A dedicated place to share all of our wins! Welcome to our fifth week of privacy & security wins
Now, this only works if you all want it to work. That means:
Donāt be shy! Even the smallest win is something you can share. The more of you who contribute the better it is for everyone
Be positive. Remember weāre all in different places of our journey. Someone enabling 2FA on their first account can be just as excited as someone who figured out how to install Qubes on their new system. Give each other some love!
Got a friend of mine using RSS! They were complaining about how hard it was to focus on different platforms and I suggested RSS and they really love the idea
Ordered a new (better) dashcam for my car
Got a new safe!
Enabled 2FA on Bluesky for Techlore (almost forgot we had this account)
I have installed LocalAI on my system. I can now turn image to text, text to image, text to speech and water to wine! I also found out that it supports Cuda while installing the amdgpu driver for my AMD GPU.
Iāve finally, finally started reorganizing my password management more seriously into more simplistic methods instead of the frankly labyrinthian local password managing methods I was using, as well as creating proper backups instead of literally whatever the hell I was doing before.
Because of that, I found accounts Iād logged locally Iād completely forgotten about, which means even more deleting.
Because because of that, I fell into a rabbithole and started a writeup on the āeggs in one basketā discussion (youāll never guess what brought it up Proton cough). Maybe at some point Iāll polish it further.
I was frankly not expecting the Signal adaptation group to grow so quickly. Turns out the two I brought in brought their friends. Populationās now around the size of 12, which is only ever an impressive number when talking about Signal, but weāll see how it stays in the long term.
Listened to too much music (using the great app recommendations from the forum, special thanks to @anon16057961, loving Nora, especially the new release that just came out 8 hours ago!)
Setup a Jellyfin server
Wrote a long post Iām proud of and happy that it sparked meaningful discussion
Excited to start testing out Techloreās new self-hosted Incognito course (Already have watched a few of the vids and found some bugs!)
On my end, considering the new DHCP vulnerability with the TunnelVision VPN issue, I managed to block DHCP traffic on Windows (for anyone who needs a reference, itās UDP ports 67 and 68 according to some web searches). Set DNSCrypt to use TCP only to further mitigate any possible UDP based vulnerabilities (itās probably overkill but as long as it doesnāt ruin my workflow Iām happy with going the extra step).
Taught some friends about DNS and the issues with query logging for their private activityā¦hopefully theyāll ask me how to change DNS servers soon!
For the last couple years I review my activities on a weekly and tri-weekly review. This topic has started a personal weekly privacy review on Thursdays, just in anticipation of this topic.
Prior to this small change I reviewed just account management. As in delete account, change profile or settings to privacy respecting options, and even finding old websites that I have credentials for.
I know it is silly but I game my activities with my accounts. Every day I do something productive I get 15% accomplished over 7 days that is 105%!
In Obsidian I started a list of websites and results on attempting to creating PWA in Brave now that it seems to work with custom ROMs. Working backwards, I create a PWA then harden until it breaks. Then repair the PWA. Save in Obsidian for recovery and how to.
Been hesitant about getting a new smart watch and cured the itch by getting some Bone Conducting Head Phones that are a 32G mp3 player of course Bluetooth. As someone with minimalist intentions this is awesome as I already was carrying bluetooth head phones.
Utilizing:
Feeder for RSS of podcast and youtube channels
FreeFileSync with PortableApps
Syncthing to sync music and podcast.
NewPipe for Downloads
Moved regular files and folders away from Documents and Downloads on several systems into an Obsidian Folder then organized into PARA Projects Area Resources and Archive. This is all going to be Sync using Syncthing.
If there has been a theme this week it is Spring Cleaning and Organizing
Recently maybe this week I shared with a coworker NewPipe and Signal. He wanted to download a song off YT and I showed him NewPipe followed up with I could send it to you with Signal.
I deleted (after editing) all my reddit posts and comments. I still have a bunch of saved posts to get through but Iāll be able to get rid of my account in a couple of weeks.
I also finally switched to libretube, which means google photos is the only major google service Iām still using. I did try self host nextcloud but I couldnāt find a good tutorial.
I actually talked to someone about how important privacy is. Our conversation was interrupted before I could finish, but as someone who only talked to 4 people this week I count that as win.
I want to highlight that I believe it is a misconception that privacy and security is inconvienent because now that I have adopted Bitwardenās Passkeys, my workflow has never been more seemless especially with biometrics
I disconnected my smart tv (LG) from the network in favor of a linux PC attached to the TV. The computer runs linux mint, I use web apps and I control the pc via KDE connect on my phone. I can even cloud game on it by connecting a controller.
Welcome to our fifth week of privacy & security wins 
