The same as last year, but things are starting to slip backwards.

  • Linode - As per last time: Still using it. Still continues to be solid for me for NetBSD.
  • Tarsnap - And still costing me around £30 a year at the moment to backup my server and desktop.
  • Teuxdeux - I might not get everything done on my list, but I’d stand no chance without it.
  • Flickr - I want to get rid of it, because I dislike paying more for photo storage than I do on film and film development, but I’m stuck since I’m over the one thousand limit and Flickr is my backup; Despite what people say it’s been years now since it made more sense having the cloud as your backup opposed to a local drive; I have loads of photos on local drives… I haven’t been able to access them for years.
  • Strava - I like it. I’m still serious enough about running that it feels like it’s benefitting me. Also I think my mind needs it whilst we are still mid-pandemic.

On the chopping block for next year:

  • Pinboard - I seriously thought about ditching it for Pocket, because Pinboard seems dead in the water and it’d be nice to support Mozilla, but the lack of descriptions for items was a blocker. I might cancel the archiving though. Or maybe just decide I don’t need almost ten thousand bookmarks at all.
  • Guardian - I had the digital subscription last year, very much enjoyed it, but I’m shelving it because I need to rein in my spending.
  • 1Password - I’m going to cheapskate it and piggyback on my employer’s plan.

I am still being a cheapskate with Duolingo and likely will be forever now. Sorry.

In 2018 I gave myself my first allowance since forever of two percent of my pay. I increased that in 2019 to three percent so the extra one percent could cover money I spent on others. In 2020 I kept it at three percent, tried to be more explicit about that separation, but ended up spending a lot of “my” money on charity due to the pandemic. So in 2021 I went (wild!) to four percent, but keeping two percent for me, one percent for me to spend on others, and a dedicated one percent for charity. Having an explicit charity budget was beautiful. I really liked that.

However, I can only control what I control and although four percent is a small amount, two percent is smaller still so I’m going to drop back down to that for 2022 (since that seems fair and I can’t see how anyone can argue otherwise) and make that cover me, others and charity.

As a result most of my charitable outgoings have been culled. And the only “other people” I will spend on from that budget will be my Mum and Dad for birthdays and Christmases.

Sigh.