Why I Wrote Digital Independence for Wales

My wife and I moved to Penarth in 2024. For her it was a homecoming: she’s from Cardiff, and we met at university many years ago. For me it was something newer. I have Welsh roots on my mother’s side and Irish on my father’s, which is how I come to be called Owen Campbell, but I was born and raised in England and had lived there all my life. We stayed because that’s where our work was and where our children were doing well at school. When neither of those things held us any more, we came here.

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.