We’re lucky enough to be spending the next few weeks on vacation in Europe as I write this. Finding myself with a bit of downtime for the first time in months, what else would I do but write a blog post? That’s not always my preferred mode of relaxation, but I do miss writing as often as I used to.

Not coincidentally, today’s post covers some housekeeping that I was only been able to take care of as I went into holiday mode. It’s about how I finally kicked my longstanding Dropbox habit. After many years of getting real but limited value from that service, I just the other day canceled my subscription. It was pretty liberating.

This decisiveness is also part of an ongoing but admittedly underemphasized campaign I’ve been waging to purge myself of redundant subscriptions. As the world went subscription crazy starting a half decade ago or so I, like many people, signed up for more services than I should have. It’s been a real slog to cancel the unnecessary ones.

For instance, I’m a subscriber to both Spotify and iTunes Match, the latter because I have tons of music that’s missing from Spotify’s catalog. It’s possible to replace iTunes Match with the music module in the Plex media server that I run at home, but I worry that its reliability and convenience isn’t the equal of Apple’s services. In a way, this is exactly the dilemma I faced when considering my cancellation of Dropbox. Sort of goes to show that some lessons we have to re-learn each and every time.

Cheers from Lyon,
Khoi