Thought I’d start off on MPU Talk by sharing my very basic home setup. I’m a cord cutter so the internet, and my mac are my entertainment center now. I use my phone to manage just about everything I used to do with my Mac. My Mac mainly functions as a server now, on 24/7 and running a fairly extensive library of hazel rules to organize all of my files. It has a Large SSD being backed up by both Dropbox & Time Machine, and is plugged into my Television (No Monitor) via HDMI. If I sit down on the couch to use it, it’s mostly for entertainment purposes like playing movies, music, or just browsing the web like I’m doing now.
Showing off the clean desktop with dynamic Mojave background. Toolbar displaying Brave Browser, and always running Dropbox, my cryptocurrency tickers, Adobe Creative Cloud, Little Snitch, Hazel, Alfred, Clean My Mac, and Time Machine.
Mac Mini, Cable Modem, and a 10 gig Thunderbolt 2 “G drive” along with an anchor USB power strip powering 4 miniature fans to keep everything cool in the cabinet.
At this point I think it works just as good, if not better than Chrome. The only thing that seems to trip new users up is the Javascript blockers that are on by default. People generally assume the browser is broken for this page, and go back to chrome without trying the “lower shields” feature first which usually fixes it. The ad blocking is great, 1 password compatible, and I think in the latest version all chrome plugins supposedly work for brave now.
I run Brave with Duck Duck Go set as the default search engine. I look up a lot of useless images to communicate, sort of like memes and I thought that would be a problem when switching over with Duck Duck Go’s image search not being good enough. Like if someone asks a question, I’ll google the answer in the form of an image for the entertainment value. Never really need googles image search, DDG’s works just fine. Occasionally I’ll head over to google for more intense research searches but that’s rare.
Not sure how important it will be in the future, but it’s a great feeling knowing you’re taking steps to avoid having your entire browsing/search history data stored by a major corporation who’s business model involves selling that information to third parties.
