I’ve been doing it for 10 years 🥰

I would trust it more than the biometric payment method they’re pushing in Whole Foods

Maybe if you don’t know CSS?

There are probably thousands of different static website generators that can make a more beautiful website out of the box, for free.

Who uses Grok?

Honestly I just run Alpine Linux on a mini PC (router) or Raspberry Pi (NAS). I don’t like to screw around with outdated, bloated Debian-based distros.

I bought my current one because IPv6 failed to provision on the one they gave me when I moved to a bigger apartment just two units away. I found some post on Reddit about the problem and it mentioned one that “ignores” the lack of IPv6 provisioning and does it anyway (I’m a programmer and IT geek but I don’t really understand cable/DOCSIS well).

If the modem they provided is just a modem and it works well, I don’t think there’s much reason to get rid of it. But personally if it’s an all-in-one box that has “bridge” mode I’d still run away and just go with my own modem.

I’m on Spectrum and have tons of friends that always complain they’re shit. Spectrum itself isn’t shit, it’s the garbage equipment they set you up with.

Make sure whatever you get works well with IPv6. For whatever reason IPv4 can go out at random but their IPv6 has never failed me (in the Los Angeles area at least).

mesh network

Or traditional network with Ethernet backhaul and lots of access points. I really wish mesh networks would die off honestly.

This is actually why I usually install a VPS in whichever country I’m physically in—my end devices always appear to be connecting to something innocent in-country (like a corporate VPN). That VPS then does the double-hop out of the country so that the VPS also seems pretty innocent too.

I don’t think it’s actually more secure though since the VPS is in my name and it’s technically decrypting everything. But I’m a bit less paranoid about that. (I’m not doing tons of illegal shit anyway.)

You have friends?

Hate that you’re downvoted for this. Tailscale is incredible software but it is buggy as hell.

I gave up on 90% of the fancy features and just do most my routing from one node with good ol’ nftables and ip route/ip -6 route.

I’ve basically got everything thrown into a Samba share on Linux then most media is consumed via the Infuse app for iOS, macOS.

As for music, I have some lossless/hifi that I can stream via Apple’s Music app too.

This is one of those things that if you really want to do it, you’ll have to live with the consequences.

I’m an American that VPNs everything first to my VPS then down a double hop commercial VPN tunnel that finally exits in Switzerland. DNS traffic also travels over that VPN tunnel so you’ll rightly guess that my DNS is rather slow too.

What I do is I run a resolver on the VPS (physically near me) that aggressively prefetches commonly queried DNS records. After years of using Unbound I found Blocky to be much, much faster (especially with huge blocklists). It’s to the point now where sure, it’s slower than a “normal” internet connection but it doesn’t feel slow to me anymore.

Storj Tardigrade with client-side encryption. I use rclone so you could even encrypt it before hitting the Storj library if you’re extra paranoid (among other things like caching, chunking, etc).

It can be specific to the web application but generally speaking you’d want to pass the protocol, client IP address, etc.

Might not be exactly what you’re looking for but I find Gotenberg quite handy for related activities.

Great point. I always forget that because I would never want to query without encryption.

I think PiHole is using Unbound behind the scenes. What I like about Blocky is not only does the performance to be much, much more solid using an upstream resolver with high latency (VPN exiting in another country), it automatically refreshes the denylists (something I think PiHole has to do in a more roundabout way).

I’ve used Unbound for years but recently had to switch to Blocky for some weird reason. It turned out to be way, way faster than Unbound.

As a bonus, blocking thousands of advertising and tracking domains is much easier with Blocky (if you’re into that).