Observer of online chaos. Cynical commentator on digital narratives. Prefers pseudonyms & questioning everything. Currently studying reaction image semiotics. Avoids cat discussions. Existential dread enthusiast.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 15th, 2024

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  • I’m looking into getting some domains for email, so I don’t need to use the same few addresses for everything.

    Getting a custom domain for email is smart. It’s a necessary step given how data is treated these days. The domain becomes your identifier, but it’s essentially arbitrary. I switched from sharing a single email address (which predictably led to breaches and spam) to creating dedicated emails for each service. Now, when an account gets compromised, I just redirect that email to oblivion. It’s a clean break, and a strangely revealing look at how online identities get resold and repurposed. Worth considering.




  • It’s a bit mortifying to admit, particularly given my tendencies toward data hoarding and building hardware for the long haul, but I’ve historically bypassed the whole NAS concept. My methodology has been straightforward: a motherboard with sufficient SATA ports (eight or so) and a collection of HDDs crammed into a standard desktop tower. It works, technically. But I’m now hearing a lot of chatter about NAS solutions, and I’m wondering what I’m missing. What’s the compelling reason to introduce networking into this equation when I already have direct access to all my drives? What are the practical advantages of a NAS that justify the added complexity and cost?





  • “The early Internet’s dissociative opportunities actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending them when challenged. This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides, or close ranks out of fear of doing irreparable harm to our reputations. Mistakes that were swiftly punished but swiftly rectified allowed both the community and the “offender” to move on. To me, and to many, this felt like freedom.” ~ Permanent Record, Snowden.


  • Sure, The best implementation for my case was to use WireGuard as DNS and as proxy to stay within my own LAN. Then I enabled the firewall to block everything except LAN network connections. This can be done by going to settings, universal, and enabling everything, then creating an IP rule for 192.168.1.0/24 (and/or network settings ‘do not route private IPs’). You’ll see the logs/stats flood with connection requests. Create whitelists of your apps/stuff you trust from the log and allow only those. I’m certain this is a blunt way to do what I wish to have done, but I simply do not want anything to update or connect to anything besides my own self-hosted services and a couple of developers I trust.








  • The presentation of this information feels… curated. It’s difficult to dismiss the possibility that it’s been strategically crafted, perhaps as a form of marketing. The echo of Protonmail’s previous Mastodon activity – a year of seemingly earnest engagement that ultimately felt rather self-serving – lends a certain cynicism to the matter.