Cousin Mose

Honestly I just run Alpine Linux on a mini PC (router) or Raspberry Pi (NAS). I don’t like to screw around with outdated, bloated Debian-based distros.

I bought my current one because IPv6 failed to provision on the one they gave me when I moved to a bigger apartment just two units away. I found some post on Reddit about the problem and it mentioned one that “ignores” the lack of IPv6 provisioning and does it anyway (I’m a programmer and IT geek but I don’t really understand cable/DOCSIS well).

If the modem they provided is just a modem and it works well, I don’t think there’s much reason to get rid of it. But personally if it’s an all-in-one box that has “bridge” mode I’d still run away and just go with my own modem.

I’m on Spectrum and have tons of friends that always complain they’re shit. Spectrum itself isn’t shit, it’s the garbage equipment they set you up with.

Make sure whatever you get works well with IPv6. For whatever reason IPv4 can go out at random but their IPv6 has never failed me (in the Los Angeles area at least).

mesh network

Or traditional network with Ethernet backhaul and lots of access points. I really wish mesh networks would die off honestly.

This is actually why I usually install a VPS in whichever country I’m physically in—my end devices always appear to be connecting to something innocent in-country (like a corporate VPN). That VPS then does the double-hop out of the country so that the VPS also seems pretty innocent too.

I don’t think it’s actually more secure though since the VPS is in my name and it’s technically decrypting everything. But I’m a bit less paranoid about that. (I’m not doing tons of illegal shit anyway.)

You have friends?

I had to look it up, what I was thinking of was MQA. Looks like they discontinued it last year though.

What I didn’t like about Tidal was their weird format being advertised as lossless when it wasn’t. It didn’t really sound all that great.

There was an application called requiem (if I remember correctly) that could rip music from older Windows XP versions of iTunes; it was only available over Tor quite some time ago. I’m not sure what people would use these days (maybe just a [modified] DAC?).

Hate that you’re downvoted for this. Tailscale is incredible software but it is buggy as hell.

I gave up on 90% of the fancy features and just do most my routing from one node with good ol’ nftables and ip route/ip -6 route.

I just added the day’s weather to my Apple Watch; but also, is it hard to open a weather app?

I’ve basically got everything thrown into a Samba share on Linux then most media is consumed via the Infuse app for iOS, macOS.

As for music, I have some lossless/hifi that I can stream via Apple’s Music app too.

And of course the website will have a ton of third party tracking because that makes sense to have on government websites.

The VPN problem sounds strange to me because from what I’ve seen WireGuard has essentially become the de facto standard (which is native to Linux).

Yeah, I used to be a typical Apple fanboy circa 2010, always watching the WWDC like I’m going to church.

Keeping up with Apple over the past several years has been very hit or miss, and watching it yesterday just kind of pissed me off.

This is one of those things that if you really want to do it, you’ll have to live with the consequences.

I’m an American that VPNs everything first to my VPS then down a double hop commercial VPN tunnel that finally exits in Switzerland. DNS traffic also travels over that VPN tunnel so you’ll rightly guess that my DNS is rather slow too.

What I do is I run a resolver on the VPS (physically near me) that aggressively prefetches commonly queried DNS records. After years of using Unbound I found Blocky to be much, much faster (especially with huge blocklists). It’s to the point now where sure, it’s slower than a “normal” internet connection but it doesn’t feel slow to me anymore.

That’s true and that all makes sense. I guess I kind of forget because generally the IP address is physically very near to where I’m testing from.

I just switched to a Swiss DNS resolver regardless. I like Quad9’s malware blocking but it’s more important to me to keep the DNS server in Switzerland (despite it needing to query outside the country regardless).

Right, I understand all that but I still can’t figure out why DNS is going to a 14 Eyes country instead of staying in Switzerland.

This confuses the fuck out of me because my VPN in Switzerland using TLS DNS shows Germany as the country in DNS leak tests.

The Swiss DNS provider doesn’t have servers in Switzerland?

Storj Tardigrade with client-side encryption. I use rclone so you could even encrypt it before hitting the Storj library if you’re extra paranoid (among other things like caching, chunking, etc).

Oh good, I’m not missing out then. I moved around quite a bit between Deezer, Tidal, random piracy in FLAC until finally landing on Apple Music.