Asko Nõmm

In my previous post I wrote in length about my feelings towards USA and concluded that I wanted to reduce my dependency on its tech products and services, which when I really zoomed out and looked at the things I use, turned out to be basically everything, which is really frightnening as a EU citizen in the current political climate.

Of course I won’t be able to move away from it entirely, and I think it’s also stupid to go that far in the name of ideology, but I’d be happy if I could move the majority of things, especially important things.

Passwords & secrets

Previously I’ve used a mix of Apple Keychain and Bitwarden for all my passwords / secrets, but both are U.S companies, and this type of data is definitely not something I want a country with no due process or privacy laws to have, especially one that has continuesly demonstrated its abuse of power towards civilians.

I’ve decided on moving exclusively to NordPass, which is developed by a Lithuanian company.

Social media

While I already wasn’t a big social media guy, I mainly made use of Reddit and Hacker News for my news and discussion needs. Both are run by U.S companies, and the pro-America propaganda is especially strong and nauseating on Hacker News, so it was honestly high-time to find something less entrenched in uncle sam’s patriotism.

I’ve settled on Mastodon. It’s decentralized, I can join a network run in EU, and I can follow hashtags to get news and discussions around topics I care about, all while I can also filter out noise I don’t care about.

Social media isn’t something I care enough about to self-host, so I’m just using the main mastodon.social instance. If it blows up one day, I’ll just sign up on a different instance and be fine. That said, it’s nice to know that if I wanted to self-host it, I could.

Music

The predatory behavior of Spotify and the U.S run alternatives to it all make me not want to pay any money to these types of services, at all. So instead of signing up for yet another music streaming service, I’ve instead resorted to purchasing the music I listen to directly from the artists themselves.

If they don’t sell their music on their website or on some other digital shop, like Bandcamp, then I’ll simply evaluate how much I care about it, and if I care about it a lot, I’ll just pirate it. Sorry, but not sorry. I’d be more than happy to pay, but I want ownership, not rental rights, and I’ve had plenty artists I like just vanish from streaming platforms, which is ridiculous.

Browser & Search engine

In a quest to get away from having all my browsing data mined for some AI training set or not being allowed to use a proper adblock extension, I really wanted to use LibreWolf. It’s a fork of Firefox with all its bullshit stripped out, but I’ve settled on Firefox itself because there’s no LibreWolf on the phone and I really need the two to sync well.

I’m very much looking forward to Ladybird, a truly from-scratch independent browser currently in development. I test drive it every week or so and it’s getting better every time, but as of now is still quite far from a daily driver material.

I’m also using Qwant as the default search engine, which I haven’t really formed much of an opionion on yet. It works for what I’ve needed it for, and it’s run by a EU company.

E-mail & Calendar

For quite a few months now I’ve been using Fastmail for both my e-mail and calendar needs. It’s run by an Australian company and it seems to focus on doing just a few things, but doing those few things very well, which is why I keep using it as opposed to something like Proton.

While of course I would prefer European, I’m fine if it’s from elsewhere as long as it’s not USA, and from the European I’ve tried (Tuta, Proton), I’ve liked Fastmail more.

Bonus points to Fastmail for allowing me to connect my work gmail and google calendar to it, so I can just use one web interface for everything.

Coding

I’ve never really pledged an allegiance to any one particular editor, so switching this around isn’t that big of a deal for me. That said, I’m doing my development work nowadays with a mix of OpenCode and Sublime Text.

OpenCode for agentic development, and Sublime Text for either reviewing the work I did in OpenCode, or when I need to get my hands dirty and really dig into a problem. Shout out to Tonsky for the Clojure Sublimed extension.

While OpenCode is run by a U.S company, it’s entirely open source and not run by big tech that’s doing its best to slopify its products and put people out of a job (cough Microsoft cough). That said, I’m still using U.S made AI models, and I’m not going to invest tens of thousands into my own AI hardware so it is what it is.

Sublime Text is another Australian creation, one which I’m a happy customer of, because just like Fastmail, they do few things, and do those few things very well.

Git & static site hosting

For half a decade now I’ve used GitHub for my open source projects and leveraged its built-in support for static sites to run this very blog as well.

Ever since Micro~soft~slop bought it, it’s been more and more entrenched in questionable use of AI, which is on-brand for Micro~soft~slop, and its been known to use your hard work to train its AI models, so that it could then charge you money to use its models, without giving anything back.

I’ve started hosting my own Forgejo instance at git.nmm.ee and have started the process of moving my open source work over to it. It’ll take a while before I get to all of it, but I’ve already set-up a CI/CD runner on it and this very blog of mine now gets built entirely on my own infrastructure.

I’ve also set-up another VPS that’s dedicated to just running static sites, which is where the outcome of the CI/CD build will be deployed to. That means I have 2 separate VPS’s running, one for Git & CI/CD, one for hosting static sites. Well 3, if you count Invobi as well, which runs on its own VPS.

I’m using UpCloud as my VPS provider, which is located in Finland and gives you many EU locations to choose from. I’ve been very happy with them thus far.

File storage

All my documents and media like images and videos that I’ve captured with my phone over the years are all on iCloud. While I’m generally a fan of Apple and I don’t have a reason to think that Apple would be selling out my data or using it for training any AI, I’d still like to have full ownership of my files, and not pay a subscription in perpetuity to have my files just exist.

For now I’m moving all of the data to my Framework laptop which has plenty storage (3.5TB) with backups going periodically to a separate SSD from the main one, which should suffice for a while, but long-term I’d probably like to set-up a NAS of some kind.

Hardware

I daily drive a MacBook and Framework computer, both American companies. I prefer Framework for not being big tech and giving me full ownership of every aspect of the device, but I love my MacBook for the performance and battery life it gives.

That said, I recently ordered the new Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Mainboard for my Framework, so perhaps I’ll use Framework more and more with its performance improvements (and hopeful battery gains). I do prefer the Framework’s keyboard to the MacBooks, and I like knowing that I actually own every part of that machine, American or not.

There are some EU laptop makers as well, such as Tuxedo, but the repairability and upgradeability of Framework is just far too nice, and so for better or worse, my laptops will remain American for now.

I have been flirting with the idea of having the Fairphone be my next smartphone, which is sort of the Framework of phones with its full repairability, once my Pixel 9a gives up the good fight, but that will hopefully be a few years from now still.

Some things will have to remain American

Such as messaging apps like Messenger or WhatsApp, or sites like YouTube. There are many things where the network effects are just too strong or there isn’t a viable alternative, and that’s fine for me, now that most of the crucial things for me are no longer American, and no longer in one basket either.

As a European Union citizen, the last half a decade or so has been a constant learning experience in understanding not only how little our big bad protector NATO chief country, USA, cares about protecting us, but also how much they really just want us to give them everything while they give us nothing in return, and that we should thank them for that privilege of a deal.

Turns out that USA is constantly manipulating, extorting, threatening with violence and war, creating divide and outrage, and is in general just about as anti-human of a place as Russia, with leaders that are as best as I can describe just pure scum.

NATO isn’t free, by the way, we pay a lot of money for the protection we’re not receiving. In fact it seems like USA is that bully who promises to have your back if you give him your lunch money, but then you do that, and get beaten up by the very same bully anyway. This is what USA does when it threatens to annex EU countries, countries it promised to protect.

You’d think it was just an error of an election cycle gone really-really bad, but you have to remember: the American people made Trump their president not once, but twice. I think this is indicative of who Americans really are. I’d love to wax poetic about Trump and his administration being psychotic piece of shit villains, but ultimately the American people wanted that. If you chose to not vote, you didn’t care, and are just as much complicit. The Trump administration is not a window, it’s a mirror looking back at the American people.

Corporations first

It’s painfully obvious how in the USA legislation is built around the idea that the most rights are not given to the people, but instead to corporations. The bigger the corporations, the more rights they get. At some point even the law becomes optional, apparently.

If you run a corporation in the USA that does some wildly illegal shit, don’t worry - presidential pardons come pretty cheap, so just put a few millions on an offshore account and you’re good.

In the USA no company needs to ask permission, they just do it. Look at Uber, who started its ride sharing business entirely illegaly, as in most juristictions an actual taxi license was required, but of course it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission if you have billions and the government gives zero fucks about the people who get hurt.

Or how about all the AI companies sucking up all the human creativity, copyrights be damned, to then profit off of other people’s work? And the USA courts say it’s a-ok, because the USA courts don’t give a fuck about the people.

These USA companies also come to EU and try their same illegal tactics here. They call it “disrupting”, I call it breaking the law, but of course whenever this topic comes up on Hacker News, the Americans there will tell me that us having laws that actually work is why we don’t have tech advancements like they do.

They tell me how we should really remove all our regulations and laws because bending over to the tech overlords so that they could poison every aspect of life is their idea of a perfect world. The ultra-rich in America are gods, and the Americans their worshippers. Praised be the people who make you pee in a bottle, for what a wonderful privilege that is!

American Exceptionalism

I really try hard to push through to myself that not all American people are the same, and I know that they’re not, but it’s so hard to keep an open mind to that when it seems that every online discource by Americans is ignorant, self-obsessed, demeaning to others and really just a reflection of the people they vote into power.

Culturally speaking, Europeans and Americans couldn’t possibly be further apart. Americans constantly insult us that we’re poor, and how they are rich. That we have no good tech companies, and how they do. Everything for them is about ultra-capitalism, money, making their billionares richer, and more money.

For us Europeans though, life does not revolve around money. For us, wealth comes from being able to spend time with our friends and loved ones, having plenty time off from work, having good maternity and paternity leave, accessible healthcare and education, consumer protection laws, employee protection laws, and in general having systems in place such that the world caters to the human, not to the corporation. We live for us, not for the ultra wealthy. Our life belongs to us, and is not for sale.

And we have those things not whenever a corporation decides they would want to give us those things, we have those things written into law, so that everyone equally gets these things, not only those privileged enough to work at a prestigious enough enterprise. We’re not narccisists and neither do we like to shit where we eat.

Independence from USA

USA is not our friend. At the best of times it’s just a gunrunner who milks us for money so that we could put ammunition into the weapons it has sold us, because it doesn’t allow us to make ammunition for those weapons ourselves. Americans are amazing at doing vendor lock-in. You could say that fucking their customer is their special talent.

USA is not our friend. At the worst of times it’s our enemy who threatens to annex our territories, destroy our economy, and support our other enemies, like Russia.

I’m working towards gaining independence from USA, by moving away from the products and services that they make. The unfortunate part is that USA seems to make everything I use, but the thought of them and their complicit big tech using my data or getting any of my money sickens me enough at this point that even if the alternatives are subpar in comparison, it’s worth it.

Now I’m not able to shield myself from USA products entirely due to work where we use a bunch of USA stuff that I simply cannot avoid, but as for my personal uses go, I don’t want anything to do with that country, if I can help it.

It’s been a bit over a year since I made any changes to my invoice generation service, Invobi, but the time to make some has come.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I see utility in interface-less services where it makes sense, and for something as simple as invoice generation, it’s a great fit. So I’ve gone ahead and done it - all the UI datepickers, input fields, and dropdowns are gone. You now just describe what you want in plain text, and AI takes care of the rest.

This makes the whole thing a lot simpler for both parties. You don’t have to deal with a bunch of UI controls, and I don’t have to maintain a complex frontend. Really all I maintain now is the API and the various LLM integrations. Less code, less bugs, less headaches.

When I originally launched the service over a year ago, I had plans to add paid tiers with more features. Never got around to it, because life happens. However, I’m now actively working towards that, and I’m hoping to get it out in the first quarter of 2026. The paid plans will include things like a REST API so you could integrate invoice generation into your own apps, among other things.

The free tier with no sign up required will always stay, because that’s the whole point. Bring your own AI API key and go forth. I plan on adding support for more models soon, but for now only Gemini is supported.