Rephrased
BREAKING NEWS!:
62% of republicans believe Trump is hiding Epstein ties, but still actively support him.

A squatter is why Valve used steampowered.com instead of steam.com. The owner of steam.com (who has owned the domain since the early 90s!) has consistently refused to sell to anyone, and has never stated a specific reason why.

I have a similar story… But first off, you can do that directly through the pihole’s UI. No need to set up custom DNS stuff just for her. Just create an empty blocklist, and assign her devices to only use that list. Multiple blocklists are also handy if you have kids, because you can set things like porn blocklists, and only assign them to the kids’ devices. So you can still jork it when you want, without the kids being able to accidentally stumble across anything.

I have a basic blocklist for guests as well, which is the default list for any new device that connects to my guest network. It selectively blocks some of the more invasive BS but doesn’t block some of the more “this will make things on your device stop working” trackers, like how some Google devices refuse to work unless you allow their trackers.

I’m pretty sure you can even set lists to default based on an IP range? Like if you have multiple subnets for different VLANs, you can set a default list (or lists) for each VLAN. So like you can have an IoT VLAN with a default “stop phoning home, I just want to be able to cast to you” type of blocklist. Then your guest VLAN can have its own default list. And your personal devices can have their own list as well. I haven’t personally dug into that yet, but it’s on my list of future projects.

My wife was annoyed with my dual piholes until I got some basic whitelists dialed in for her. She’s a stock Android user, and my Google blocklist broke basically all of her phone’s native apps… Because Google’s invasive tracking is fully wormed through all of them.

It basically took an evening of us hunt-and-peck’ing our way through her phone’s blocked requests, whitelisting one thing at a time to see what was necessary and what was just tracking BS. I set her up with an automatic VPN that connected whenever she was away from the house, so she was always connected to the home network, and always protected by the pihole. Once we got that figured out, (and she learned to stop clicking the damned sponsored Google search results, which fail to connect with the pihole), she basically stopped noticing it. She got used to having it. She started taking it for granted…

We recently moved, and I haven’t had time to set my media/server stuff back up yet. I’m just running the basic ISP modem/router for the time being. And now that she got used to the pihole, she has been hit with whiplash because she’s suddenly seeing ads again. She visited her usual World of Warcraft site, and was like “what the fuck is this? The damned site is basically unusable…” She insists on using Chrome, (because it’s what her phone uses, and she wants to sync between the two), so I was only able to install the lite version of uBlock Origins as a stopgap, because Google intentionally broke the full version.

What really got her was when she noticed our Roku TV’s idle screen suddenly had ads. She was like “what the hell do you mean the goddamned TV has built-in ads? We aren’t even watching anything right now! It’s just the fucking sleep screen!”

Yes dear, why do you think I insisted on setting the pihole up years ago? Ads are invasive, and you don’t even realize how bad it is until you’re out. Once you get used to living without them, going back is rough.

I’ve literally heard coworkers mention the whole “I actually don’t want a raise because my taxes would go up and I’d make less” bullshit before. I do what I can to redirect them when I hear it, but some people are extremely dug into their worldview and don’t want to be helped. Like acknowledging a progressive tax rate would require acknowledging that their entire concept of income and taxation is built on a lie.

That just means you’re not paying taxes on the income. It’s not like you get the entire $700 back in taxes, because your tax rate probably isn’t 100%. If you pay 30% in taxes, (no clue what you actually pay), writing off the $700 would simply mean you pay $210 less on your taxes.

While I agree with Section 230 in theory, it is often only used in practice to protect megacorps. For example, many Lemmy instances started getting spammed by CSAM after the Reddit API migration. It was very clearly some angry redditors who were trying to shut down instances, to try and keep people on Reddit.

But individual server owners were legitimately concerned that they could be held liable for the CSAM existing on their servers, even if they were not the ones who uploaded it. The concern was that Section 230 would be thrown out the window if the instance owners were just lone devs and not massive megacorps.

Especially since federation caused content to be cached whenever a user scrolled past another instance’s posts. So even if they moderated their own server’s content heavily (which wasn’t even possible with the mod tools that existed at the time), then there was still the risk that they’d end up cacheing CSAM from other instances. It led to a lot of instances moving from federation blacklists to whitelists instead. Basically, default to not federating with an instance, unless that instance owner takes the time to jump through some hoops and promises to moderate their own shit.

Personal projects. Not everything has to be FOSS. My tiny little script to automate my lights turning green and my smart speaker playing All-Star by Smash Mouth at full volume, so I can jork it in peace? That shit doesn’t need to be public.

I agree that it should be heavily regulated, and kids shouldn’t be allowed unsupervised access… But I disagree with why Putin banned it. It’s just anti-LGBT propaganda on Putin’s part.

Fun fact: Lemmy’s mod log is public. Here is the log for .world, filtered by that user:
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=19175986

FWIW, Plappa works really well on iOS. It’s not the official ABS app, but it was obviously designed around ABS. It has all of the features as the official app, without the whole “try every month to get into the TestFlight beta, because TestFlight hard caps the user count” BS.

+1 for Home Assistant, though the Docker implementation doesn’t allow add-ons. That may be fine at first, but a lot of the more complicated setup requires add-ons. For me, it was worth it to just go ahead and grab an HA Green to run my HA stuff.

Nope. DisplayPort can adapt to HDMI or DVI passively. It won’t support the proprietary bullshit like HDCP, but it will be able to display video just fine. Pin 13 on DP is specifically used to detect adapters, so the output device can automatically change to using an HDMI protocol if it detects an HDMI adapter. This technically requires a dual-mode DP port to automatically adapt, but the vast majority of DP connectors produced in the past several years are dual-mode.

But going the other direction (HDMI to DP) requires an active adapter, to strip out all of the proprietary HDMI-only bullshit.

Yes, DP converts to HDMI natively. But because HDMI has so much proprietary BS built in, going from HDMI to DP requires an active adapter which strips out the proprietary BS.

Yeah, I’ve done the black light check at hotels before. I was pleasantly surprised.

One tip though: They don’t usually change the top comforter in between guests. They’ll typically change the sheets, but the comforter is only changed on a regular (typically weekly) schedule. But they’ll be happy to change it for you if you ask.

Unless it’s a honeymoon suite. That shit all gets changed in between every guest, for obvious reasons.

Just an FYI, since privacy seems to be a big concern for you… AirBnB used to allow hosts to hide cameras inside of their rented spaces. It was explicitly allowed in their renting rules, under the premise of allowing owners to enforce rules and collect evidence in case of excessive mess/damage/theft. They banned hidden cameras in 2024, but over half of rental owners still admit to using them, and about half of all guests still report finding one inside of their rented spaces if they bother to look.

Also, don’t use the default “data/media/{library name}” (or whatever the suggested format is) folder setup that the Trash Guide has you set up. At least change the “tv”, “movies”, etc name to something different. Jellyfin has a known vulnerability where an attacker can get access to media without valid credentials if they already know the file path. Jellyfin devs have stated that they have no intention of ever fixing this, because it would require completely divesting from the Kodi branch that everything is built on. And since everyone follows the Trash Guide to set their *Arr stack and library up, guessing file paths is laughably easy.

You’re using the suggested file naming in your *Arr stack, so Jellyfin can automatically match media? Congrats, so is everyone else. You’re using the suggested folder layout so your *Arr stack can use hardlinks? Congrats, so is everyone else. At least change the library folder names. Since your library folder doesn’t need to match the name of your Jellyfin library, you can literally have your “tv”, “movies”, and other folders be named whatever you want. Hell, name your tv folder “peepee” and your movies folder “poopoo” for all I care.

Also not having online search results posted above the locally installed programs. If I search for “cmd” and hit Enter, I want it to open Command Prompt. I don’t want to do a fucking Edge search for “cmd”, or have it open some internet ad for something else named “cmd”.

Yeah, work machines really make avoiding Windows difficult/impossible. And the worst part is that IT’s group policy often prevents individual employees from disabling all of the super invasive telemetry and data sharing BS. So if you want to be able to use the same accounts across work and personal devices, (like using the same browser profile, so your settings and bookmarks automatically sync), then your personal stuff inevitably gets sent to Microsoft. They’ve deliberately built ecosystems where separating your work and personal life takes extra effort, and that is enough to trap plenty of people.

This is also why zero-calorie sweetener packets are the size they are. They’re allowed to round to the nearest 10, which includes rounding down to 0. So sweetener packets are realistically ~4.75-4.9 calories. That way they’re allowed to call it a “zero calorie” sweetener.

Individual user accounts, so multiple people can use the same device without needing to log into a new account each time. For example, User A watches a show on the TV. Then User B opens the TV, and has to log in to be able to access their own watch history. Then User A returns, and has to log back into their account.

Braindead remote access. I use a reverse proxy so it’s not a need for me, but plenty of people don’t understand how to properly set something like that up.

Single Sign On. It flies in the face of what Jellyfin stands for, because it would require a centralized authentication server that everyone’s servers phone home to. Just like Plex. With Plex, you log into one account, and can see all of your available servers, because they’re all tied to the same account. With Jellyfin, every server requires its own authentication, because there is no central server to manage all of the “Account XYZ has access to libraries A, B, and C” stuff. If I want to watch something, I can’t easily just search all of my servers at once; I need to individually log into and search each one to see if it has the content I want to watch.