I have too many computers - Day 9

I saw people recently talking up their home setup - here are the machines running at my house.

Compression: Fileserver & dns cache/forwarder/short circuit, syncthing, ~20-ish terabytes, mostly USB drives (IBM Thinkpad Laptop, Slackware 14.2) Big disks are NOT put together in a volume. They're just mounted in the same place with container names: Barrel, Tankard, Flagon, Carafe, etc.

Dress: Plex server (Mac Mini - Core 2 Duo 2Ghz, SSD, Slackware 14.2)

Quarter: Asterix & Icecast server (Generic mini tower, AMD E-450, Slackware 14.2)

Kilt: i3, firefox, motion (Sony laptop, Slackware 14.2)

Boot: qemu hosts, podman containers (Mac Pro, 8-core Xeon @ 2.67Ghz)

Knee-High: Linode, mail server  - qmail, dovecot, rainloop, Slackware 14.2

Stirrup: Lenovo Legion Y530 (packed with ram & ssd, i7, Slackware-current, AlienBOB liveslak Plasma5/ktown version)

Anklet: Desktop, connected to 42" 4K tv, intel i7-3770, fast NVidia video card, 32G ram, some large spinny drives, some reasonable boot SSD drives, heavily customized Slackware 14.2 derivative & Windows 7 for gaming, in a fancy wooden case

(gratuitous network cables)

Tube: Raspberry Pi 2 B+, SARPi, mplayer running the pirate radio station

Bobby: Raspberry Pi 3 B, SARPi, running as the guts of an old tube radio box to stream tiki music to my bar

Toe: Raspberry Pi W, SARPi, mplayer running CatTV on an old monitor

Over-The-Knee: Raspberry Pi W, SARPi, currently unused, with camera module

Thermal: Raspberry Pi W, SARPi, connected to a few sensors about the house, with camera module

Crew: Calculating pi, slowly, using Bellard's Formula, IBM Thinkpad 760CD, Slackware 7. Not online! I keep this one running for historical reasons. it's shut down twice a year for cleaning and the batteries get replaced (They're still available!!!) when they need to be

Dev: Linode, development/storage server, Slackware-current

Gs: New Dell i7 mini tower, running Windows 10 (my one concession... hubby is only familiar with Windows)

Day 8 - Link Dump!

 I don't call myself a prepper, BUT...

• Kiwix - run a complete, local copies of wikipedia and wikirecipes and wikibooks. Also available: stack overflow, open street map, and all sorts of other good stuff. Perhaps from a 
• Raspberry Pi Webserver connected to a battery and solar panel in a metal box or Faraday Cage
• With slackware on it
• Make clay for your own pottery, from pretty much anywhere
• Got an SDR? Get the weather pictures right from the satellite.

• Tired of being tracked? Instead of bending over backwards to block trackers, poison their fucking well. It's not tough to write these either: I have a perl script putting together random phrases that opens 8-10 google, bing, yahoo, facebook searches in tabs, and then closing them all. Repeat at random intervals.
• Sobering stuff about Tor. 

Happier things:

• Typography in Ten Minutes
• If you're hardcore, you do spreadsheets in the terminal. (sc-im is to sc like vim is to vi)
• RFC8890: The Internet Is For End Users. (Not giant multi-national corporations shareholders.)
• Cyberdecks for High-Tech Low-Lifes cyberpunk case mods!
• 7 versatile VIM commands to memorize (emacs? PFEH)
• Let's reinvent the web! about the 10,000th article to say this, but there are some good points. Also refers to Gemini, so reminiscent of gopher, that it makes my little pre-web internet 🖤 go 💓 (emojis for future UTF-8 testing) I can't be the only person who looked to the future with sadness when Netscape/Firefox/Mozilla et al removed the gopher:// protocol
• Yet another reinvent the web article, but this one is more realistic and offering a product
• Open Source VR! Mostly here to remind myself to investigate this further.
• Hiding messages in x86 code with semantic duals. Awesome. Possibly to hide virus code in legit code.
• OpenLayers: GMaps like javascript objects for OpenStreetMaps
• Ungoogled Chromium: AppImage packages of Chromium with all of the google calling home behaviors elided
• TinyPilotKVM: RasPi + HDMI->USB adapter = networked KVM for cheap
• Slackware now has a Patreon!
• If you want to feel some technology whiplash that makes you feel old, someone's been running an IBM System/370 mainframe on a $5 raspberry pi w for 5 years.

Odder Things

• Shabbat-compliant jewish search engine (seems to be down?)
• Things I may start stocking in my bar: Tepache, Prusser's Rum, Arrak, Pulque, Amaro, Bénédictine, Becherovka, Maraschino, Okolehao, Advocaat
• dobbs.town - subgenius-only mastodon instance. GET A CONSTANT STREAM OF SLACK FROM THE LUCK-PLANE!

De-Googling My Life, Day 7 - sad interdependence

 If you're truly serious about removing certain very large internet companies from your life, blocking them at a DNS level with a blackholing mechanism such as pi-hole, you're going to start seeing this a lot in the browser: 

The sad fact is many of the big players provide DNS service - Amazon, Google, and in this case, Yahoo have infested the entire internet stack from top to bottom. If you block all of Yahoo, you end up cutting a large swath out of the internet, since a lot of people still use yahoo DNS servers. If you're serious about it, wouldn't you block DNS from certain companies? If you can't trust them not to track you at a cookie/fingerprint browser level, should you trust them not to track you at the DNS level? Imagine trying to avoid CloudFlare's front-end or dns service.

And even if you go as far as blocking the big named companies by-name in dns (ex: *.google.com) someone may not be using google's DNS but their cloud services otherwise, so your traffic is still traversing into the googleplex.

Is it hopeless to avoid them?