Yeah, the article itself makes me a lot less sympathetic towards the author than the headline would suggest, given he instigated this whole legal dispute on frankly idiotic premises.
People have already mentioned the more popular ones
Apart from those, Id recommend Behind the Overlay- it’s an extension that removes a lot of unclosable popups on pages in a single click. Things like “disable your adblock” messages or websites that poorly gatekeep content behind a subscription.
If plastic grocery bags could be considered single use, then I think I have an interesting method to share.
Since I was young, probably in the 2nd grade or so, my mom and I were trying this project where we’d take plastic bags and cut them into strips. We’d then feed these into her sewing machine, which used one of its functions to stretch the plastic until it was about the same with as a thin strand of rope or thick yarn. We’d quite literally roll them into balls of plastic yarn.
She’d then knit them into all sorts of things. Drawstring bags, coin purses, and her favorite- tote bags. They were very pretty and had unique feel to them as well. The best I could describe it was it felt like a fake leather purse, but more bumpy due to being knit. It might not be the most efficient method of reducing single use plastic waste, but given that we still have the bags we made back then, I’d say we did a pretty good job of keeping them out of the landfill!
Two items I can think of: a bluetooth/wifi controlled multicolored lightbulb and reusable K-cups
Rather than setting up strips of lighting along my ceiling in my apartment, just changing out the bulb in my lamp is a really simple way to have full customization of a room’s lighting. Nowadays, I find myself just lying in bed, changing the color and brightness of the bulb on my phone as I listen to music, changing it to whatever feels the best. Even for regular use, changing how bright or soft the white light is can be useful.
As for the K-cups, it makes for a really easy method of making coffee at the office. Due to a long commute, I have to wake up earlier than I would like to arrive at the office on time, and it generally leaves me little time to prepare coffee at home. During the summer I usually prepare cold brew the night before, though in fall and winter, I prefer warm coffee and I find it easiest to grind whole beans myself, prepare a K-cup the night before, and then brew once I arrive. Simple and clean with very little hassle.
I tend to like the “bangs” feature that DuckDuckGo offers when it’s set as my browser’s default. Basically by putting !+prefix it automatically redirects your search to a different website. !g will do Google, !b will do Bing, !yt will do YouTube, etc… And it’s quite extensive. Currently, DDG claims to have 13,564 bangs you can use, so if there’s some website with a search bar, chances are it can be banged from DDG.
The search engine from my use over the last 4-6 years generally provides me with “good enough” search results and I enjoy the interface itself, as well as the sorting options when searching images. Every now and then, if i don’t get the results I want, I can just bang a different search engine (I’m just starting to realize the repercussions of using “bang” as a verb…).
I sometimes gift it to friends I run a discord server with around 150ish people, so discord tends to be a platform I spend a lot of time on. As it stands now, I don’t have major qualms with the developers of Discord, so for now, I don’t mind spending money on it.
Oh yeah, I reckon there’s a good number of extensions for it too, probably something I should check out as well in the future.
And yeah, it’s definitely a tradeoff of sorts. Denying a browser or search engine access to all personal information, including GPS, might lead to irrelevant results, so I imagine it’s a matter of giving as little information as possible for the maximum relevance in results. GPS is one of those compromises I’ll make as well, though only at the zip code level most of the time, since most apps/sites don’t need to know my precise location.
While I do try and stick to my trusted sites as much as possible, the things I often want to find online are beyond the scope of the sites I have bookmarked. Though bookmarking more sites that I trust and opting to use them over a regular search seems like a good habit to get into