Why I Only Use Signal

If you’ve ever tried to add me on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, or any other messaging app, you’ll have discovered that I’m not there. It’s not that I haven’t heard of them or that I’m some sort of technophobe - I just choose not to use them.

Instead, I use Signal for all my messaging needs. Here’s why.

What is Signal?

Signal is a messaging app, much like the others you might already use. You can send texts, photos, videos, voice messages, and make voice or video calls. It works on your phone and your computer. It has group chats. In terms of features, it does pretty much everything the mainstream apps do.

Deploying Everywhere: Why This Site Lives on Multiple Platforms

If you’re reading this, you might have arrived here via owencampbell.me.uk, or perhaps through owencampbell.eth.limo, or maybe even owencampbell.bzz.link. The same website, accessible through multiple different addresses. Why? It’s all about resilience.

The Problem with Putting All Your Eggs in One Basket

We’ve all experienced it: a website goes down because the hosting company had an outage. A service you rely on shuts down with little notice. GitHub goes offline and suddenly half the internet’s documentation is inaccessible. Twitter decides to rebrand and change its APIs, breaking countless integrations.

Terminals and Shells: A Beginner's Guide

I often find that there is some confusion for beginner programmers when it comes to understanding the difference between a terminal and a shell.

Let’s take a few moments to look at the history of where those terms arose and how that fits with the world of modern computing.

What is a Terminal?

Computers used to be enormous machines, often filling entire rooms. When I was at University in the late 1980s, there was a large ‘mainframe’ machine somewhere in the Computer Science building and there were workstations around the university campus from where students and staff could use it.