MediaGoblin

I’ve been having a play with MediaGoblin and this software looks very promising.  If like me you feel uncomfortable with the amount of data you are sharing with 3rd parties e.g. Flickr, Dropbox, YouTube etc. then MediaGoblin like ownCloud could be a way forward.

I will admit that installing and getting MediaGoblin working isn’t straight forward but it’s not too hard.  I like the idea of sharing my media with friends, family and others without having to also share it with Google, Facebook and Dropbox etc. and of course without all of the advertisements that come along with that.

I’m using the most basic DigitalOcean droplet (512MB memory, 1 core, 20GB SSD) to host my MediaGoblin instance. For the Operating System I’m using Debian 8.

I used the following guides to install and get MediaGoblin working. The official MediaGoblin documentation is very good.

I didn’t install PostgreSQL as suggested in the documentation, I’ve stuck with the default SQLite database.

Here are some live MediaGoblin sites to give you some ideas.

https://wiki.mediagoblin.org/Live_instances

This is my MediaGoblin site:

https://media.bscable.info

Register with Goblin Refuge and start using MediaGoblin without having to install your own instance.

Privacy

I’ve just finished watching a pretty scary documentary called Terms and Conditions May Apply.  It doesn’t necessary tell me something I didn’t already know or at the very least suspected but it still made me feel pretty sick.

I had already begun the process of deleting my data from my social networking accounts and closing them down.  After watching this documentary it’s made me more determined to head down this path.  The scary thing is my data probably won’t actually be deleted from these companies servers (who knows how long they will retain it for).

This is a must see – I definitely recommend this documentary to everyone.

Computer related documentaries

If you like computers and the internet I’m sure you’ll find these documentaries interesting.