My friends, I am deep down the rabbit hole of garden planning and recipe research and can’t bring myself to write an in-depth post this week. Instead I will offer you a handful of the meals we’ve enjoyed: a watermelon, mint, and feta salad which needs no real recipe; a spinach mint dip, with equal parts plain yogurt and spinach and smaller parts dried mint and walnuts; and Kulajda, a Czech mushroom soup we had with poached eggs. The first two especially have been helping with our mint problem!
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo on mobile for a while now, since hearing about the feature that keeps your other apps from sharing your data with each other. Aside from that, DuckDuckGo is a browser and a search engine, without the targeted advertising of its competitors.
This is both their appeal and their business model: they don’t collect your personal information, and they don’t use it. The ads that they make money off of? Paired to be on-subject with what you’re currently searching, not some behind-the-scenes profile of who you are and everything you like. Truthfully, I’d have swapped them in as my primary on desktop a long time ago, if only switching browsers wasn’t so tedious.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t! Once I finally plucked up the courage to transfer my digital life, I found out that DuckDuckGo has an “import bookmarks and passwords” option, which did most of the work for me! Since then, I’ve discovered that the desktop version also blocks tracking attempts, pop-ups, and most cookies, and has an omnipresent fire button with which you can wipe out all cookies, caches, browser history, and permissions, except on websites you’ve specifically and deliberately fireproofed. (The mobile version has this too!)
I’ve been further and perhaps most delighted by Duck Player, however. Privacy and self-determination are all well and good, but can they hold a candle to watching YouTube videos without the ads?! The answer is yet to be determined.
It’s not exactly a secret that I love languages, generically and in specifics. So I’ve been consistently delighted by K Klein, a YouTube channel all about linguistics!
Sort of like Tasting History, this is somewhere I go for specificity. Give me this very zoomed-in little niche of your science, whether the focus is on a specific language, specific feature, or specific event! K Klein covers a little bit of everything, from French’s spelling system to temporal pronouns to spelling reforms, which has given me both a deeper understanding of languages I speak, and a sort of starter platter as to the fascinating phenomena other languages offer!