Its interesting that Tor nodes are operating at a loss while VPN companies are raking in the cash. For all practical purposes the Tor network is basically just a decentralized VPN service. Perhaps Tor could offer a paid fast lane (or introduce some way to automatically donate to nodes as you use them) to incentivize…

TIL that GNU Grep is about 30x faster than BSD Grep.

I think buying a personal domain name is a worthwhile investment for anyone. There is just so much you can do with them for only $10/year. You can: Create a portable email address that can easily switch between email providers Host a web page that you fully control Put web services like Mastodon, Nextcloud, Jabber,…

Well looks like the European copyright reform passed. It seems to me that this is only going to limit the EU’s ability to compete with the rest of the world (specifically the United States and China) in the information technology sector.

Something that I’d really like is to have a “hub” for all the various online media services I use. For example, I could connect my Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, etc. to it and see everything in one interface. Right now AFAIK the only way to do this is using something like Plex which requires you to…

NextDock 2 is a cool project being crowdfunded right now. Basically it is a laptop with no onboard CPU, memory, or disk but it can be connected to any device that offers HDMI out to be used as a monitor (Android Phone, Raspberry Pi, Chromecast, etc.). If you’ve ever wanted a portable monitor with built…

I have to say that I am seriously impressed with the F-Droid Repomaker utility. It’s well-designed and easy to use.

I recently found out about “Participatory budgeting” which is a democratic way of creating a national budget. Basically, each year when you pay your tax bill you decide how much money you personally will allocate to various government programs. For example, if you pay $100 in taxes you could choose to spend $15 on Military,…

I wonder if it would be too harsh to require users to not use passwords seen on the Have I Been Pwned password database. I’m sure it would be pretty effective at making people add a few extra numbers to the end of their password.

Well today was my first time trying the Uber PWA instead of the full Android app. The map was a little laggy and only updated about one every 30 second, but other than that I found it a perfectly acceptable experience. For now, I think I’m going to continue using it.