What I did, maybe useful for you
I love Apple, use Google daily, chat on WhatsApp, and I'm on X for the great tech and science community. But I have backups and alternatives ready, just in case.
US services blocked or restricted. Internet works, but your tools don't.
No internet, maybe no power.
Whatever happens, you want your data on drives you own.
Photos (Google Photos, iCloud, phone), videos, documents (Google Docs, OneDrive, Dropbox), email (Gmail Takeout, Outlook export), chat histories (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal), contacts, notes (Apple Notes, Keep, Notion), passwords, calendar, bookmarks, actual music files (not playlists), purchased ebooks and movies, and DNS records from Cloudflare or your registrar. Get all of it onto a drive you own.
This isn't about emergencies, it's common sense. My Apple Notes are holy to me - years of thoughts, ideas, lists. I still use Apple, but I exported everything to markdown, encrypted, on my own drives. The archive is maybe 50MB and I should have done this years ago.
Mail and files run through Nextcloud (self-hosted, replaces Gmail/Outlook and Google Drive/Dropbox), video calls go through Nextcloud Talk, and LibreOffice handles documents just fine. Signal and DeltaChat cover messaging, Vaultwarden holds the passwords. For AI: Deepseek Flash, running locally, day to day.
AI: Deepseek Flash running locally via Dwarfstar (Antirez's inference package) on a dedicated M3 Max 128GB, with OpenWebUI and the Hermes agent for interfacing and multimodal work. Ollama, MLX and LM Studio round out the local LLM side, Draw Things handles image generation with LoRA, Minimax Music replaced Suno for local music generation, and LTX-2/mlx-video covers video. I also grab models straight from Hugging Face when I need something specific.
Infra: Docker for containers, GitLab CE for git, Mattermost for team chat, PostgreSQL as the database, a LAMP stack on Ubuntu, Parse for mobile backends, and OpenStreetMap for maps.
| Instead of | I use |
|---|---|
| Gmail, Outlook | Nextcloud Mail (self-hosted) |
| Google Drive, Dropbox | Nextcloud (cloud.ddq.nl) |
| Slack, Teams | Mattermost |
| Zoom, Google Meet | Nextcloud Talk, OpenTalk |
| Signal, DeltaChat | |
| GitHub | GitLab CE (git.ddq.nl) |
| Google Maps | OpenStreetMap |
| ChatGPT | Deepseek Flash (local) |
| 1Password, LastPass | Vaultwarden (self-hosted Bitwarden) |
All self-hosted on Dutch VPS via TransIP, no US services involved.
External drives, encrypted, kept in more than one location in case of fire. Battery and solar for power. Offline music as actual MP3 files, maps downloaded for navigation, and passwords printed and locked in a safe. Cash for when payments fail, a hardware wallet for Bitcoin and Ethereum kept offline, walkie talkies for communication, and printed documents - ID, insurance, and so on.
I'm Norbert Schmidt. Been running servers for 25+ years. See my infrastructure above.
None of this is doom and gloom for me, though - it's the part I have the most fun with. The local AI community on X has been great, and I even won a prize for MLX-video-maker, a local video generation tool. Being at the front edge of local AI, running it all myself, is something I genuinely love.
Open science: iSPEX on OSF (OSF is winding down its projects hosting). Now volunteering with the EOSC.
This site just shares what I use. Ask Clippy in the corner for quick questions!
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