𝕽𝖔𝖔𝖙𝖎𝖊𝖘𝖙

Yeah as far as I know this still works.

You need to use a valid address (there are sites for generating one)

You also need to use a credit card that has never previously been used in Google with another address

I use a DNS server on my local network, and then I also use Tailscale.

I have my private DNS server configured in tailscale so whether on or off my local network everything uses my DNS server.

This way I don’t have to change any DNS settings no matter where I am and all my domains work properly.

And my phone always has DNS adblocking even on cell data or public Wi-Fi

The other advantage is you can configure the reverse proxy of some services to only accept connections originating from your tailscale network to effectively make them only privately accessible or behave differently when accessed from specific devices

It was not managed, honestly I should’ve disabled bitlocker, I just never expected it to be a problem.

As to settings for when it installs updates, they didn’t seem to stick or were not always respected in my experience. I spent a bit of effort trying to make sure it wasn’t configured to do that but it would still just go for it anyway if the system ever became idle after midnight or so.

Anyway this story has a happy ending because after that I decided to give daily driving linux another shot, and none of the issues I had experienced previously still exist here.

In fact, incredibly enough I have found on average that the games I play perform better on Linux now than they did on Windows.

And my OS never installs updates without my permission, let alone forcing an unscheduled reboot.

No seriously though, I aliased the apt command to nala and I use it instead.

It works nicely with grc for colors in the console and more importantly it supports simultaneous downloads so it runs through a large queue of updates much more quickly.

This article has a bit more detail on the topic

Another cool trick is using tailscale to ensure your portable devices always can access your Pihole(s) from anywhere and then setting those server’s tailscale addresses as your DNS servers in tailscale.

This way you can always use your DNS from anywhere, even on cell data or on public networks

I keep a third instance of Pihole running on a VPS and use it as the first DNS server in tailscale so it will resolve a bit faster than my local DNS servers when I’m away from home

It happened to me often!

Part of that I’m sure it’s the fact that I work nights, but Windows refuses to acknowledge that during my work hours is not an appropriate time to install updates.

Simply stepping away to get a coffee or use the restroom is enough for Windows to decide now is the time to reboot and install updates for an hour or so and you better hope you saved everything before stepping away.

As a matter of fact, one of those instances is the one where the update broke my bitlocker encryption and I lost everything that wasn’t backed up. That was my last day using Windows.

apt is outdated, use nala

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package friends
E: Unable to locate package to
E: Unable to locate package play
E: Unable to locate package games
E: Unable to locate package with

“ah shucks, Windows Update just initiated a reboot without asking, guess I’m out for the night guys”

https://vscode.dev

And as many others have mentioned, it can be self-hosted as well.

Also fun side note:

As long as you are logged into a GitHub account and in a desktop browser you can press the . key on your keyboard while viewing any GitHub repo to open it in vscode web.

Yeah this is what I do.

Putting Cloudflare as my secondary would allow some requests to get through and then often the device whose requests went to Cloudflare would continue using Cloudflare for a while.

The best solution I found was to run a second Pihole and use it as the secondary.

You can use something like orbital sync to keep them syncronized

Seriously this was my first thought.

I actually remap PgDn/PgUp to Home/End on my poorly-designed keyboard that lacks those

It depends what I’m backing up and where it’s backing up to.

I do local/lan backups at a much higher rate because there’s more bandwidth to spare and effectively free storage. So for those as often as every 10 mins if there are changes to back up.

For less critical things and/or cloud backups I have a less frequent schedule as losing more time on those is less critical and it costs more to store on the cloud.

I use Kopia for backups on all my servers and desktop/laptop.

I’ve been very happy with it, it’s FOSS and it saved my ass when Windows Update corrupted my bitlocker disk and I lost everything. That was also the last straw that put me on Linux full-time.

What about when they buy a new printer and need drivers.

Printers have “just worked” on Linux for longer than Windows has provided drivers through Windows Update. What printer do you have that requires special drivers in Linux?

Linux is a problem for people who come from windows and need more than basics but are not tech savvy enough to get their hands dirty.

Spot-on. For people with minimal to no computer skills in the first place Linux will serve them well.

The one who well struggle the most ironically are Windows “Power users” and other intermediate/advanced users who don’t have the equivalent skill already in Linux or time/willingness to learn Linux systems.

I have a fairly “bleeding edge” laptop with an RTX3000 series GPU and an AMD CPU/APU and I have been surprised at how well it runs on Linux.

Not only is my battery life consistently better but it handles the GPU switching flawlessly and performance in games is also consistently noticeably better than what I experienced running Windows on the same hardware.

Even in just the last year or two the advancements in Linux support have been downright incredible! (At least in my personal experience)

Of course I’m using Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, but I was in Windows too and my experience has only improved by switching to Linux.

It’s not a Windows app.

You can run it on Windows with Docker, but I would suggest a Linux server and a reverse proxy for the best experience (like most self-host solutions)

The installation documentation is here

And here

Definitely Immich.

There’s a lot of these kinds of services, hosted or self-hosted that are labeled as a “Google Photos replacement”

But very few of said services have features like face matching and object recognition alongside automatic backups.

IMO it’s not a legitimate replacement for Google Photos without those features and Immich really delivers on that without compromising your privacy.

I use and love Kopia for all my backups: local, LAN, and cloud.

Kopia creates snapshots of the files and directories you designate, then encrypts these snapshots before they leave your computer, and finally uploads these encrypted snapshots to cloud/network/local storage called a repository. Snapshots are maintained as a set of historical point-in-time records based on policies that you define.

Kopia uses content-addressable storage for snapshots, which has many benefits:

Each snapshot is always incremental. This means that all data is uploaded once to the repository based on file content, and a file is only re-uploaded to the repository if the file is modified. Kopia uses file splitting based on rolling hash, which allows efficient handling of changes to very large files: any file that gets modified is efficiently snapshotted by only uploading the changed parts and not the entire file.

Multiple copies of the same file will be stored once. This is known as deduplication and saves you a lot of storage space (i.e., saves you money).

After moving or renaming even large files, Kopia can recognize that they have the same content and won’t need to upload them again.

Multiple users or computers can share the same repository: if different users have the same files, the files are uploaded only once as Kopia deduplicates content across the entire repository.

There’s a ton of other great features but that’s most relevant to what you asked.

You are right, I dunno why I thought it wasn’t actually proxying all the traffic.

I can see how that could potentially be expensive for them if you were using it to stream video or something