Moving My Digital Footprint out of the United States - Part 3

I’m trying to rely less on US services & tech, and I’m using a few hours every Sunday to migrate.
I’ve mentioned why I want to do this migration in the first part of this series.

Last week I didn’t get to do anything, as I spent all Sunday setting up a self-contained solar panel circuitry with a battery and everything.
I’m pretty sure it’s a hideously large solar cell for running such a small light, but it makes me happy every time I see it light up. Solar cells are super cool!

Taking light from the sun, and turning it into... well more light!

Anyway, enough about solar energy, let’s talk status updates of tech migrations. There’s been some good and bad things.

What Went Well

First off, switching email has been much easier than expected! As emails are forwarded automatically from Gmail to my new proton mail, I’m not really scared of losing an y emails, and then I just start any new conversations from the new proton-based email.

Running inbox zero in both emails is a little annoying, but it’s good motivation for switching stuff over (or perhaps unsubscribing from a few things). A surprising amount of services require you to write them an email to switch your email, but on the other hand, at least you can write them an email. I’m looking at you, horrible AI “support assistant” bots.

Switching over to use Proton Drive and Proton Docs instead of Google Drive & Google Docs has been pretty seamless.
The only hiccup has been that when you export your data via Google Takeout you don’t automatically get shared directories, so you have to download those manually if you need them, so I had to go through my GDrive to determine what I wanted to keep.

I also canceled my Netflix today. A very easy decision that I’ve been putting off for a long time, mostly due to inertia - they almost never have anything I want to watch.

What Went Poorly

I was really hoping that at this time I would have switched my Calendar away from Google, but Proton Calendar doesn’t support reminders (or tasks, as I believe Google calls them these days), which I use extensively. Seems like I’m going to be stuck with Google here a bit longer, until Proton ups their game.

I also wanted to try out Mistral as an LLM, specifically I had a small web scraping task that I figured I would test it out at¹. It’s, not great. It’s doing the thing the frontier models used where it’d say something was “perfect” and “fantastic”, when it doesn’t work at all, which is a tad disappointing.

It is however, much cheaper than e.g. a Claude Max subscription (15€ versus 100$ or 200$ a month), but it seems here you do get what you pay for.

Next Phase

For my next phase I’m hoping to move my hosted services out of DigitalOcean, as that’s the last US service I pay actual money for.