User Profile

I believe in the life-enhancing and capability-extending possibilities of technology as well as its potential to surveil, control, and misdirect. I work towards tools which are respectful, trustworthy, and safe enough to be used even by the most vulnerable among us, even when those with power oppose that freedom.

🌸 "High-end nondescript." 🌸 #Nonbinary 🏳️‍⚧️ #Trans 🌈 #Queer 🧠 #Disabled 🕍 #Jewish 🌹 #Socialist 🏴🚩 #AntiFascist 🏙 #Urbanist 🗄️ Guerilla #Archivist & #Pirate 🏴‍☠️⛵.

💻 #Technologist 📣 #Activist & ☔ #ProductManager in 🤫 #Privacy, 🔒 #Security, &. 👁️ #TrustAndSafety. 🛡️

📍 Unceded Ohlone land in the Confederated Villages of Lisjan’s territory. Pay your Shuumi Land Tax to support rematriating stolen land.

Find me at @tilde@infosec.town or tilde.lowengr.im.

My favorite fiction imagines other worlds, different systems, and alternate ways of being, while still populated and experience by flawed imperfect people doing their best and trying to get by. Cozy unchallenging fiction is a great source of joy in my life, and there are plenty of novels I keep coming back to just to relax. I've also discovered that I am fascinated by books which explore what it's like to think, to experience, and to express autonomy and agency within systems which are not themselves self-aware. Science fiction is where I'm most comfortable, but I can dive into almost any story depicting smart but flawed people trying to manage complex and uncertain situations.

For some reason, I find a lot of non-fiction relaxing: it's just a joy to learn new things! My favorite books are ones which give me a new lens or way of seeing and understanding the world and how things happen. But a book which leaves my readin list longer than when I started is great too.

🍵 While I read, I like to enjoy limitless (green) tea, and (lukewarm) coffee in moderation. 🥟 Dumplings and soup are my favorite food groups, which makes xiao long bao humanity's greatest achievement besides audiobooks. ☔ As well as splaying on the couch for a rainy day, reading with a warm mug in my hand, I also like to listen to books while sailing, hiking, camping, or really any other activity which lets me look at trees or find a cool bird or pretty flower. 🏕

Since I spend my day staring at glowing screens, I try to focus on audiobooks. Audio is also a great fit for my wandering attention: I can crank up the playback speed until I need to focus to follow what's going on, and that makes it much harder for my mind to wander.

Most books that I'm only going to read once I get from Overdrive & Libby. I prefer to buy new books from my favorite authors, and anything I find myself reading over and over. For those audiobooks, I love Libro.fm (personal referral link). They're a social purpose corporation, care about DEI, and let you support your local book store when you shop there. Most importantly, all your audiobooks can be downloaded as DRM-free mp3 files so you can archive them on your own, and use any audiobook player you like.

Either way, audiobooks go to my Plex server so I can listen using the Prologue app on iOS. Using my own server means I don't need to sync my several-thousand file terabyte-plus collection to my phone. But since Prologue's playback rate only goes up to 3.5×, I've found myself using Pocket Casts more and more. If I were setting things up today, I would probably use Jellyfin rather than Plex, but my clumsy setup works and that's more important than perfection.

Friends: would you also like access to my books? Send me a message on Signal and I'll get you a library account.

For a smaller audiobook collection, I strongly recommend BookPlayer. It works great, and has a ton of flexibility and convenience. But it chokes when synchronizing huge libraries, which is why I switched to Prologue.

I also enjoy the Voice Dream app for folks in the Apple world. Not every book has an audio edition — especially obscure material and non-fiction. Having a robot in my phone which can read me any PDF or ePub is magical. Custom voices and pronunciation, fully offline reading, it's really solid.

Not all audiobooks come in neatly packaged .m4b files, and some proprietary players don't support faster playback speeds and other accessibility needs (looking at you, Libby). I'm hugely grateful to odmpy, m4b-tool, and tone for massively simplifying formatting, conversion, metadata and the other logistics of dealing with lots of big weird files.