234 North

8 years ago today my son and I were at an an airshow of World War 2-era airplanes at a local airport, including “Nine-O-Nine”, a B-17 bomber owned by the Collings Foundation¹. I had wanted to take my son for a ride in this plane but the line was long and the cost prohibitive.

Tragically the end to Nine-O-Nine came about a year later at an airshow in Connecticut with 7 of 13 people on board (3 crew and 10 passengers) dying in the crash. The NTSB cited poor maintenance of the plane while it was on tour. I’m glad we never took that ride.

1. Not the original Nine-O-Nine which was scrapped in 1945. Collings Foundation painted another B-17 to look like the original.

Apple seems to have updated photos to search by date properly again. It used to be that you could search for any photo on a given day from any year. That changed awhile back and a search for photos on July 28th would be first a search on “July” to get everything in July, then “28” to get all of the photos for the 28th. Unfortunately it also searched on text so if any picture had the number 28 it in you’d get those too. 

That type of search stopped working in Photos for macOS Golden Gate and it seems that searching on “7/28” works again!

I must be the only person on the planet who doesn’t give a hoot about “The Odyssey”.

I’ve learned in the last few days that defending people you’re not tied to in some direct way is a losing gambit. I’ve been angry with people in the past for not defending me in various online fights after I defended them. I was angry because I thought we were on the same side. I thought they were my friends so why weren’t they coming to my defense? It turns out those people were playing the game the right way, it was me who was mistaken.

I’ve also learned that valuable lessons can come from just about any direction, any source. I’ve had some revelations over the last week driven by conversations with someone I have never gotten along with, someone in fact who was on the other side of some of those online fights I mentioned above. You can always learn, if your mind is open, even from those you thought never had anything to teach you.

Amazon Prime Video appears to be a gold mine of old shows. I just started watching season 1 from 1975. This show was on TV when I was a kid but I don’t remember much about it other than how cool I though the Eagle shuttles were.

I still think the Eagle shuttle is cool. One of the greatest spacecraft designs of all time.

Space: 1999 Season 1 on Amazon Prime Video

Quite a bit worth writing about this week!

🛠️ Tools of the week

• Firefox
• RemNote (notes - personal)
• TickTick
• Capacities (notes - work)

📰 Published

Published my opinionated guide to privacy-based DNS.

I’ve been wanting to write up some stuff like this and this week was a good time to start getting something positive on the blog.

☁️ The weather!

After the crazy heat and smoke from the week before this week was absolutely gorgeous in Chicagoland. Air quality as good as it’s going to get (AQI below 50). Temps in the low 70s and dew points in the low 50s. Nice taste of Fall that comes to an end tomorrow (7/26). Back to reality. The humidity has already been climbing today.

⚛ Proton testing

Last week I mentioned trying out Proton Unlimited for a month.

Proton Calendar is out for my testing purposes. Some weird misses in updating recurring events, etc. Stuff they said they’re working on for the rewrite. So maybe later. Also, they desperately need a “CalDAV Bridge” to allow use of external calendar applications.

Proton Pass-based email alias support is excellent.

When it’s all said and done I can’t see myself using Proton. I really like the user interface and they’ve done some really, really good work since I last used it. The problem? It’s pricey and solves a problem I don’t have. If someone wants to get away from Gmail the answer for pretty much any regular user is Fastmail, not Proton.

👵🏻 Wrapping up Mom’s stuff

Wrapped up my mom’s “digital life”, downloading data and deleting accounts. This all reminds me that I really need to start thinking about end-of-life plans and how someone would deal with all of my stuff.

📝 Yet another notes/task management app

Started trying out NotePlan. This app has come a long way since I tried it several years ago. It really seems to have hit a sweet spot of functionality combined with Markdown. I had signed up for a 7-day trial that I was going to cancel because they want $120/yr and there is no way I would pay that. Oddly when I went to get it from the Mac App Store the first thing that happened when I launched it was an offer for $60/yr, which me being me, I instantly accepted since I’m a nerd for this stuff and it was half the cost. So far I am not regretting that decision. I could easily see using this full time.

🫜 Gardening

Got some work done in the garden. What started out great has been very disappointing. Too many critters getting to the veggies before they’re even ripe!

🐦 Gone from social media

A conversation I had this week with someone I’ve butted heads with far too often over the last several years was a (virtual) slap in the head that, as much as I’d like to be on social media, it just isn’t the place for me. I deleted all of my social media accounts and won’t be going back. This Gen Xer is unplugged permanently from that part of the Zeitgeist.

There have been various articles online this week around privacy issues, mostly around cookie notices on websites. Not surprisingly the tools recommended went from Firefox and Linux (Cory Doctorow) to Safari and various extensions (John Gruber). I didn’t actually agree with either one of their lists not only because I thought their choices were poorly thought out but that they didn’t include probably the most impactful thing you can do for your online privacy before anything even hits your web browser: privacy/security-focused DNS.

Intro

This is my opinionated guide to two DNS services after having used both of them for years. No, I do not recommend NextDNS. It is a poorly supported service. For other options and guidance see:

• Privacy Guides
• Privacy Tools

Both of those sites offer a lot of information about online privacy in general.

Both AdGuard and Control D offer multiple options in this space for anyone from the person who just wants some routine ad/tracker filtering for free to the enthusiast who wants full control over DNS blocklists, querying their DNS logs, etc. and is willing to pay for a subscription.

For the super-enthusiast there is pihole and AdGuard Home. These require running services on your own system. I have never used these and have no desire to so I will leave those as an exercise for the reader.

The Options

For the basics in privacy/security-focused DNS, Control D has this good write-up of the options available but DNS boils down to two options:

1. Standard DNS where the user configures their system with a pair of DNS servers. This requires no other configuration but from a security standpoint isn’t the best option.
2. DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) which provides encryption between your system and the DNS server so nobody can see your DNS queries. All modern web browsers support this natively but for more robust filtering computer operating systems require additional setup.

Standard/Free

For those that don’t want to mess around with much the easiest thing is just to configure your computer/phone/whatever with one of the following:

• AdGuard Public DNS (see option 2 - plain DNS)
• Control D (see “legacy resolvers” after selecting an option)

These are preconfigured DNS servers that will do a ton to increase your privacy and security online.

DoH/Subscription

For those that want a lot more configuration and other goodies AdGuard and Control D offer subscription-based DNS for personal use:

1. AdGuard DNS
2. Control D

I personally use/pay for AdGuard DNS after using Control D for several years but both are excellent services. I prefer AdGuard because it is integrated with AdGuard’s other tools that I also use.

DNS Blocklists

Both AdGuard and Control D provide the ability to use various pre-configured blocklists for removing ads/trackers/etc. This is a huge subject itself and I won’t say much more about it but this is the major advantage to these systems.

My recommendation: Hagezi’s DNS blocklists, available for a wide variety of tools. Both AdGuard and Control D support these out of the box as options.

These lists offer various levels of filtering for ads/trackers/malware depending on how heavy-handed you want to get. The more you filter the more likely something will break. I personally use the Multi PRO list but stuff does break on occasion. I have never had an issue with Multi NORMAL or lower.

No matter which of these you choose you’ll be quite happy with the results.

Final Words

The most power here is in the subscription services. Both AdGuard and Control D provide software for just about every platform that allow you to use the configurations you’ve set up: one place to configure all of your devices and get the same protection on all of them. Not only that, this works for any application, not just web browsers, so if you’re concerned about your operating system or other applications “phoning home”, or ads/trackers in your email, this is the best way to block those things. For example: all of the major browsers phone home with telemetry. It can be turned off but it is opt-out, not opt-in. With AdGuard or Control D, and Hagezi’s blocklists, this stuff gets blocked regardless. Less setup and configuration on the user’s part once this is in place.

I can say this: after years of blocking ads and tracking with DNS-based services I have never had ads follow me, or worried if Facebook is listening to my conversations (hint: they aren’t. They don’t need to. They’ve got sophisticated tracking). If you don’t like Big Tech start with this powerful tool.

Lots of controversy this week about a new post from DHH in which he shows the right-wing, white nationalist, scumbag he is.

In short, Heinemeier Hansson argues that not only should Europe have very tightly controlled immigration to only allow in The Worthy, but kick out everyone else already there, millions upon millions of people.

It never ceases to amaze me how much cover Trump has given these jerks to just come out and say whatever they want, no matter how disgusting it is.

What makes this all the more ridiculous is that Hansson lived in the US for over a decade and reaped the benefits (including becoming rich) he’d rather others not have.

Hansson says:

You can't save the continent's declining birth rate, growing retiree burden, or even economy as a whole by importing millions of people from a culturally incompatible third world.

So...how does one save it then? Maybe he’d advocate culling the old to reduce the retiree burden perhaps? Or maybe advocate for enforced child-bearing like “The Handmaid’s Tale?”

He might want to familiarize himself with migration patterns in the ancient world as well. He clearly has no idea how things have worked from the beginning of time.