Moved over to lemmy, mastodon, and proton mail. Aiming for Linux in the next year or so also
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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Privacy
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Went low-key public with our internal browser project by sharing here on the feddit. If you're a dev, packager, Arch Linux user, or already build Firefox from source, this is for you (others can check back at a later date when perhaps there are more builds running and tested). More people using it becomes a shared privacy win. I humbly suggest that this is currently the most privacy-friendly general-purpose GUI browser out there^1^.
^1^: Biased? I would never!
Been trying to use Lemmy/Piefed and Digg more than Reddit
Well, I went underground and hid from the government on principle and they listed me as a missing person which made my bank lock my government ID so I couldn't access my funds which forced me to come out of hiding and identify myself and my whereabouts, which taught me that next time I will have to find alternative ways to keep my money that don't rely on government ID, like crypto, which obviously brings its own set of problems, and highlights the big issue with a cashless society.
I don't have a clear solution yet but it was a very good learning experience that exposed some fundamental issues with fighting capitalism on a grass roots level.
I am now more inclined to become a poisoned cog in the machine as a result.
I had already cut ties with most spying companies. My last win is installing Linux Mint on an old laptop that I was not using anymore.
Got two people (plus me) on Delta Chat so far. The easy onboarding really comes in handy for getting "normals" (like my parents and technologically challenged friends) to sign up, especially when compared to MossadChat (Matrix) and Jabber, and it has less metadata than both, and it eats less battery than both, and somehow it works better than both (MossadChat calls didn't work because of the delay from pull notifications, Jabbers did but the battery life was atrocious, like we're talking 20% in the background vs 1% of my battery on Delta.)
Last week I moved over my CloudFlare tunnels to Pangolin on a VPS. Went easier than expected!
My big win (in the making) is that I'm going to file my taxes completely offline. Working on the documents in isolated VM, using tax software offline, and sending paper forms wherever I can. Unfortunately New York state is not accepting paper forms, as far as I know...
What is VM?
Virtual Machine
Thanks
It is super simple to set up and way less esoteric than it sounds. Very useful too.
cool, what tax software? (open source?)
Ha, I wish! It's H&R Block. But it works offline, I can download update files, and I'm not forced to online filing.
Unfortunately, seems that tax software is too complex for enthusiasts to start an open source project. And big tax filing corpos has no incentive to go open source.
I got my spouse to start using our cupid BitWarden vault and we recently setup a relatively hardened MBP for their work/now home use since their mini PC running windows 11 has basically bricked itself because windows.. But yeah, they aren’t using the windows computer, so a hardened MBP is a win in my book even though Apple can be similarly privacy-invasive if their devices aren’t hardened.
I installed OpenWrt on my router this week
I've had a Linsys router that is supported on my table still sealed for like a year and a half putting this off. Was it hard? Is there much to adjust in the set up after or is it kinda just plug and play "plug into modem and set your passwords" type stuff?
It was pretty much plug-and-play.
I downloaded the OpenWrt image (about 6 MB in size) and navigated to the firmware update page on my router's web interface. Selected the image and it took roughly 5-10 minutes to install. All I had to do was update the default SSIDs and its passwords to match what I had before.
I'd say my win is that my stack of self-hosted services have been running without unscheduled maintenance for about two months now. Regular updates, backups and storage cleaning, but no breaks, IP or routing glitches, unhandled memory leaks or anything requiring a fix. And that includes a 99% ad-/tracker-/hostile script-/spam-free LAN. (The 1% are source-injected ads on a couple of locations)