I’m not talking about cleaning up the house—that’s an ongoing project that stays “up to standards” fairly well.
I’m talking about my digital house. For several different reasons, it has become a cluttered mess over the past year—the past 3 months in particular.
So what did my digital Spring cleaning entail?
- I disconnected apps that, without ever asking my permission, gave themselves access to my Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Vimeo, and Flicker accounts! I was furious! God only knows what they have been sending out that I have no knowledge of at all. If you have ever read a status update, tweet, or anything but one of my blog posts that says I liked or recommended anything, it wasn’t sent by me! Assholes! These apps gave themselves permission to post in my name?! That really pisses me off! They also then have access to your location information (and who knows what else) through your phone. It’s just unbelievable to me!
- I’ve gone through my iOS devices and computers and deleted apps I haven’t used in the past 6 – 9 months. Gone.
- I used an app called CleanApp to clear out cache files, duplicates, all orphaned files from apps that had long ago been deleted by simply trashing the app file without knowing what other files its installation had placed all over the hard drive, old iOS images and backup files, the jillions of language files (that I will never use) that accompany apps, ancient universal binaries, log files, system archived email attachments that had long ago been downloaded or trashed with the email that sent them but remain tucked away by the mail app. This gave me gigs more space on my hard drives.
- I then moved all of my files back to their original locations. I had moved them, as a backup strategy, to other hard drives when I upgraded to Mavericks (10.9) in case anything went awry—which it did. I then had to install 10.8 back on the system but left the backups in their new safe place until I could re-install 10.9 without the horrible file preview issue it originally had on many machines. Now that I’m successfully running 10.9, it was time to put everything back where it normally lives.
- I removed archived files that I only keep around in case something horrific happens to my hard drives. I burned them all to Blu-ray disks and then deleted them from my hard drive. (Amazingly, that accounted for over 200 gigabytes of disk space!)
- And to increase my level of serenity, I deleted CNN from my Facebook feed along with almost every other news-related feed I followed. Yes, even though they were mostly liberal, I’m sick of the headlines that all follow this formula: [Simple Sentence] followed by [Ghastly Hyperbole]. “For example: He was enraged at the flight attendant. What happened next will change your life forever.” Sickening drivel! [Are you reading this UpWorthy?!] I kept Rachael Maddow. She’s rocks. And on the conservative spectrum, I muted all of my friends who post mostly political rants. I’ve had enough of it all:on both sides!
Well, I feel like life is now a little bit simpler, you know—that feeling you have when the house is clean from top to bottom.
I highly recommend you check your social media apps to see what apps on your phone and iOS devices have given themselves unlimited access to them. You will probably be shocked! I certainly was.