I struggled with this a while ago. The advent of ai and more capitalist strangulation just seem to have made that same feeling worse.

So, what did I do? I stepped out of IT as profession completely, first of all. I’m just a worker bee now. I still have to use some tech for work, but minimal. I realize I am lucky to have been able to do this, but it helped me immensely having corporate tech be more of a choice.

At home tech is a hobby. I self host what I need, and use what I must to get by and screw the rest. If an open source project even hints at corporate influence, I immediately start looking for something else. It’s a pain sometimes, but it’s part of the hobby.

Couple this with trying my best to spend more time outdoors, learning new tangible skills, and just leaning more towards offline time in general really quiets my mind. And stay away from national and international news as much as you can. That stuff is poison.

Best of luck! In my own experience, finding a balance is not an easy thing to do.

Came here to say this. Had to read it twice because shooting a dead person didn’t seem right.

It’s the never ending battle between what’s secure and what’s practical. In order to have widespread adoption, it has to be easy. In order to be secure it requires layers of complication.

It’s a yin/yang battle.

A bank vault with walls 2 feet thick, 24/7 surveillance and requiring a two key unlock mechanism is secure compared to a house door lock on a regular suburban bungalow, but is it very practical?

The level of digital security generally attainable is limited by how likely someone is to use it.

2FA using keys is the closest I’ve seen to a happy medium, but it has to be implemented correctly. If the private keys are sitting on a cloud server somewhere and it gets hacked, is it more secure? Maybe not.

Just like real defence, the walls are only as good as the foundation or weakest point.

I read the excerpt on Wikipedia and it didn’t seem to fully describe my own experiences, though I expect it doesn’t hold a candle to the depths of the topic. I will have to read more to see if it helps verbalize the feeling I get towards organized religion.

Thank you for this.

I got really stoned one time as teenager and thought I had come to the very real and imminent discovery that Christianity is and was always the work of deep evil to silence and quell all other true religions. The crusades, the burning of the library at Alexandria, Pope John Paul III sitting on his throne of pure gold, It all made perfect sense. Don’t question it, just have faith.

I more or less fell headlong into atheism of a sort shortly thereafter, so part of me must really believe that on some level I guess?

IOT home devices using cell data? In Canada? It would either come with a hefty monthly fee, or the appliance company would lose their shirt.

Cell companies here put a lot of effort into keeping the prices up.

Might fly south of the border though.

So, what happens if I use pi-hole or adguard to block DNS for the advertisement TLDs, like I do for all the other gizmos in the house trying to show me ads or obtain telemetry data?

That sounds a bit ambiguous, though I should have prefaced my previous comment with the fact that I am still very much learning about this stuff myself.

More recently, I am trying to wrap my head around containerized VPN connections through WireGuard using gluetun. The idea sounds great, in theory. Figuring out how to make it work will probably be less so.

If you mean just accessing a service through VPN from the outside world, then I might be able to help.

I’ve done it successfully a few times. Most of the issues I have ever had were usually with misconfigured firewall rules around NAT.

Bash scripting, firewall config, vpn tunnelling, and containerization ( rootless Podman ).

I’m into combining these in interesting ways.

While it could be argued that there are tons of communities for these, combining them to run secure apps or automate their setups don’t seem to be as popular.

It’s a hot topic at social events, as you can imagine.

It may seem like a small percentage loss when talking dollar for dollar subscription loss vs Disneys massive revenue, but the scarier thing for their board of directors is damage to their brand.

The thought that a situation like this could cause any long a lasting or irreparable harm to the iconic mouse ears in any way would make keep them awake at night.

The awesome people in the world. The loud, mean ones are easier to spot and spew their crap confidently, but the less obnoxious, actually nice people are everywhere.

Don’t let the media and Internet fool you.

PS: And if you can help a decent human in need, please do.

I would argue that Linux is inherently much more secure than windoze, simply because of how it handles user space vs. System (root access vs. User access). Also by how transparent its configuration is and how much information is readily accessible detailing how it works and how to adjust things.

However, when talking security for anything above the average user’s browsing needs, it can get very complicated depending on what you are trying to achieve.

Think of it like building something to keep out honest people vs. to keep out hardened, knowledgeable, clever thieves. Obviously the latter is going to take more time and resources to achieve, while the need to keep out more sophisticated bad actors would probably only be needed if you have something they might want.

Here are some suggestions for searching if actual security is your goal. Others can chime in with more things if they want. This is just some topics/programs you can read about to dip your toes in.

• nftables/Firewalld (common firewalls)
• wireguard/openvpn (vpn protocols)
• rootless containers (podman)

Best of luck!

I’m glad you have the opportunity to hit the reset button like that. It sounds like you have a positive look ahead for the change, which is half the battle in my opinion.

It might take some time to feel like you fit in better with your new group, but the extra effort is worth it ten fold if you do find your close friend group there.

Most of the best friendships I ever had started off a bit Rocky. And usually were not at all what I expected. Come to think of it, things are rarely what I expect.

Best of luck!

My wife and I (mostly her) started some simpler growing this summer. We are both new at it.

Just basically a single raised garden with potatoes and carrots, a small compost bin and a little garden greenhouse.

I don’t think either of us were really expecting it to feel so rewarding to harvest food that we grew. It’s the most excited I have seen her about something since the kids were born. We are hoping to upscale a bit more next year with what we have learned so far.

Food forest concept isn’t something I have heard of, but I’ll definitely dig into it, so thanks for that!

I never really got the excitement as a kid. Why were adults so happy for another mouth to feed? Diapers to change?

Then I became an uncle and it made a lot more sense. Kids are hilarious. Early congrats for March!

Hard to say when for either. I can see fallout getting a serious rush put on it to try and catch the popularity wave of the show.

Hopefully that doesn’t encourage too much refurbished content from the older games though.

Your life reads like it is the good kind of busy. Not the corporate phone ringing all the time kind, but the wholesome living it up kind. Love it!

That’s quite a find!

Depression is no joke. A psychiatrist once told me that everyone has bad days, but if you have more than 1 a week on average, you should see somebody.

I’m glad your friends are coming. It sounds like an awesome time.

These things are favourites of mine as well, though I find my family life conflicts a lot with my projects. Not in a bad way, just that there is only so much time in a day.

I really look forward to the selfh.st newsletter each week.