issue we're all facing, climate change, which we're not really doing a whole lot about, because we're all too busy living our lives.

But, back to a personal level, where at least I can influence things.

Cycling! I had two challenges this year, as the years before: ride more than I did last year every month, and ride more than I did last year in total. The first one I had accepted would fail, as in 2024 I did 1350km during June due to a cycling trip. I didn't realize how badly that month would fail, as this year I spent half of it traveling with the kids, and the other half with health issues afterwards. Only managed 134km the whole month. Still, the second challenge was still up for grabs. At the end of October I had around 900km to go, and things seemed a bit hopeless. But by setting up a strict daily quota, in the end I managed to top 2024 by a whole 18km, to reach a total of 5734km for the year \o/ This meant around four times the normal kilometers in November and December.

In terms of cycling, even though this year I failed to do any long trips, I'm happy I did my first events, and not just one, but three. First Gravel Primavera Borgå, a 100km gravel ride, then Helsinki Gran Fondo, my longest ride ever, 160km, and I did it on Monty, my mountain bike (Sanna-gravel was in service), and finally Falling Leaves Lahti, another 100km gravel ride. All challenging events, and super happy that I completed them.

Some negatives from the cycling year were the three crashes I had, all of which amounted to some physical damage and inconvenience. Even worse, only one of those was not my fault, and none of them related to the events, where one would think these would happen. Something to not repeat during the next year.

For 2026 the plan is to do at least the gravel events, potentially the Gran Fondo, and look for other nearby / train reachable events too. Also I'd like to do a few weeks of cycling somewhere, potentially the Baltics. I did plan on going further into Europe again, but it doesn't look like this year will grant me long trips like that. And obviously will need to top last years kilometers.

Relationships! This year was both a blessing and a curse, in terms of relationships. I guess that is something possible with being polyamorous. I have an amazing partner I love to bits. We've had our troubles, but we've also worked through them, and I'm extremely lucky to have her <3. I also suffered through one relationship breakdown, which I think grew me a lot in terms of boundaries and being polyamorous, especially in terms of how one builds expectations about relationships (spoiler: don't). One learns through setbacks and failures.

Reading! I've been reading more this year, though I can't prove it with numbers, since I only started tracking my reads at the beginning of the year. Pretty sure I've read more long form books than previous years though. Probably less comics though. Reading is great, we should all do more of that. This year my focus has been very much society / political, in terms of the long form books. This is not always easy, but it is always worth it.

Coding! I'm surprising myself to even mention this, as unfortunately I've not had the same enthusiasm in the recent years, outside work. However, I've started my journey to learn Rust and I'm actually pretty excited about it. I remember years ago learning Golang and just constantly being really bored about it. Rust actually feels pretty good the more you get into it. Got a few ideas for things to do, related to Matrix and Socialhome mainly, lets see where those go.

Numbers:

• Total kilometers by bike: 5743km
• Longest ride: 161km
• Best average speed over 20km: 28.35km/h
• Days on bike: 233
• Hours on bike: 288h
• Elevation on bike: 43705m
• Books read: 49
• .. of those long form: 14
• .. of those comics: 35
• Tidal:
  • Top artist: Evanescence
  • Top song: Epica: Edge of the blade
  • Unique artists: 2678
  • Total minutes listened: 98.6K
  • (of course I listen to music outside of Tidal too..)

Happy new year everyone! I'm hoping humanity gets its shit together, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

(photo Gravel Primavera Borgå by Christer Ådahl)

#yearreview #2025 #newyear

As is traditional, I'm ending the year with a look back at my garden in 2025. There have been a few triumphs and some disasters. Read about it here: https://bit.ly/3KKvpqD

Happy New Year and here's to a great gardening year in 2026. The rose is the aptly named 'It's a Wonderful Life'.
#BlogPost #YearReview #gardens #gardening #plants #flowers #photography #roses #BloomScrolling

2025 year review:
- 2 blog publications
- 7 projects I contributed to
- 11 accepted and merged pull requests on GitHub
- 181 OpenStreetMap contributions
- at the April stand with comrades at @capitoledulibre

Good  

#opensource #GitHub #OpenStreetMap #capitoledulibre #YearReview