I just made that ^ up. So in order to protect my underwear, errmm, privacy, I have these online habits below. Yes, this is very opinionated and I don't care, go home.

Add-ons

Cookies and trackers are often generated when we click an ad. While not all trackers/cookies are bad, some website inject those to get our browsing data and use it for their products or worse, sell it, without our consent. So it's really important to be mindful of what we browse on the internet.

Facebook Container

Hate seeing Facebook ads about the product you browsed recently? This extension will prevent that and isolate your Facebook session while browsing other websites.

uBlock Origin

This is a content blocker, not an ad blocker. It "blocks" ads too! But it is not an ad blocker okay? I have been using uBlock Origin for many years because I find it more resource friendly and it serves its purpose for me. There are other alternatives out there but I won't link it because I am biased, by the way it is open source. heh.

Universal Bypass

You know those URL that when you click, it will redirect you to the land of God knows where to click because there are multiple "continue" or "next" button, moreover you have to wait for 5-10 seconds! You have now arrived at the garden of malwares! If you misclick, it goes to another dodgy website that will open a popup that claims to be better than your $100 anti-virus and says your computer has a virus. That was a long introduction, phew! Universal Bypass will try to skip those URL and give you a clean page what will redirect to the real page that you're trying to access.

Firefox Multi-Account Containers

I am not actually using this since I don't keep too many tabs and sessions but If you're someone who has to open multiple tabs in multiple windows, you might want to organize them with Firefox Multi-Account Containers. Of course, you have to use Firefox (I am biased).

The extension let's you create sessions that are color-coded and store it in a so-called "container". So for example, you have a "work" container and a "personal-browsing" or "whatever" container; you logged in to an email account to "work" container, the other containers won't know that you are logged in to an email account because they're different sessions. It's like opening different accounts to multiple browsers, but here, you're only using Firefox (because it's the best browser). Actually, just try! It's hard to explain, please. Or go to this link, where our fellow Mozillians discuss it in-depth.

Emails

Our email accounts are like the main gate to our privacy online, so don't ever give the key to anyone. Phishing mails are really common but it can be avoided easily. How do I do it? I ignore most of the messages! HAHA jk.

1. Two-factor authentication baby! Yes, enable it!
2. Always check the  from, mailed-by, security block from the email details.
3. Check the URL before clicking a link in the email. You can see it if you hover the cursor over the link, usually it will appear at the bottom of your browser. If the text is too small for you, right click the link and use "Copy Link" option and paste it somewhere. Just make sure it's not a gibberish asd123.com  or something.
4. I don't think it's bad to have multiple email accounts. I use alternative emails to sites that I can ignore email notifications. For example, social media accounts, since notifications can come via push notification.
5. I have trust issues so I generally ignore messages, unless it is important or from a close friend. When I see links sent to me without any followup message it is automatically ignored. This also applies in social media messages.

Labels and tags are also quite useful for email. It filters the important messages and the ones you can ignore. When reading emails, I do it in the following order; Important -> Starred -> Updates. Sometimes, I glance over through the social network requests and if I'm really bored, spams.

Browsing

• By using Firefox, my privacy already has one layer of protection through its Enhanced Tracking Protection.
• As much as possible, I try not connect to a public wi-fi, unless it's real emergency, like I'm lost at SM Megamall or Mall of Asia and I don't have mobile data (It actually happened, except I had mobile data hehe).
• Always make sure to browse sites securely (HTTPS).
• If  I am on a website that asks to disable my ad blocker (content blocker or whatever), then it "could" be a sign that I don't want to be in that site, else, I am very careful of what to click or fill-up.
• Whenever I search something and the result gives me dodgy urls, I open it in a private window so no cache or cookies gets saved.
• For online banking, I mostly use their mobile apps, if I have to access their website, I make sure to check their SSL certificate which you can see if you click the lock beside the address bar. Online banking sites will have their own SSL certificate name.

Social Networking Service (SNS) and Apps

• Social media settings also have privacy section, please play with it, yes it's a toy. I mean I am responsible to what I post online so I should know who can view it, and comment on it, and play on it (huh?).
• When I sign in or sign up using my social media account to another site, I check the data they access from my SNS (social media is so long jeez).
• Same thing with android apps. Not sure about iOS apps, but whenever I install an android app, I also check the permissions it requires. You can also re-examine the permissions of apps already installed.

Some of the things mentioned here might be common knowledge, but not for everyone.

Stop thinking that privacy is only for the famous, evil can make bad out of anything. Any bad person can exploit anyone's privacy for their gain regardless of popularity. They can use your data to deceive the people around you.

So to add an extra layer to your privacy protection, I encourage you to share what you know to the people around you, especially elders. Asking them to ignore messages from an overseas worker using a local number or writing comments with their full name and address (including yours) to a facebook raffle of someone without a checkmark next to their name might go a long way. Hehe.

P.S.

Protect your underwear.

Memorization has been a pain in the butt since the dawn of my school life. However, learning a new language requires tons of vocabulary memorization and there is no shortcut for it. It is even more challenging if you are lazy with a short-term memory.

When I started my journey to learning Japanese, I had to look up for something that will enable my mind to retain the information for a longer time. Then I found about Spaced Repetition System (SRS) which is basically a technique that helps you retain information in your brain using certain intervals. This article has more explanation about SRS.

Anki is a multi-platform flashcard app that integrates SRS natively. It has a wide variety of options that can be tailored based on one's capacity and patience to keep reviewing. There's also a lot of pre-made decks that can be used immediately.

Remember those math flashcards that has some problem on the front and the answer on the back? This is how it looks like in the app.

Creating the cards on your own is quite easy. If you know a bit of HTML and CSS you can also try modifying the card template.

However, customizing the options require some bit of understanding. This article might be of some help (well, it helped me at least).

I have also provided some screenshots of my setup in the Japanese for the Lazy article.

While I mainly use Anki for studying Japanese, it can be used on other categories as well. In fact, I've seen people studying medicine utilize the app. If I had only discovered this gem when I was in school, it would have been so much easy. Heh.

Welcome to the World Wide Web! heh. Recently, I find myself talking with my inner-self (no I'm not going mental) and recalling things I want but couldn't. Must be signs of aging. That said, I decided to make my own website so I can write things I want to remember; publicly lul. And maybe it's time to have one since I've been a developer for 7 years and I can't even include something on my résumé (I had a wordpress site tho HAHA).

Don't know why I had to explain myself there. Anyways, Wordpress has been a popular content management system (CMS) for a long time but I didn't really want to make a custom theme in PHP so I decided to look for a NodeJS alternative. I ended up using Ghost which is very minimal and I find it really simple to setup. It also uses handlebars which has a nice syntax hehe.

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Then for the past 3 weeks, I allotted 1-2 hours every night to making the custom theme. It was a nightmare because I am not a frontend guy and I suck at design. However, since Ghost CMS is open source, there's a lot of free themes available to be used as inspiration. I probably looked into around 10 source codes (yes let's make that bold and italicized) because I'm a "best practice" freak and I want to make my project structure as maintainable as possible.

Currently, this site runs in an EC2 instance (free of course - #TeamFreebies here). I did use Amazon Simple Email Service for the mail stuffs and Let's Encrypt for the SSL certificate. I'm planning to move it to an ECS stack as an experiment but not now as I'm probably the only one visiting this site at the moment, heh.

It was a fun experience, setting up something from scratch. It served as a refresher as well for my CSS and HTML skill, and some bits of frontend javascript.