You’re right, and I was little ambiguous and unclear what I meant by formality.
By formality, I was suggesting that the US government spends a lot of time hand wringing about the budget, delaying for compromises, and then exceeds the budget anyway in certain areas.
They intentionally hold it hostage for compromises on other things we don’t actually want.
The budget is probably more a formality anyway.
I used PiHole for a long time, then graduated to self-hosting a VPN so I could get as-blocking when away from my home network.
Ultimately I ended up using just AdGuard DNS via the DNS profile for iOS, and hard code the DNS into my home routers.
There might be a better setup, but this simple deployment takes care of 98% of ads.
If you’re on MacOS, you can run networkquality via crontab and append the results to a text file. I did this for a few months on a congested network to identify ideal times to try and do schoolwork.
E: A word.
By the time one becomes a senator, they are experts at fleecing money. He is disappointed because he knows all the lost revenue he could have had if he only had known about the data beforehand.
And the skills to use it; they’re not plug-and-play. Get you license and get on the air to hone those skills.
A buddy experienced the exact same issue as OP just the other day. We ran diagnostics and it turns out his computer was running deprecated DNS IPs for a popular ad-blocking DNS provider.
It was DNS.
Been running AdGuard for years once mobile DNS profiles became available. Hardly see any ads, and (on the rare occasion) when I do, they’re jarring and out of place.
Obsidian, but I’m not competent to comment regarding their privacy. You can air gap the install and have it on an isolated machine.
It’s hella customizable, and there is broad support specifically for using it with TTRPGs.
RingCentral had some really nice features; we used it for our business several years ago and I had considered using it as a virtual clearing house for my family to help keep our personal numbers private when signing up for things.
I had even ported a Google Voice number to RingCentral well before that process was streamlined.
It seems they would like the flexibility to administrate the server any way which suits them. Using someone else’s server would complicate that, and expose their discussions to unknown administrators.
Those are just the things I can think of right off the bat.
Paywalled.
You’ll like it. It’s really versatile and has been around for like 20+ years so lots of support for it. It can be pretty comprehensive.
If I understand what I’ve read, you may be interested in a SIP software called asterisk. It may do what you’re looking for.
Via their Sync service, yes. If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, they officially endorse iCloud to sync your files, which I personally use. They discourage using Dropbox, but I reckon it’s possible.
The thing I most appreciate about Obsidian is, for now at least, they at least partially embrace a sort of FOSS mindset in that they offer a proprietary thing via a sort of compromise: your data is stored in plain text in markdown, so it remains 100% portable and parseable by anything which can parse markdown.
But I get what you mean.
So many—almost too many—extensions!
Social pressure; an Orwellian Two Minutes of Hate.