I pretty much always use a VPN these days because I hate Comcast and don’t like them seeing my traffic. I like nextDNS because it gives me centralized management and filtering of DNS for all my devices, it’s definitely worth the $20 a year. I forgot to mention I also have the extensions CanvasBlocker, WebRTC Blocker, and LocalCDN but I think it is likely just ublock origin (and nextDNS filtering) that got my score to 96%.

96% using Android Firefox Beta with ublock, nextdns, and a VPN.

I recently gave up on daily driving Pop OS. About 6 months ago I got a new laptop with Windows 11, which for various reasons I am not a fan of. I decided it would be a good time to try an experiment and install Linux. The biggest issue right off the bat was lack of hardware support, the fingerprint reader and the speaker amp are not supported. I spent a bunch of time researching and seeing if I could make them work but apparently it has to do with the kernel and isn’t really something I can fix. This didn’t seem like a big deal at first because I can get sound out of the headphone jack or via bluetooth, and while it was convenient to login via a fingerprint reader, it wasn’t something I really felt like I needed. Since then I’ve become much more reliant on biometric authentication, it’s just so much more convenient to be able to auth bitwarden with my finger instead of having to type in a password. More recently, I started using Proton VPN and the client is pretty crap in Linux. Switching over to Windows 11, I can login with my finger, all of my passwords are a finger print away, Proton VPN works natively with wireguard and is generally much more reliable and easier to use. It’s just a much better user experience, there’s nothing weird and janky to deal with, I don’t need to mess about in the command line to do basic things. I really loved Pop, and I’m sure I’ll boot back into it, but I’m daily driving Windows 11 until I can sort out the hardware issues and get Proton VPN working better, and I think both of those issues are out of my hands so all I can do is wait.

I’ve been daily driving Pop on my laptop and my biggest frustrations currently are lack of working drivers for the fingerprint reader and speakers, and the Proton VPN client is crap compared to Windows.

I’ve been really happy with Pop on my laptop. Tiling was a lot more useful than I expected, it’s nice being able to flip it on and off as needed.

Not quite a disaster but a credit card got hacked, my Microsoft account was locked for suspicious activity, and I received a very targeted phishing attempt for my banking credentials. I’m now a paid subscriber of Bitwarden, set up a shared vault with my partner, and have 2 yubikeys arriving later this week.

I used Power Delete Suite to overwrite my comments and posts via API, it includes an option to export everything from your account to a CSV before it takes any destructive actions, and it’s super easy to use.

You can tell Reddit PR folks got their word in on this article.

A simulacra shambles on.