Declaring Bankruptcy

by Christopher Paul on September 9, 2012

From time to time, I declare bankruptcy. Not in the financial sense but in the reading and computer sense.

Sometimes, I can’t get through all my RSS feeds and I have to mark the hundreds of items as ‘Read’ just so I don’t see 300+ unread items in Reeder. When I was a PC user, I’d frequently reinstall Windows because, let’s face it, after three hours it was infected with a virus and starting to crawl to a halt. Recently, I’ve done the extreme with my Mac.

Since I had to replace my hard drive anyway, I figured I’d refrain from installing the dozens of apps that I had on the previous install. No more iLife, iWork, writing apps, utilities, extensions, plugins, browsers, etc. All gone.

I refuse to install Flash, Chrome, Firefox. No more Fantastical (although it’s a great app). No miscellaneous design apps to pick colors, create gradients, copy special characters to the clipboard. No Instagram apps. No Facebook or Twitter menubar apps. Nothing but the following:

  1. iPhoto (for iCloud photo stream and I know it’s not perfect)
  2. 1Password
  3. Byword
  4. MarsEdit

I’ve installed Fever and will be using that as my RSS feed reader and I’ve done away with all my feeds and will slowly add them back in to make sure I don’t get inundated with a bunch of junk I’ll have to mark all as read later, anyway. I’m keeping my music in the cloud; I’ll stream what I want. I have all of my data backed up on Time Machine so if I need it, I can get it.

I found that I never listened to most of my music or used half the apps I downloaded so why have them take up space and computer resources? And instead of uninstalling everything, I just used my hardware failure as a chance to start over.

I feel lighter already.

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