So last night my firewall decided to say F you Reann and stopped working for no apparent reason. I called my ISP to see if it was anything on their end but it was a big nope. It was rather late at night and I do not have computers with monitors at my place so I thought I was SOL. I was frustrated that I could not do anything because I had the bright idea of deleting one of my two static IPs out of the router and than reboot it. I thought to calm my frustrations I would play some games on my ipad, and holly poop am I ever not used to all the ads in mobile games. Luckily my youtube ad blocking does not require anything else on my LAN so I put on some videos and went to bed. In the morning I remembered I had a ethernet to USB adapter and a USB A to c adapter so I would be able to fix it that way. Don’t know how many times I needed to fix the firewall because I broke the internet trying to fix my boo boos and a few times the firewall just said F you Reann I am not putting out. But it is now fixed and I can enjoy my moble games and web browsing mostly ad free!
So I had no pihole action on my LAN.
Like seriously how do people hand how many ads are shoved at you when you are using your devices?
I was on DuckDuckGo this morning trying to fix things and wow the ads, really made me miss searXNG.
Luckily I do not get spam, I spin up a new address for everything so I did not get those ads at least.
It’s more than jarring. It makes me want to rage quit when I’m over at a friend’s house trying to help them work through an issue. Especially now that most people have migrated to Windows 11. So, now you have webpages of ads and popups, and the OS itself is inundating you with popups and ads. And it’s not like I haven’t spent hours with my friends trying to get them to cut that shit out.
I still run an instance of Windows 10 on a local account, but it has been severely detached from the mother ship and de-bloated. Telemetry, communications with Microsoft, etc, are handled by a very long host file. Services are to a bare minimum. Pfsense filters Microsoft crap as well. Now since updates are no longer being offered, that door has been shut too. So now, it’s just an OS without the umbilical cord to the mother ship.
I was never really a windows user, I grew up on Mac OS (Apple DOS, 7, 9, and X). I am stuck with an iPhone and an iPad because I do not have the money to replace them at the moment but as soon as there are no longer updates for them they are being stripped of most of the data, being put onto my IoT vLAN and being used as HA kiosks. I say so long to things as soon as updates are not being pushed because they become attack vectors. I have had my ID stolen once before, probably not because of out dated things but I want to limit the places bad actors can get to me (just know the process of making sure stuff doesn’t hurt you further is hell).
I have a Mac mini I am thinking of doing some actual work to get Debian installed on but I turned on the Mac just to get my iTunes purchased music off of it and than half assed an attempt to get refit installed and get Debian running, maybe some day I will get it working but that day is not now.